It makes sense, on both a human level and a community level, to offer services to the community you serve, to keep people truly healthy and speaking highly of the business. The other side of it is that consumer facing retail has a real need for products and services that actually help people deal with the problems in their lives, not more distraction, more nonsense, and more transactions that are necessary but annoying and boring. When we go to the FedEx store, we're not going for an experience. We're going to ship a package, and hopefully for a good reason. But there is an endless row of nonsensical retail out there selling things that only feed the anxiety loop.
I'm not saying this as a judgmental outsider prosecuting anyone. I'm speaking as a person who was subject to consumerism his entire life. My mother and father had it, and they passed it nicely and neatly on to me. You might say one of our major pastimes for avoiding boredom and anxiety was shopping. It took me a long time to realize I had normalized consumption as a way of life, a way to manage what I didn't understand about my own nervous system since the beginning of time. My time, that is.
Now, at 57, I'm realizing that I need to conserve energy and clean up the parts of my personality I may not have had the capacity to fix when I was younger. One of those things is learning to watch my mind and my actions as an observer. I have to work at this constantly: see what's going on in there, redirect the nervous system, and, through that observer, literally regulate thought. When we can do that, the feeling of anxiety, and the feelings that trigger it, become much more manageable and much more human, rather than something manufactured by modern life.
And we can't blame it all on modern life. We are designed with anxiety. The nervous system, and the dysfunction of our childhood experiences, have followed humanity from the very beginning. Life is difficult. Parenting is extremely difficult. Even the best childhood has deficiencies that shape our personalities and our ability to understand the nature of reality. When life deals us blows, our coping mechanisms are often improvised, made up in the wrong state of mind, pieced together from what we've seen other people do to survive. They work, but they aren't necessarily efficient, and they aren't necessarily productive.
This is the beginning of a new age of awareness about how our nervous systems work, and about the chemical systems, our hormones, that have governed us our whole lives. This is the age when we can look into our childhood and understand the cause and effect behind the way we react to life's circumstances. This is the age when managing addiction is easier, because we can explain it better and we have faster solutions.
The fastest solution is to breathe. Breathe better. Don't hold your breath. Breathe, breathe, breathe. Stop reacting. Observe the mind, then take right action, all the time. Read good books on this, on philosophy, on service. Clean up your diet. Exercise and move your body. Take care of your family duties. Keep your house clean and your body clean. Tell the truth, always. Practice non harm.
Of course, all of this is easier said than done. But life isn't easy, even when it's easy for a stretch. Say you're born beautiful, into lots of money, with a phenomenal body. Eventually we all age. Everything is temporary. Everything fades. So we should be grateful, moment to moment, for the blessings we have, and at the same time, while staying present, paradoxically plan for the future. Find humility in not knowing. Find humility in not having total control. Surrender to life every day, and then get up and do what you can: work, fight, dance, thrive, share, live, love, experience, and be aware.