It was low tide. I walked out onto the sand and silt of the Chesapeake Bay and spent the day photographing the ospreys hovering over the water to scan for their catch. In the end, the world didn’t come crashing down around me, and I didn’t lose my mind.

If you want something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done; you might also have to do something others will tell you is completely stupid and irresponsible. But what do they know?

CC photo courtesy of RambergMediaImages

How are you supposed to achieve the American dream when you can hardly survive for today? Good question.

The funny thing about money in capitalist society is that there is never enough of it, and at best most of us will always maintain a delicate, teetering, false stability on the brink of disaster. It’s very common even for people with high incomes to feel they can’t  even afford to question the status quo, let alone launch into a major life  change that could make them happier were they to succeed. We want desperately to be happy, but the chances that any disruption of our delicate balance could cause our lives to come crashing down around us are just too high.

This is a very complex issue, but I can tell you that solving it starts not with any specific concrete action, but with challenging the fundamental assumptions and social taboos that keep the larger socioeconomic status quo in place, and keep us subject to it.

First, take some time to consider that consciously or unconsciously, you have most likely fallen victim to the assumption that your work-life and money struggles are your fault, and that you are therefore inferior to and deservedly indentured to your creditors. Begin now to understand that our society is structured in such a way that necessities such as education, healthcare, housing, and transportation are nearly impossible to procure without going into massive debt. That is not just your imagination, and you far from the only one. The vast majority realize this after it is too late to opt out of the scam–if they ever figure it out at all–so there is no reason to feel ashamed or hopeless.

Don’t be tempted to say, “No, that doesn’t apply to me.” Open your awareness, look deep within yourself, and give it some time. It’s there. Casting off this sense of shame and hopelessness is the first step in beginning to really break out of the trap.

Most personal development books give you false hope in solutions that assume you can control your own destiny by working harder, staying focused, setting goals, or learning the law of attraction–all without looking beyond yourself and questioning the actual playing field. As long as you continue to work under the assumption that YOU are both the problem and the solution, you will be going nowhere fast.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: if you want something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done. It’s true. But what is it that you have never done?

Breaking free from the same old cycle of work and pay bills, work and pay bills will require throwing away everything you’ve ever thought about positive thinking and “taking responsibility” being the way to create the life you want. If conventional thinking and solutions could get you out of your painful status quot and into your best life, you’d be there already. You have to stop looking at yourself and take a hard, critical look at the economic system to which you are subject, and what you have had to do to survive in it up until now.

As you work on this change in thinking, here is the major shift for which you are laying the foundation. Note:  Your “intrinsic worth” refers to the unique value and purpose you–and only you–bring to this world, as opposed to the value corporations find in molding your life to suit their needs.

Old income and expenses:
1. Income: You depend on corporations and other entities at the top to give you education, work, and wages. Someone else dictates your work and your pay, which will always be as little as they can get away with so they can make a profit.

2. Expenses: You give your wages right back to corporations and other entities at the top in order to have your basic needs met and to enrich your life beyond the basics as well. Someone else dictates what your requirements are, and how much you have to pay for them, so that they can make a profit and leave you with little to show for yourself.

New income and expenses:
1. Income: You create income by developing your own intrinsic worth, so that corporations and other entities at the top become irrelevant. Now operating outside the limitations of the larger socioeconomic status quot, you determine your own work and what you are paid for it so you can be happy and fulfilled.

2. Expenses: Your needs, both basic and beyond, are determined and met by your own intrinsic worth so that you pay far less to corporations and entities at the top. You maintain the power to determine exactly how much to spend and what you want to spend it on–money itself, let alone corporations, becomes less relevant.

No problem can be fixed unless you first face it and tell the truth about it. Stop looking at yourself for the moment, and look at society. Look at “the system”. Look at the corporations. This is the first step toward the happiness you seek. Just keep this mantra always in mind: the status quot is not your fault, and the minute you dare to question, you are no longer subject to it.

This sika deer delighted the YMOS youth birding group, who braved the post-Sandy cold and high winds to explore Maryland’s eastern shore Saturday. The curious deer (which is technically an elk, and an elk from Japan at that) ventured closer and closer to us as the children stood still, tense with excitement. Suddenly, the deer turned around, showed off its white rump, then made several agile leaps as a display of dominance before continuing his lazy browsing nearby. The entire group laughed and shrieked in delight, and there were many of those group hugs teens do while jumping and down and giggling.

If separation from nature–whether we realize or not–is some of the worst pain we modern humans live with every day, reconnecting with it is one of our greatest joys. I hope for these children that they will never succumb to that pain and emptiness the way some of us have as adults. For all of us adults caught up in an endless rat race full of cubicles, concrete, and cars, I hope we can remember how to group hug and jump up and down over a deer.  That joy does not have to be lost to us forever, especially when we can look to children who have not yet forgotten.

