Conscious living is a choice, albeit one that many people in our culture choose not to make. To live consciously is to live awake and aware. It is to engage with the happenings, events, choices and questions that take us beyond the confines of our own personal crib.
When you intentionally seek information that is not directly about what’s happening in your home, your day-to-day life, your relationships and finances, you are living aware. When you decide that the world is complex, big and filled with nuances, ideas and truths that sometimes contradict one another and require an open mind to digest, then you are living awake.
Living awake and aware is one critical aspect of living full of your good self. First, to choose to live full of yourself is to disregard the traditional teaching that to do so is wrong. I can hear the voices echo in my mind and memories. “You are too full of yourself young lady!”
My great work is to loosen our cultural knee-jerk agreement with this idea: that living full of yourself is somehow bad, wrong, sinful, prideful and arrogant.
No it isn’t.
Living full of yourself is exactly what we ought to be working toward and teaching, empowering and assisting our children to do. It’s what the world needs: more women (and men) who claim and affirm their good, unique, powerful skills, intellect, and insight and who use it to make more space for everyone to flourish.
Conscious-Checks are good for the full-soul and the truth that the world is bigger than what we see and touch each day. Conscious-Checks encourage us to apply the Fullness of all that we are to the betterment of our world, society and community.
Conscious-Check for April 15th (no, not taxes) is an appeal to apply the fullness of your mind, reason and compassion to the issue of guns, education and violence.
My kids love the TV show Glee. Since we do not watch television during the week, it is a ritual to record it and watch it together on Friday or Saturday night. Last Saturday the program began with a warning that this segment would include violence in schools. After checking in with my kids and establishing ground rules (the pause button gets to be pushed whenever someone needs to stop), we proceeded. Most of the show was typical Glee – love, friendship, music and quirky side-stories – until a gun-shot rang through the halls. Until the students clamored for safety and huddled in corners. Until close-ups of terrified faces filled our TV screen. Until one character was shown standing on top of a toilet seat silently crying to herself, alone and afraid.
My kids cried. They hid their eyes. We hit pause. We talked. They shared how afraid they were of that happening in their school, of the truth that the shooting in Connecticut was still on their minds. They didn’t understand why adults loved guns so much. We talked about hunting, about their grandpa who hunted pheasants, about our beloved neighbor who is an avid hunter. “I still hate guns,” one twin stated. “All of them." “Why do they have to be so easy to get” the other asked?
“Why,” my 13 year old wanted to know, “can’t President Obama protect us from these things?”
Why indeed?
Living in fear of guns in our schools does not create space and opportunity for our children to become full of their good intellect, responsibility and care for the world. Watching the leaders of our nation not negotiate, not discuss and not find ways to eliminate the easy access to assault weapons, is not demonstrating the fullness of what it means to lead for the sake of the whole.
We can do better. We can help our kids discover their full, good, strong character and express their opinions to their leaders. We can role model the behavior of a fully involved citizen and call our congressperson, senator and the white house to urge passage of strict gun regulation. We can write a telephone script with our kids and help them call too. We can open this discussion up among our peers, colleagues and families. If we can’t pass stricter gun laws, at least we can make sure the issue of gun violence and easily obtainable guns is not allowed to disappear or be ignored. We need to fully keep the conversation going. No matter what.
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