How to learn humility for a better tomorrow
Step by step guide of 10 easy ways to reconnect with yourself and to love the life you live.
1. Recognize kinship with everything that exists.
To walk in a busy city street, on a gravel road, and between trees, flowers, and lovely weeds and feel a kinship with every living thing makes us understand that a better world is forming under our feet. We can look beyond the dooms-day apocalyptic media and see that human intelligence is naught but a bleep in a symphony of beauty and grandiosity. To understand that a tree carries you more than you ever feel its presence, that a flower understands more about life than you will in your 80 or so years of presence on this Earth. To understand that a weed has more influence for good than your thousand-or-so Instagram followers and to realize that the insecurity and not-good-enough feelings you harbor comes from a deep, deep understanding that life isn’t yours to master, but for you to surrender into the good and kindhearted reality of what’s natural, pure and genuine. And to realize the most authentic part of you resides precisely in the kinship, the equality, the understanding that life in general matters more than needs for iPhones or the latest hashtag.
2. To breathe and understand your living body.
You breathe, human, you are a home for your life. Life is not meant to cuddle your every want, life is not meant to heal your every wound, life is not even meant to harm you. What life is, is the superior love and intelligence that pushes you into the unknown and makes you understand your very small space and insignificance in all of this that you call your world. You belong to the world, not the world to you. These notions of divinity in you are not but a realization that you’ll have in the future at just how precious the time you wasted in this ego-inflated trend of human superiority that you’re helping to heal. You live and breathe and are a home to your own life, and more than that the kindness and heartbreak are just lessons for you to learn that to love yourself is to have respect, love, and compassion for the good things about life.
3. To assume ignorance.
“I don’t know” might be the most powerful sentence you’ll ever say to yourself. The assumption that you’ll know everything that is to know in your lifetime is genuinely a cry for feeling less-than. This world of science against spirituality, the illusion that somehow you’ll succeed in transcending life itself, is a cry for help. You plead and plead every day in silence for kindness and true genuine love in your life, to not feel abandoned by the forces that rule all this, and do not feel as empty as you think you are. To assume ignorance is just a step to understanding what life needs to teach you. To assume ignorance is to have the insight to realize that in your life, superiority is a matter of envy, distrust, and disrespect for life itself. To assume ignorance is to understand that the spoiled child you feel deserving of being has been coddled enough, and the inner hurt is still there. As much as you’d like to know everything, you also don’t have the ability for it. The lie of infinite potential is not more than a need of human superiority, of lack of kinship with whatever else is in this world, the need to use and abuse power and influence for not more than attention, to feel yourself deserving of the spotlight of importance. To assume ignorance is to understand that you’re here to learn and heal, to help others to heal, and not cause more harm.
4. To disconnect from the constant noise of opinions
The world of knowledge in this world is built on layers upon layers of opinions, nothing you think you know is truly factual, nothing you believe is genuinely entirely true, nothing you imagine can possibly be close to the real truths about this world. To understand that humanity is here to heal, not to understand the truth, is a realization that humanity does have a strength: to compassionately hold yourself accountable for the harm you help spread, and to finally stop the thread of evolution that makes you feel your not good enough because you’re not the master of life, and just how insane that feeling and subconscious thought truly is.
5. To reconnect with the best of humanity
There is no point in feeling a kinship with trees and flowers, rivers and oceans if you do not truly believe to be a part of the human spirit. Because everything is sacred and given the current situation of the world, humanity is not more sacred than the oceans, the mountains, the snow, the leopard, the lion, the cat, the dog, or the trees and flowers. Disconnect from the worse and truly recognize it, gain insight into why humanity behaves this way as a collective. To truly be part of the force of change, inspire others to deeply question themselves into the radical notions of humility. Reconnect with kindness, generosity in a way that does not feel superior (more kind than, more generous than), but in a way that makes you feel that equality is possible, that you are truly part of the change that needs to happen. Understand that some of the best lies help you feel comfortable in your misery. “There’s no problem in accepting just a little evil”, is the biggest lie of all. That little thread that connects you to harm others and yourself, do not accept it. Reconnect with the natural part of humanity that lays solidly and placidly in the comfort of genuine good. Acceptance that you live in lies, helps you reconnect with the essential truth: there are bigger and more powerful forces of good than you. And they can help you if you’re willing to accept the inner humility of lack of superiority.
6. Refrain from judging others, judge yourself based on what you can do better.
Do you judge a tree for being naked in the winter? Or do you joyously envy the tenacity of feeling freedom in such a beautiful way? Do you envy the silence of forests against the noise of thoughts in your head? Do you envy the melody of the ocean and the tenacity of rivers? Let’s see… even if not as powerful as the wind, you can still help others thrive and be happy, you can still put a smile on someone’s lousy day. You can still act as a vessel for kindness and compassion and understanding. Judge yourself based on what you can do better, on what you can incorporate that is purely human and you’ll find yourself.
7. Understand that you don’t know what you don’t know.
The biggest assumption can be the biggest lie. If you tell yourself that you’re something else than you are, that you can achieve what others never will, in the rat race of humanity for a spot that is unachievable. Instead, deeply accept and love that authenticity does not reside in doubt, but in asking the right questions.
8. Success is not how the world measures your worth.
The world is not comprised of the small fraction that humanity represents. The world watches your every movement and thought and knows what you want, what drives you, what you don’t even know that propels you to say things. The idea of success you have might not be congruent to the reality of life, it may not even be congruent to your own reality. To live authentically you do not need to be an anarcho-primitivist, you just need to be true to the kindness and worth you actually have, not the one you wish to embody. Might be that in turn, life rewards you with a deeper understanding, a deeper sense of living, a deeper sense of self.
9. Humanity is wrong, but the rest of the world is not.
We all know this, somehow. We feel it in our bones that things need to change in a different way. Do not rely on feeling that your authenticity lays in the worst parts of you. Understand, read a lot, and varied, do not rely on ancient philosophers and internet quotes to determine your truths. Observe, observe, observe. Be the observer, and act only when you’re positive it’s the right action. We tend to minimize life entirely for the sake of our importance, let’s stop doing that collectively.
10. Finally, understand that the body in which you carry your life is you.
There isn't much else to say about this. Stop the nonsense, do not allow others to dictate how you must be, feel and think. Just stop trying to guarantee failure by constantly looking for approval for just how much of a failure you are. If the world didn’t want you here, you wouldn’t be. You matter, maybe not as little as you think and not as much as you’d wish.
