Zombies Seeking Lifelines Beyond Apocalypse

It can be very easy to let life’s flow carry you across the torrents cascading through the river of your life. To “go along to get along”. You can get in a groove, working, playing, raising kids. Your kinship network runs on auto; see the parents, dine with siblings, drop the kids off and pick them up, chill with friends.

You can find yourself, at some point, waking to the zombie effect that routine produces. All of a sudden, you look around at your life and recognize that you’re living in a state of slumber. This moment’s epiphany awakens you to the realization that you’ve stopped growing.

Stopped moving. Stopped being, in the sense that the challenges of existence are out there, in the depths as you meander in the shallows, life’s current passing you by. Of course, this recognition is illusion. Consciousness is oceanic. Deep, abiding, stable. The ever-present observer is motionless, fully there, totally aware.

But that illusory life that is the daily grind is where we believe the lessons are, where we believe life is. The desires that lead to ceaseless suffering, the lack of fulfillment, the yearning to do, to grow, to achieve, to be, are the very stuff of existence and, some might say, the very reason we are here. The reason, for life itself.

Sages might say, be still. Exist within the flow of your life as a witness, cultivating silence and peace. Be present, fully and completely in the Now for those around you; be love, acceptance and unconditionality manifest.

Easier said than done when still within the dynamic phase of life, where society still makes demands upon you. Jobs, raising children, engaging the world and manifesting your full potentiality still call and, in that moment of epiphanic self-realization, deficits in this area wake you up from the dull drone of somnabulance and inattention.

You realize you’ve lost yourself. That you’ve become a facsimile of your truest self. That something vital is missing and that life is robotic and drone-like and that time is running out. The sense of urgency this realization immediately gives rise to can be lost just as quickly as it was found as your life conspires to return you to slumber.

But even if you comply, even if your eyes lose the shine that that moment of self-realization awakens, even if you return to the routine and immerse yourself within the daily grind, seemingly once again lost to your greater…