My kids say it’s embarrassing when I post about food on my social media profiles. But with the “Frankenstorm” on the way with its rumored cold weather and snow, I needed to finish getting the rest of the greens and root crops in from the garden. A lovingly crafted traditional French coq au vin for dinner is a perfect excuse to drink the rest of a decent bottle of pino noir while washing turnips, and this has been my Sunday afternoon.

Real food is a critical part of creating a life in harmony with nature, especially if your health and body weight have been put under duress by the what I’ve come to call the environment trap. I have never particularly enjoyed cooking or food gardening, but I do an awful lot of it when I’d rather be out taking pictures of birds. That’s just how important it is. Being able to provide nutritious, quality food for the family is a struggle for the poorest Americans, and often falls by the wayside for a middle class with more money than time thanks to the ridiculously unbalanced work-life structure we get forced into. It can be even harder if you don’t have a family to feed, because you’ve been trained to think it’s not worth it to spend that kind of time just on yourself. In any case, it means more money for big corporations.

Taking the time to grow natural food, or at least to eat naturally, is critical to a healthy, happy life. I found growing food to be incredibly simple once I stood up for myself and took back my time. Here are the steps:

1. Throw some turnip seeds on the ground.

2. Wait a few weeks.

3. Never pay $8 for a bag of organic salad greens again.

4. Become healthier from eating all those greens, and find that your medical expenses are dramatically reduced.

5. Use the savings to quit your job as a corporate wage slave and make a living selling your artwork on Etsy.

OK, most people would argue it’s a little bit more complicated than that, but it’s not nearly as complicated as the corporations who depend on us feeding them our precious time and hard-earned money would have us believe. Growing turnips really is that easy. If I had to choose just one seed to preserve in the event of a zombie apocalypse, it would be the humble turnip. I’ve spilled turnip seeds by accident and gotten loads of unexpected food. The soil wasn’t even that great, and there was definitely no know-how or effort involved. Do you think the 1% would want you to know that?

I’ve talked mostly about the psychological environment trap and how to start making the mental changes that will lead to changes in the physical body. Of course, that’s just the beginning. The real challenge is attacking what keeps us trudging back to the same windowless workspace in the first place: money. Building a path to real change–actually escaping the environment trap completely and living outside of it–requires two simple things:

1. Reducing expenses (i.e. by planting turnips)

2. Creating income outside the cubicle.

In the very near future, this site will host a forum on these topics and more, so stay tuned! It will be an exciting journey.

I have a confession to make: I am a birder.

On many of my social media profiles, I share my nature photography more than any other type of content, and I’ve resolved to do more of that here. A picture is truly worth a thousand words, and photos have become a very important part of how I invite people to connect with nature.

In one of my social media communities, a bird photographer posted an invitation to share an older photo and reminisce on a great day spent birding. For a moment, I thought that was going to be tough for me. Many in that community have years and years of birding memories to look back on. I have two years as a birder and have had my camera for just one year. I learned to use the camera in modes other than “auto” about six months ago, so I’m a little ashamed of some of my “early work”.

For several years before I discovered birding, my awareness of nature was much broader. I went on weekend hikes, taking in the multi-sensory experience of immersion in nature. When I reflected on my life before my alignment with the natural world, I felt that I had gained a secret insight that many others never would as they trudged through life trapped in an endless cycle of overworking, oversleeping, and overconsuming. I had been there once, born to serve as a cog in the machine until one day I dared to ask, “When did this become acceptable?”

The photo above was taken very early on a Saturday morning in December 2011, just as a dense fog had begun to lift. On this cold, bleak morning the mist over the local reservoir was so dense you almost couldn’t see your hand in front of your face let alone make out any birds. It was beautiful and surreal, as if I had broken the all the rules to step outside the boundaries of a life mediocre at best, dully miserable at worst, and glimpsed something none of us were ever supposed to see.

A greedy few are controlling our lives and the future of our planet with all its peoples, something they never could have done without breaking our connection to the natural world first. We humans fight for what we love, but we can’t love what we never see, and powerful interests are reaping massive profits by keeping us in the dark. We languish in our windowless work spaces, sick and overweight, looking forward to tonight’s sitcoms as if that were all we had left.

As our exile began with disconnection from nature, our salvation begins with reconnection. A broad connection to nature was helpful to me, but human motivation thrives on specifics over generalities. When I see an osprey feeding her young or look into the eyes of a curious tufted titmouse, I don’t see just birds, I see reflections of humanity and the interests that threaten both. I see something important enough to make me quit a high-paying private-sector job and redesign my entire life. If you want to change your life forever, get yourself a pair of binoculars.

