REALITY CHECK. Always know that what you see and do is not real, in the sense that it is in fact a social construct. This means, there can always be change—orchestrated with or without you.
IMAGINATION. It is never to be underplayed. We have imagination. We need imagination. It is what will save us and many others suffering on this planet. So use it daily to think of different futures, where none of us need for anything material because we share what we have and are satisfied with the simple things of life.
LOVE. Do so with everyone and everything. Let Love be your mantra, your raison d’etre, your reflex in this life and the next and the next and the next. Always be of Love—not the falling or obsessing kind, but that which knows no discrimination in its embrace of all that exists. Yes, be a discipline called Love because it is indeed a chore, which must be undertaken daily under constraints that bind us and enticements that seduce us away from its eternal glow.
JUSTICE. Not just us. Ask yourself, how must I live so that others too can live in the here and now (but also in the future)? How must I live to enable every other living organism its right to be? And when my ability to live means the sacrifice of another species, how might I do so humbly—while also being ready to, one day, sacrifice my own living for that of another creature’s time to exist.
HUMOR. This is the essence of our survival in a place of mostly cruel jests on nature, sick humor in everyday sociality, and inequitable ironies in the making of civilizational progress. We must never take ourselves seriously, even with the very breath in which we know, all of it is also as serious as a heart attack; that is the punch-line that catches up and flat-lines each-and-every one of us—rather unexpectedly and in our hubris.
AMBIGUITY. It is a key part of reality (un)checked, where everything—albeit construed—is never just black or white. It is both black and white, right and wrong, this and that, us and them, good and bad. And so that is how it must be experienced, with our acceptance of all that makes the world go upside down and round and round, even if our so-called self-awareness means that we seek only the “positive” for each tale of our existence.
COURAGE. Need I say more, since we all exist in the same fabricated reality that keeps us mostly in someone else’s check.
