Looking for the Door

For years now I've felt a longing. I look around at the world that I'm living in and I feel a deep dissatisfaction with the way it's working. I see the people in my life struggling to make ends meet, struggling to make their marriages work, struggling to raise their children. Every day it's an uphill battle against a system that is in collusion to keep us struggling.

We go to work every day performing what they would like us to believe are important tasks. They are important only to the machine, and the machine has a purpose that they would like us to forget. The machine is feeding only itself, and it's using our souls as the power the grid to do it. The machine exists to perpetuate itself. Debt is the ball and chain, and it keeps it's hold on us through our own desire to consume. The machine feeds us information that keeps us in debt. It gives us credit cards and mortgages and uses the laws of supply and demand to keep our rate of consumption at a level that will drive the prices higher, driving us to incur more debt so that we can keep up.

This longing that I feel is my soul crying for departure from the machine. My soul has known for years what my brain couldn't quite latch onto. My emotions waned as I spent years feeding the machine. I kept wanting and consuming and digging the hole that would keep me here - wanting, consuming, and feeding the machine - perpetuating a life that I will eventually pass on to my children.

Somehow some light snuck in. Somehow my soul spoke loud enough for my brain to hear it. I don't have to keep doing this. It doesn't have to be this way. I don't have to keep feeding the machine. The machine is lying. There is a door - and I can walk through it. Others have. There are possibilities outside of the machine.

And so my brain began struggling against the machine. Dissatisfaction set in leading me down a pathway to depression; leading me to want things that are directly contrary to the needs of the machine. My brain began looking for the doorway - but the paradigm beyond the doorway is so foreign to everything that I've been taught that though it's right in front of me, my eyes just can't seem to focus on it.

Lately - glimmers of reason and understanding have been sifting through the smog of the machine. Ideas are running through my mind about taking the leap and making it happen. I'm realizing that the only way through the door is to start walking towards it. It's location is vague but I CAN see it up ahead.

I can put one foot in front of the other. I can trust my intuition to guide me and begin taking steps. The trouble with the door is that you can't get to it in a day. And it's work. I know that there will be physical labor in the future, but the labor now is mental. It has less to do with figuring things out as it does with overcoming everything I know - everything I've been told.

I realize that right now all of this sounds like it was written by a crazy person. Perhaps I am crazy, but no crazier than the woman in the office next to yours. I'm no crazier than the woman that you will pass in the aisle at the grocery store later today. We've all gone a little bit mad in my opinion. Madness is the only justification I can find for continuing to live this way.

I keep wishing that there were someone to take my hand and lead me through these steps. I haven't found anyone. I see alot of forums on self-sufficience and sustainable living out there. I know people who are giving it a go that are perhaps only a step or so ahead of me. I haven't found the guidebook yet. Perhaps I will as this search begins in earnest.

Until now this has been mostly in my head and in the ears of my loved ones. I think often that they are tired of hearing me go on about it. I know that some of them are afraid of what it means to pull away from the machine. My dear husband seems to be drifting slowly after me. He is at a point now where he at least seems willing to hear me. His soul must be speaking louder, too. I know that he feels as stuck as I do, but the way out is hazy for all of us. It's hard to step forward when the footing isn't sure. It's hard to risk falling. It just seems like I'm risking so much more by sitting still and continuing on this path.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
~Albert Einstein

It's time to do something different. I have some ideas and I'll be jotting them down as they come through more clearly to me.

For now - baby steps. They may be small, they may not get me far, but at least I won't be in the same place tomorrow.