Every day we wake up from sleep, but we aren’t really awake. We are only awake enough to drive our cars, do our work and cook our food. And when we take a break, and we’re awake, we’re still asleep. We blink, but we don’t think. And time tic-tocs away. Coffee doesn’t wake us up. It helps up sleep walk. Yet, it can help us think, and mindful thought is the only thing that wakes us up.
I’m talking about a meaning of the word “awake” that is not a common one. Strategic awakening. To be strategically awake is to know where you are in life and where you want to go.
Even for the common meaning of awakening, there is a gradation. As I’ve written before, in “100% awake”, there are multiple stages between opening the eyes and being able to do basic motor skills, and getting to the point where I can operate on a much higher level - solving problems and fixing things.
But that high level is still.. kinda low. I maintain that there’s and even higher level of operation. And no, you don’t get there by smoking joints :P. But seriously, no drugs will get you there on their own, even if they enhance you like in the movie “Limitless”. We can go there when we distance ourselves from our current situation, and consider our life as a whole. Out of body experience, if you will.
In those moments we reconsider our basic assumptions. ven if I am really good at writing code, or welding metal pieces together or painting portraits, is this what I should be doing? Is this the right thing that is best for me, and for society. Is this the thing that I enjoy doing, or that it will get me towards doing what I enjoy? Is this the right strategic thing to do?
Well first of all, the right strategic thing for every different person is determined differently. People are in different stages in their lives, caught up in different circumstances. People all want different things. We all see success differently. What means success for you might seem like a failure to me and vice versa. It’s because it’s all up to us to define what success means for each of us. It’s not what someone else tells us. “The American Dream” is not everyone’s dream. It’s just a an inception, which displaces our own desires. It’s real name is “The American Sleep”. Everyone’s dream is different.
We can only see our dream, when we are strategically awake, and not when we are mindlessly doing stuff. We step back and look around, and look at a map, and see the winding path around the mountain, and know that there is a peak. And the view… oh the view from the top, and the views along long the way are beautiful. At least in our own eyes.