a return to intuition

SORRY I BROKE YOUR RULES. I WAS BUSY FOLLOWING MY INTUITION.

- UNKNOWN

At school, my concentration span is extraordinarily short. I struggle to comprehend the junk that is being taught to me by teachers who give the impression they’d rather be elsewhere. Eventually, my mind drifts someplace else, until their words are blissfully mute. Here, in this sweet spot, the words literally go in one ear and out the other. I stay here for as long as I can, until inevitably, they bust me. But I honestly don’t care: the punishment is always far more interesting than the bullshit lesson.

I don’t fit into the gargantuan generic machine that is the schooling institution. I am an underling; defiant, different. And here, “different” is not celebrated. In fact, it shuts it down and sends it into exile. Because to the system, “different” equates to rebellious, anti-social, uncooperative, dumb. And so it goes, I am gum on its shoe.

The system desperately wants to rate me, mark me, give me a gold star. When I mess up, it wants to fail me, report me, expel me. It wants me to know conformity so well that I wear it like a snug coat on a cold winter night. It wants me to keep quiet, keep me on the straight and narrow, and once I’ve navigated my cyclonic adolescence, be an employable, respectable citizen of the world.

I’m only a teenager, but I’ve spent my whole life as a square peg in round hole. So, this shit was never gonna fly.

On a random day in the first term of Grade 10 the penny drops. I realise that the system has no interest in who I am nor who I aspire to be. I am done with their carrots + sticks. So, after one-detention-too-many, I grab my backpack and walk out of the school gate, and never set foot in that hell hole again.

Some decades later, the world around me continues to make little sense.

Does it, to you?

In the confluence of extreme division + disparity, friction looms. In its infantry, we are tricked into believing we can suppress, numb, and assuage it. We push that fucker down until the dogs are snapping at our heels. Privilege, luck buys a little time. But inevitably, usually in the eleventh hour, it comes to surface, begging to be addressed. And when it does, we have no choice but to sit in the discomfort, where it feels like war + stinks like rebellion.

Yet, this is how revolutions are born.

Unless I’ve been living under a rainbow-coloured utopian rock (not completely out of question in the Byron Shire), I think it’s safe to say that collectively, humans have not, to date, been thriving. All that inequality. All that preventable disease + ill-health. All the unnecessary war, poverty, starvation. Billionaires cruising around space like tiny fucken man-children, while down here, all hell breaks loose amongst the common people. Money trumps environment, money trumps love, money trumps justice, money trumps ethics.

We function in highly dysfunctional societies that PRODUCE trauma, anxiety, illness, and addiction… whilst doing nothing to alleviate, nor quell the symptoms and causalities of its damage. As a people, we’ve lost the ability to think critically + independently and instead are seduced into a false sense of security by a system that is interested only in gathering fuel for its very own bonfire.

And that was before we had even heard of the c-word.

Now its 2021 and we are squeezed cheek-to-cheek in the birth canal.

Patrons, perhaps you have managed to dodge sizeable interruption to your lives thus far. Lucky you. But the world tugs at your leg, begging for a new trajectory, illuminating all that is not aligned with your evolution. Do you feel it? Speedily, we approach the fork in the road and there is no turning back. Better buckle up.

Mouths agape, one eye on a Netflix special + one hand clutching the butterflies in our stomach, we watch with a cocktail of futility + disbelief, as freedoms, one-by-one, give way to mass censorship, tracking, discrimination, and hard lined rules. Where, only months ago, hysteria + fear seemed transparent + relative… today they are normalised, and drip fed to us daily. Division is palpable, middle-ground non-existent.

Here we are. You, me + nothing but a dark night of the soul before us.

If only we could find a way to walk it together.

With all focus on the outrageous, heinous beliefs + actions of thy neighbour, we are dangerously distracted from that which we have actual power over: ourselves. Instead, righteousness reins. Seven billion different points of view and one system to mitigate them all.

