So You Want To Be a Better Human

Why not start with being just as good as you are right now?

Brooke Landberg
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read
Photo by Adarsh Kummur on Unsplash

Once we learn that our unexamined thinking can cause real suffering (e.g. gender bias in company hiring practices, unconscious insecurities, “colorblindness”), it’s easy to want to start putting all our thinking under a microscope.

I for one find myself trying to mine my thoughts for all my prejudices and blind spots so that I can be the perfect human. When I do that with a sense of need and urgency, all I seem to get is stressed. I don’t seem to get anywhere productive.

It can be tempting to try to speed up our growth when we find out there’s always more growing to do. When we know that we can change on a dime in the flash of an insight, it’s easy to get greedy about having more of those insights.

But trees don’t try to grow faster than they grow. They can’t. And that’s okay.

We’re not so different than trees, you and me. While we can look in the direction of how growth happens, we can’t force ourselves to grow faster than we grow. And that’s okay, too.

As my dear friend Michelle put it yesterday,

This sense of needing to know more — to grow more — can take us away from our innate source of wisdom. It can put us in an angsty, hectic, busy-minded state, when what we really need if we want to see something new is to have absolutely nothing on our minds.

We want to be the best we can be. We want to fulfill our potential. We want to do more good. We want to save the world. This is beautiful.

In order to do that, we know we need to keep waking up — to keep elevating our consciousness. But that doesn’t happen through clamping down or closing off. It happens through openness.

Raising consciousness happens through being present with the level of consciousness we have. Waking up happens as soon as we relax into the present moment. Or, as my dear friend Michelle put it yesterday,

It happens through seeking, sure, but a kind of clear-headed, reflective seeking. Not a desperate, grabby seeking.

Paradoxically perhaps…

You’ll get there, my friend. In the meantime, no matter what you do, you cannot be anywhere but here. Plus, you can accomplish a lot while you’re right here.

So why not be here? Here is where it’s at.


The Daily Lift

Grounded insights on living well — and loving well — in an unwell world.

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Brooke Landberg

Written by

Working toward freedom.

The Daily Lift

Grounded insights on living well — and loving well — in an unwell world.

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