Learning about a world beyond your world.
Something that really pisses me off about the fact that now everything is content, everything is marketing, from what makes our hearts sing to the daily labour that sustains us, and that if we're lucky in this late-stage empire, both things may be achieved with the same activity, is that to get attention, visits, clicks, likes, leads, cash, exposure, you have to answer, in your life message, your cover letter, your elevator pitch, your fifteen-second ad, your statement, the following fucking question:
"What's in it for me?"
As if everything that exists only exists to satisfy the potential client. So that your sempai will notice you. As if everything has a purpose that repeats itself. As if learning were a pyramid scheme.
When quarry tycoons come across a majestic mountain, on which the sun and moon seem to take turns to rest, which protects us from hurricanes and which has millions of years of stories to tell, they ask themselves, "What's in it for me?"
When glass-making magnates are standing on a beach, with the sway of the waves serenading them, the salty scent of the sea breeze, and the shining sand caressing their feet, they ask themselves, “What’s in it for me?”
When real estate agents get lost in a remote, hidden community, where the neighbours are your uncles and cousins, where it takes a village to raise the children, where the fruits of labour are shared with love and the streets are walked without fear, they ask themselves, "What's in it for me?"
And when narcissistic parents receive diagnoses that their children differ from the norm. When psychic vampires encounter honest beings who deliver their trust and loyalty, thirsting for affection and true love. When teachers, priests, guides, leaders, and other authority figures hold tenderness in their hands, like clay dolls, ready to be moulded and baked to learn and share what their environment believes is the right thing to be and do, and those authority figures have fractures in their own souls and minds, if they still have any, they ask themselves, "What's in it for me?"
And the truth is, if people don't take my courses, don't buy my books, don't listen to or read my stories, because they only expect something in them that will benefit them, something physical, economic, vocational, or that gives them social capital, then I'd rather talk to a wall. Or talk to plants. Or to the air. Or to the water. To the earth. To the fire. To little animals. Because they don't ask themselves what's in it for them here. Because they are the here that is here for themselves.
I'd even rather speak to the ancestors, the masters, the anima in everything, the guides who have transcended or who have not and will not go through the trouble of being incarnated and then ceasing to be so, that even though there isn't and will never be anything here for them, they simply continue floating. As part of the whole. As life itself.
Perhaps what's in it for you is the realisation that not everything here is for you. That there's a world beyond your world, experiences beyond your experience. Perhaps the reward is knowing and appreciating, even celebrating, other ways of life on this path we all share. That the sun shines with and without us. That languages we don't understand remain lines of communication, like bridges for those who, without them, would literally be speechless. That what someone wrote yesterday was part of their context, and what we write now will be part of ours.
Not everything has to make you richer, wiser, more powerful, or more skilled. Not everything has to teach you how to teach. Sometimes the beginning lies in learning how to learn.
Not in tolerating in silence, just waiting for your turn to speak, going over the message so much that you miss the message of others while they are discussing it or experiencing it.
The mountain is not your raw matter. Neither is sand. Acres of land, even less so. Life in siblinghood and in nature doesn't have to be your source of income. Even less so does the act of destroying them to line your pockets and steal "respect."
Sometimes you open a book to get your head out of your asshole, not to dive deeper. You take a workshop to break your cycle of self-absorption, not to give free rein to its spin. If you watch a show or performance, if you listen to a song, constantly thinking about formulating responses, you'd be better off not doing it. You'll waste less energy if you remove our sensory demonstrations from the background music for your mental jackets.
The world isn't here for you. The world is here for the world. And if you cut yourself off from the world, from the connection with the great everything and everyone, much less it'll be there for you. Then, truly, there will be nothing for you in it.
If from a selfish point of view you ask yourself, when faced with a landscape, a being, a work of art, what's in it for you here, you immediately answer yourself that there's nothing here for you.
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