What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, the media cracks on with its catchy slogans + panic campaigns. We can spot diarrhoea-journalism from a mile away, yet the majority regard it as gospel. Somewhere along the line, news stopped being news/truth/fact and began being something which vied for our attention by means of its shock value; keeping us anxiously anchored to an often false + misleading narrative.

In the clutches of fear and hysteria: reason and logic are lost.

Friends, it’s a mighty good time to undertake a detailed inventory of your consumption.

Mostly, we are not happy with the procession thus far. We are neither confident nor aligned with the governance or guidance we’ve received. We don’t feel seen. We don’t feel heard. We do not want to perpetuate faith in a system that has PROVEN to be defective, destructive, and self-serving – we are simply, for now, shit-out of any other options.

We’ve spent our existence leaning into systems, and now, as they implode around us, we plummet into existential crisis. We want to unplug from the godforsaken matrix, but we want a guarantee of what is on the other side. We don’t know uncertainty well enough; we haven’t quite made friends with the unknown. Besides, we were sold the idea a long time ago, that we have control over our lives.

And now, underneath the silence, anger, righteousness + confusion (essentially all rooted from fear), our intuition is beginning to roar like a caged beast.

Because something desperately needs to give.

So now, we’re in the trenches. Human interaction is sticky, and our triggers ceaselessly beat us across the head like wet fish. To get seven billion people on the same page is a ludicrous idea, no? You’ll have to do our own work.

Check where you are reactive. Check where you are righteous. Check what is on repeat.

Because your beliefs – and mine – are subjective.

Systems can be great. They evoke organisation + efficiency + productivity. But the problem arises when these things overrun our HUMANITY. Systems are nameless, faceless, generic: high in horsepower + stats + red tape … and dangerously low in human connection.

We are more familiar with totalitarianism than we may think. When we first heard the horror stories of war, slavery, concentration camps, we angrily sought out a figurehead to blame, someone to burn at the stake. Until we learnt that many atrocities are, in their infantry, normalised affairs. Accepted by the people. Voted in. Normal and legal.

Genocide. The Holocaust. War. Slavery. Racism. Apartheid. Discrimination. Oppression.

People just doing their job.

Systems have a tendency to steer us away from our intuition. And here is the thing about intuition: it is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. It is the one untouchable, fail-safe thing we have in this life. A moral compass. And in the overuse of structure, mandates, rules, threats, control measures and restrictions, it starves.

It is time to turn the tuning fork inward. Turn off the motherfucking TV, unsubscribe to the Murdoch press. Triple check your complicity + apathy + righteousness + sources because you, your children + the world can no longer afford it.

And if you find you are fearful to speak up, to change or to question what is widely accepted yet morally bankrupt, then call on the strength of the many truthtellers who walked before you, who dared to do so.

Rosa Parks. Martin Luther King. Mahatma Gandhi. Nelson Mandela. The Suffragettes. Greta Thunberg. Edward Snowden. Jesus Christ.

Thank god for those afflicted + brave enough to pull sticky malevolent things out of the shadows and hold them under the light. Even if it meant breaking the law. Even if it meant danger. Even if it went against the majority.

These be wild times.

There is nowhere to go, but in.

I really wanted to call this essay “Fuck the System”. But that implied a kind of war or confrontation. And I don’t feel like a war or confrontation is the answer. I believe it’s about pouring our energy into that which is worthy. We’ll break away from the clutches of the system not by struggle + force, but when we learn that our cognisance + consciousness + compassion naturally release us from its custody.

I have an inkling that you and I are here to break away from the Pangea of globalization. I think we’re figuring out that we’re not supposed to be managed, categorised, organised or exploited under the banner of giant systems. We are not generic beings, but living, breathing miracles, and one size will never, ever fit all.

Conformity, righteousness + division do not lead us out of the wreckage – they are the quicksand which buries us deeper, with every unconscious move we make, into bullshit. We are being called to lean in c l o s e r. We are not here to run an evaluation of the world, only our own.

May the voice of our intuition be louder than that of our triggers.

We are no longer afforded the luxury of walking the path of least resistance, but the work will be worth it.

I’m ready.

Are you?

❤️

“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.” 
― Rollo May