Manifesto for Living (Right?)
Contributor
Written by
Akosua Biraa
October 2016
Contributor
Written by
Akosua Biraa
October 2016
  1. Reality Check. Always know that what you see and do is not real, in the sense that it is in fact a social construct. This means there can always be change.
  2. Imagination. It is never to be underplayed. We have imagination. We need imagination. It is what will save us and many others suffering on this planet. So use it daily to think of different futures, where none of us need for anything material because we share what we have and are satisfied with the simple things of life.
  3. Love. Do so with everyone and everything. Let Love be your mantra, your raison d’etre, your reflex in this life and the next and next and next. Always be of Love; not the falling or obsessing kind, but that which knows no discrimination in its embrace of all that exists. Yes, be a discipline called Love because it is indeed a chore that must be undertaken daily under constraints that bind us and enticements that seduce us away from its eternal glow.
  4. Justice. Not just us. Ask yourself, how must I live so that others too can live in the here and now (but also in the future)? How must I live to enable every other living organism its right to be? And when my ability to live means the sacrifice of another species, how might I do so humbly – while also being ready to one day sacrifice my own living for that of another creature’s time to exist?
  5. Humor. This is the essence of our survival in a place of nothing but cruel jests of nature, sick humor in everyday sociality, and inequitable ironies in the making of civilizational progress. We must never take ourselves seriously, in the very breath in which we know all of it is also as serious as a heart attack - which in itself is the ultimate joke of life that catches up with each and every one of us—rather unexpectedly—in our hubris.
  6. Ambiguity. It is a key part of reality (un)checked, where everything—albeit construed—is never just black or white. It is both black and white, right and wrong, this and that, us and them, good and bad. And so that is how it must be experienced, with our acceptance of all that makes the world go upside down and around and around, even if our self-awareness means that we seek only the “positive” for each tale of existence.
  7. Courage. Need I say more, since we all exist in the same fabricated reality that keeps us mostly in someone else’s check.

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