CrankyBuddhist   the learning never ends …

We now have the opportunity to really begin to become unattached from our stable hum-drum everyday lives. It’s something that I’ve been experimenting with over the last five years or so.

As a society, the American one, we have developed our lifestyles to be completely dependent on jobs, on stability, on comfort, and on the premise that we buy things in an effort to hold up the illusion that we are all the previous things in this list. We can be comfortable if we are employed, stable, and buying things. We can be stable if we are employed, comfortable, and buy things. This line of thinking is the very center of our collective universe.

Society has a hard time letting go. Once it finds something that works, at least for the majority of the people involved, it really doesn’t want to change. It gets stuck. It starts living in fear of change. It starts thinking about the risks involved in changing, rather than the benefits. It stops moving forward.

The internet brought up a hairball for society. The hairball being a massive change in the way we live. It was all ok when it involved sending jokes in emails around from friend to friend. But then banking went online. Education went online. Paying bills went online. But not all banks, not all schools, and not all companies wanted to be online. So if I want to do my business online, I have a slimmer selection of people and companies and banks that I can work with. But, work with them I do.

I like the idea of being mobile. I like the idea of being able to sit on the beach in Tulum with my laptop and work on a job that is based in San Francisco, get paid by direct deposit, and make payments for things like storage or services online. I like that when I want to change locations, I just logon to the net and buy a plane ticket. I like that all I have to do is carry a small laptop around in a backpack to do this. I like that I don’t need a phone. I like that email can get to me just about anywhere.

But society doesn’t like it. My storage place refuses to allow online payments and I still have to pay by check. My bank freaks out when I leave the country. My job doesn’t have direct deposit. And some things are impossible to do over the net if I’m not sitting in the right location.

I’ve designed my life, as much as it is possible, to exist in a small, thin box that I carry around with me. I love the change that it has brought to my life. I love the mobility that I now have. Do I still have attachments. Yes. I mean someday I will have to get rid of this box too.

Change is good.

Change is freedom.