Ill Being

What is disease 🤒 but a lack of ease?

What is Business 💼🤑💼

but a systematic lack of ease?

🚶 Pretty much everybody’s

got a case of the busyness 🏃

😷 This covidian plague
isn’t going anywhere

until we remember how to be easy 🍰

Our cells are
signaling chronic illness.

We are unwell by any measure of wellness.

We are malnourished

We are irradiated

We are overworked

We are underslept

🦠 We’ve all got Braess’s syndrome 🕴️

Rushing is slowing us down 🐰🐢🐰 Hurry is stopping our hearts.

And there’s no such thing as a cure, at least according to reductionist science and the nihilistic school of allopathy.

the art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease

Jacob Stegenga

But there is a cure.

And it’s easy.
I mean Easeness.
We need rest! 🛌

We come here only to sleep, we come here only to dream; it is not true, it is not true that we come to live on earth. — Cantares mexicanos 18.39,
a song of the pre-Colonial Aztecs

We are ungrounded

We are deathly lonely.

In my school, most of us have, on average, maybe, two acquaintances…. No “friends”.

Aaryan, grade 12

We are riddled with sweeteners, addled with uppers, saddled with alcoholism, paddling upstream between two rocks in a Amazon box without no oar.

We are opioided to oblivion.

Yet enduring pain in silence also creates a vulnerability, … . The normality of enduring the pain then, imperceptibly, becomes the normality of taking the pill. What never changes is the lack of human contact. We can slip from silence about pain to silence about addiction.

Timothy Snyder, *Our Malady*

When painkillers work, that creates a particular danger, because then we can ignore the deeper sources of suffering. … It used to be that American politicians competed with visions of a brighter future. Now a good deal of our politics is the solicitation and manipulation of pain. … They want people staggered by suffering, so they oppose health care. Pain is their politics, their propaganda is a death trap.

Timothy Snyder, *Our Malady*

We are not free when we are sick. And when we are in pain, or when we are anxious about illness to come, rulers seize upon our suffering, lie to us, and strip away our other freedoms.

Timothy Snyder, *Our Malady*

America’s longest war (so far)

was fought over poppies.

We are ADHD toddlers with iPads.

We are SSRI’d teenagers with guns.

We’ve let 🐄ine makers
off the hook
to cull the herd

We go on jabbing and boosting
our chronically ill children
while their heart sacs swell and burst.

Once loneliness had reach epidemic proportions and suicide began to outperform war, disaster, and violence combined, we found a way to outlaw being friendly. For nearly two years, we codified ourselves into solitary confinement (a la Death Row), superglued our eyelips to the Feed, plugged our ear canals with fearmongers podcasting, shielded our eyes from compassionate contact and vitamin-D generating sunlight, and hid our faces in shame, shirking subtlety for blatant, flailing charades.

Is it any wonder we are unwell!?

We are unheard, unseen, numb.

We are Xanax’d into a fugue state.

We are sitting our asses to death.

We are working ourselves miserable.

We all need to LevelOut, especially…

  • usurious investors

  • progress obsessors

  • job promising politicians

  • work addicts and other slaves

  • shopaholics and scroll-junkies

  • phone and substance abusers

  • superfluous middle management

  • growth hackers and HODLers

  • tax accountants and tax dodgers

  • megalomaniacs and martyrs

  • prodigies and the problem child

  • the damaged and the lost

  • the gift and the curse

🗨️ Bubbles adrift in stormy skies

When we meet, we might pop, or foam up 🧼

Fear is not the mind-killer.

It is the mind.

Mind, n.: a brittle, drafty nest woven in flails and fits of the threads and shards of what hasn’t killed us, strengthened through resistance, like a callus, like a stone, shaped all-at-once to deflect the terrors of a world that would eat us alive if we let it and to guard with petty obsession the soft gooey vulnerabilities that might otherwise let love into that deep vat of pain we so desperately try to contain.

We’ve become so distracted by our sick ceaseless minds that we’ve lost touch with our bodies, our guts, our hearts. The way back is quiet, barefoot, sweaty, and dark.

To LevelOut,
we must face our fears

and shed our minds.