taking hold of life

Little kids create worlds to play in. Adults can too.

Sometimes an image comes and you just follow that.

yes, but sometimes the world that people fall into can be negative, and then the lifestyle they have can become habitual, which causes them to become stuck in that world.

Yes. I remember this old janitor I talked to once. Somehow we got onto the subject of alcohol and he told me he had once been a drunk. I asked how he got out of it.

Without any drama, he told me he had to stop hanging out with people who drank.

I once got in with a group of people who complained all the time. After I moved on I realized I was still doing it... as you said.. out of habit. It sucked, and I was glad when I popped back out it. But I think I replaced the complaining with other habits. I don't think habits are necessarily bad.

As they say, it's not a problem unless it's a problem.

I think you should read Heidegger in existential phenomenology, but I will be glad to express it in my terms... We live in and through our forms, but our social forms tend to bore us into a sense of nothingness that we must overcome through our active relationships with each other, and because we find these informal relationships which give us our sense of being active and real are stressful, we run to the protection of the forms which bores us.... Now; Boredom is Heideggers choice of words, but I would tend to agree, that while our social forms make life, and understanding, recognition possible, they are also imbued with behaviors we can make no sense of... Why should we salute as superior officer who is a dumass only because such behavior is part of the form??? And we could ask this question of a million or more situations common to the forms that structure our behavior... We cannot live without them, and yet they are essentially self negating since we must sacrifice part of oursekves to belong... Does that make sense, that the loss of self is the price we pay for the survival of the self???

Could we say that our forms become meaningless in that we no longer feel connected to them, or they become meaningless because we carry them out not because we feel that is what we should do, but because its just “the done thing”?
Not all forms are self-negating, but at the same time they don’t reveal our “true-selves”, because I could live through a certain form, but another person could take my place in that form, and so it doesn’t reveal anything about our identities.

Even discarded forms, the trash of history, never have zero meaning... The fact is that in life we discard one form for another the way a crab exchanges cramped quarters for a new shell... In fact, all human progress has required a change of form... At the same time, we find ourselves in forms, and we cannot live without them, nor even understand life without them... To see ourselves as individuals requires that we see ourselves outside of the form, and this happens in the most violent fashion during adolesence.... Because we have no objective proof of being, when we find ourselves out and looking in we suffer loneliness, and soon learn to con-form to social forms...

It is not proof, but evidence, because when we are recognized by others in our form we feel as though we are real, though that reality is not individual, but collective, and never only about itself, but has to be about something, salvation, survival, love, war, order, anarchy...The best we can hope for as human beings is informality in our relationships...Marriage is a form, (social form) for example, but love is the relationship (moral form)... If I can understand the form of Marriage by analogy, then as Shakespears said: When two people ride a horse, some one has to sit in front... If the moral form is love, and that is the goal of the relationship; then the rule of the form, the formality does not matter...If the goal is shared, the rule does not matter; so who cares who sits in front??? But people love their rules, their social forms because interaction without rules is stressful beyond belief...

To try to live informally means about as much as playing multiple chess matches all at once with all level of skills each offering a different prize or penalty... Our forms are often taken for the benefit of a few, and at that point only a handful get the life out of the form that they put in, and everyone else suffers for their benefit... People change forms out of necessity, as Jefferson noted in the declaration of independence... WE hate change, and our forms offer stability... So even when social forms have become complete disasters people often hold onto them to the death...What it takes for people to change is another form to change into...

A house is a form, of shelter, and no matter how bad a house gets, people do not move out into nothing, and only with reluctance would they move into an older form, like a tent... If you really want to take hold of life, and change the world, first find a formal understanding and then teach it... People think change that is all too common in history is beyond them at this moment... All the need is formal vision, to be able to see life either as form, or relationship... If we value our relationships we must learn to reform our forms because that is our way of becoming what we are...

To change social forms, though history is repleat with examples of such change, often seem impossible because of the level of stress it involves, but desparation often forces people to accept such stress in order to muscle their way through it to a better form... For those who cannot conceive of a form beyond the form they live with, only more suffering and even death await...If you consider that good is the goal of every form, then one must ask why so many endure so much of pain and desperation only to avoid the anxiety of freedom and change...

I did not mean to write a book...Back to work...