What do you think is the best introduction to someone you’ve just met at a social function, church, parent teacher conference, etc.? I suspect if you’re like most folks, you asked the other person, if they didn’t ask you first, about their occupation. Without even realizing it, we draw a lot of our self-identification from our job. After all, it consumes the majority of our waking hours--and most of them if you’re a workaholic! And we should prepare ourselves for being empty-nesters or a retiree well before that actually, inevitably, happens.
Sogyal
Rinpoche writes “We believe in a personal, unique,
and separate identity — but if we dare to examine it, we find that this
identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our
name, our "biography," our partners, family, home, job, friends,
credit cards… It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our
security. So, when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we
really are?
Without our
familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an
unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never
really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of
time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are
never left in silence with this stranger on our own?”
And once this pox
invades an entire culture, bad times ensue.
Neal Postman adds “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when
cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious
public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people
become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation
finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”
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