Return to Reality

Many of us leave home convinced we are going to conquer the world. We are anxious to shuck off the restraints of family and tradition, to cut our own swath and make our own rules. We know we can do it better, make it faster and see it all.

Somewhere along the way we learn we didn't know quite as much as we thought. Our ideas weren't as new as we took them to be. Suddenly the "quaint" homespun wisdom that once we rejected takes on new form. The first trip home after such awakening is a return to reality

Gary L. Bauer

The Use of Skills Leads to Growth

Most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.

This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi