A Moving Future

I think a lot about movement and about the future. I think of new capacities we might be developing as humans, and the possibility that each challenge we face has the potential to make us more human--human in ways we can only begin to imagine. I wonder if the way we walk, the way we stand, the way we sit in our cars or on the subway or on the bus can change us and change the way we treat one another. We see people who are tired, tired of the world, tired of the cards they have been dealt. They wear it on their shoulders often, rounded and downward, hunched and protected from all that assails them. This too is the easiest position from which to view our phones and our computers, shoulders sloped into a bubbled concavity where we and our screens can commune alone, able to interact with the global population in utter isolation. How strange, this seeming paradox of vulnerability within solitary confinement. But if we are able to move through this, to stand tall as we tweet and roll our shoulders back while we type, we might start to notice the world around us, the living breathing laughing crying dirty dazzling world through which we parade. If our chest is just a bit more broad, I don't mean like soldier or state trooper puffed up and wide-stanced, but just a bit more upright and open, our heads allowed to rest just a bit more gently upon our poor over-worked vertebrae, perhaps our hearts would beat with a bit more ease and efficiency, our lungs open to allow more oxygenated air to enter our blood stream, our bowels and intestines better able to process the depleted foods we consume, our livers and kidneys more free to clean our used up blood of all the toxins we ingest. And then, perhaps, we would not be so burdened by our bodies or our machines, and we might be able to see one another as a brother, a sister, a mother, a father, a fellow human who holds the same failing organs, the same bile and hemoglobin and iron and tears. Then, we could be like super-humans with super-powers such as compassion and empathy for all beings. It's true, we face a great many challenges to our humanity these days, but we have so many opportunities to recognize a human-being in the villain with whom we so often disagree. Like Jay-Z says, "Go on, brush your shoulders off", roll them back and down then relax, open up the torso just a bit, see what you notice around you. Then maybe we can move past the disgust and anger and truly see into the heart of the other. It beats in fits and starts pleading for you to become a super-human and see them.