AliHasStories

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”
-John Lennon

I know this is supposed to be a travel blog, but the truth is, it’s a life blog and I was supposed to be traveling. I’ve had a family emergency come up and I’m going to have to postpone my first big trip, likely to next year.

I expected to feel disappointed, but the truth is I’m not sure I was quite ready to go. I still have a lot of little things to do to the camper. I need to put the new shower head on, finish organizing the stuff that doesn’t fit neatly inside. I need to learn how to use the electric jack I just got for when I’m not level and can’t add my sway bars on while traveling. I’m sure there are six other things to get done I can’t think of.

I also have some close friends and family I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to, even temporarily. Time is a funny thing. It stretches and changes and shifts, even as we try to box it into a rigid thing.

Also, my plans, including dates, are literally arbitrary. I decided when and where, and I can decide to change that. Flexibility in life seems to be a key ability, in my experience. We are in an eternal dance with how we think life should go, versus how it truly plays out.

That’s really the reason I’m even typing out this post. It’s okay to be flexible. It’s okay to adapt, to change, when presented with new information. It’s okay to make plans, and it’s okay if those plans need to change. If we were all a little more adaptable, I suspect our societal collapse wouldn’t be happening right now. Among many other reasons, of course.

And really, maybe that’s why I want to travel. I want to search for community, see if it still exists. Because I believe, above all, for a society to run even remotely smoothly, we must have community. We must be built and based on community, and I mean all the way down to the neighborhood level.

Fuck rugged individualism. Fuck pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. That suggests that people don’t deserve community. That suggests that community is not what keeps us together. Ants have it figured out, man. They know they have to work together to keep the colony operating. We could learn that lesson, if we collectively wanted to.

Fuck the economy, too. I get that it’s not that simple, especially living inside capitalism and a failed (or getting very close to failing) democracy. But isn’t that the point? We’ve made “the economy” a living, breathing part of our society, and we give it as much, or more, standing as we do each other. But what is the economy, at a ten foot level rather than a 30,000 foot level?

It’s the machinations of our collective labor, exploited by capitalists who profit off that labor. Shouldn’t the economy work for all of us and not just the few? Don’t we deserve to participate more equally within that system? Let’s take money out of the equation. Set it aside and pretend the world doesn’t revolve around a made up currency that we randomly agreed would be of value and of importance. Then what is the economy?

Is it the value we place on each other’s ability to participate in a society to the benefit of self and others? I believe so. And what is that worth, exactly, if you can’t use money as the valuation? Is it worth having a good roof over your head, good, healthy food in your belly whenever you’re hungry, water freely available to all, and maybe even a few non-keep-you-alive necessities like phones, clothes, shoes, maybe even entertainment? If you’re nodding your head right now, then you don’t agree with capitalism.

If you’re with me so far, hi. Welcome.

What if, and hear me out, what if we all operated on an agreed upon set of general principles that respect each other, rather than demanding moral adaptations according to some prescribed religion? It’s called the horizontal morality scale. The principle is simple; do your best not to harm those around you or yourself. If you’d like to throw a rock through someone’s window, this scale says that would hurt them, therefore you shouldn’t.

But what about those who refuse to agree to those principles, you might wonder. If you don’t agree with societal level rules of engagement, you probably don’t want to be in this society. So we have to come up with a way to deal with those who don’t. Locking them up isn’t the answer. That’s just another symptom of the sickness we call capitalism. What is the answer? I can’t say, because I don’t speak for society. I’d happily participate in the conversation though.

I’m not sure why this post needed to scale up so broadly. Must be on my mind. But it is related to the changing of plans.

Plans come and plans go. People move and shift and change, adapt and evolve. Society should, too. It and it’s governing rules should change right along with the people. Even the founding fathers agree with me on this point. That’s why they called the Constitution a living, breathing document, and instituted amendments.

Change can be scary, intimidating, confusing. But it’s not a bad thing. Hard does not equal bad.

I’ll keep you posted.