Letting go of Striving

Every new year it becomes clear that we are acculturated to striving.  It reminds me of a documentary series I love to watch with my children called Capitalism. In the first episode, it discusses how we have been taught to believe that humans innately engaged in barter and trade, tit for tat relationships because this is a premise of capitalism. When in actuality, indigenous communities worldwide then and now practice collaboration and cooperation with the “I store my wealth in my neighbor’s belly’ paradigm. The villager who catches a big fish one day shares his catch with the community, and he is fed by another’s catch the next day. A flowing process of interdependence.

There is so much we could unpack around this. But for now, this articulates for me how a barter and trade model commodifies us all. In it, we are producers of outputs. There are values placed on our outputs and stratification, judgement, and insufficiency stem from there.

We’ve been disconnected from knowing ourselves as members of a web, equal in our gifts, sharing them when available and relying on the web in interdependence as our indigenous ancestors.

We are alone, judged and we need to measure up.

I understand striving well as it is how I survived life as an orphan. Recently, I also learned that preemies have a strong sense of determination throughout their life, likely imprinted from early moments of struggle to survive. So being a preemie may have initiated me into striving.

From early on, I strove to be good, to please, to perform, get good grades, win awards, all with the desire to have a better life. As an adult, I strove to be a good mom, to learn all I could about wholeness, to be a student of life, spirit/creator and Mama Tierra, to be a good human.

But as I sat observing nature and observing my children, I realized no being strives perpetually, rather we unfold.

We just are.

The flower in the field stands tall. The frog leaps and croaks. The lizard basks. The coyote lazes and chases. The mice scramble. The chickens peck and scratch. The birds flit, chit chat and soar above it all.

Our children crawl, stumble, get back up, reach, engage, observe, express curiosity, reach for connection. They are not doing this to be ‘good enough.’ They are just following the impulse of growth, the pulse of life within them.

If not steeped in a culture, organizations, and media that systematically conveys ‘you are not good enough’ there is never a need to strive.

Our inner child naturally excels and shines, because that is what they are here for, but it is never meant to be for external approval.

Most of what achievement looks like in our society is a vie for external approval. If we are trying to accomplish something from a place of ‘if I do this, then they will like me, they will approve of me, I will be good enough’ then we are handing ourselves to others as we have been trained to do, seeking external approval.

Seeking to be valued.

To have value within the model of capitalism.

But this is all made up. A sticky pervasive layer we get to lift off our sweet selves.

Before we were distorted, disconnected, we knew..

Our ancestors knew…

Our souls are innate, essential, ‘right’ just as they are.

An innate member of a collective, regenerative, vast and interdependent whole.

We don’t need to strive.

We can allow ourselves to unfold, to bloom, to pulse, to peck and scratch, to fly!

We can open to reciprocity in community for the joy of it, the delight of co-creating, collaborating, being human together.

What would it feel like to just allow yourself to be and know it is enough?

It is and always has been.

Blessed New Year. Blessed Old, Ancient You.

*Gorgeous art by @rocioartist