Like a tiny grebe leading a flock of geese through the fog, a handful of bold individuals can return humanity to its former freedom, far outside today’s norm of social and environmental malaise. More than a few of them may be birders.

“Nature is all around us if we only look.”

I am sometimes tempted to say this, and probably have said it in the past when teaching nature alignment. It sounds kind of inspirational, right?

While it’s a true enough statement that nature is all around you even when you’re standing in the bleak concrete center of an office complex, I have a couple of reservations about putting it that way. In more cynical moods, I feel it’s more like a few human profit maximizers poured millions of tons of “progress” squarely on top of nature, then plopped the average folk back in along with a few legally required saplings and a retention pond. You park your car in the concrete lot after your hellish morning commute, sit in your windowless cubicle or production area all day, emerging later to find this Priceless Earth character telling you “Look around! It’s nature!” That’s the first problem. It sounds too much like the mainstream self-help industry’s “positive thinking”, so despicable it even gets its own post.

The second problem is that nature isn’t just around us. We are a part of it. We think of life forms on earth in terms of humans and animals, as if humans were not also animals requiring specialized food and environment in order to survive. Having all but lost direct contact with the earth, our food sources, and natural instincts, we are surviving, but poorly. An escapee from the sensory deprivation of the cubicle myself, I believe that forcible disconnection from our natural environment is one of the primary causes of the general psychological malaise and poor physical health that has become the accepted norm for our species.

I’ve sat in the parking lots of office buildings and watched people come and go, unhappy, overweight, talking on cell phones or tight-lipped with their eyes cast downward. I’ve seen them spend lunch break asleep (been there, done that) or scarfing fast food in the driver’s seat of their parked cars before rushing back into the building, in a great big hurry to get back to doing what they hate in a setting they hate even more. Most of us will spend four or five decades of our lives like this, working diligently toward the end of our indentured servitude with the desperate hope that we will finish with sufficient health and enough money to take some pleasure in life before we die. There will always be time to enjoy nature later, after that next big promotion, or in “the golden years.”

The good news is that if you are reading this blog, that’s not going to happen to you. You’re awake and there’s no going back. When I talk about waking up, stepping outside, and learning to see nature around you, I’m not talking about being grateful for scraps left over after some tycoon indulged his profit motive at our expense. I’m talking about changing your perception as the first step toward changing your environment.

Concrete parking lots and windowless work spaces  make you want to scarf a McRib on the commute home and spend your evening reclining in front of the television. Deep down you know you know you could eat something nutritious and spend your time on something useful, but you can’t break free from the trap. It was never your fault, and now you know: do not underestimate the power of environment to drive your behavior and life choices. When you start changing your awareness, even in the smallest ways, you can take back little pieces of your natural self, and you will start to feel your motivations changing.

This is why I take so many nature photographs around office buildings and other over-developed areas. They serve as evidence that instead of wearing blinders that block out nature, you can learn to block out the unnatural environment and its influence on you. Keep in mind that this can be just the beginning of a complete personal transformation, which is never easy–but some things are worth fighting for.

Here are a few of my photographs. How is your nature alignment today? Share in the comments!

A common raven couple flirt atop a cell tower behind BJ’s Wholesale Club in Owings Mills, MD.

The arrival of spring in front of the Toyota Service Center in Owings Mills, MD.

A mourning dove hides in the evergreens around the Howard County/AscendOne office building in Columbia, MD

A butterfly enjoys the overgrowth around the Dobbin Center shopping area in Columbia, MD.

A black-headed gull makes a rare visit to a high-traffic shopping center in Hunt Valley, MD.

On Friday, I tweeted this:

It was much too large a topic to bring up in 140 characters, but I’m glad I did. It generated a lot of discussion and a lot of questions! What did I mean by “the system”? What are the main ways we participate in it? I promised to spend the next day explaining myself, and it turned into three days of tweets about how we can adjust our thinking and take back our lives. I’ve compiled those tweets here so I can share them with my other social networks. I’ve put them in a more logical order than the way they appeared on Twitter.

The system is not just government. It is all interests & entities that benefit by directing our lives & culture without our full awareness.

Remember: “the system” is perfectly designed to keep you in terror of life outside it, while working for rewards you can never achieve.

Why would the system change if we just kept it going by supporting it with our dollars and our life choices?

How can employers force people into cubicles for 8, 10, 12 hours a day? Because people submit to it! Take a stand now!

Employer running your life? Stand up. You may not want to walk out like I did, but start looking for a way out. Don’t stop until you succeed.

When you buy from corporations, you & your neighbors are dependent on them for work. End that servitude. Buy local, buy from each other.

Never forget: For every person who “worked hard” for their wealth, there are 99 others who worked just as hard and got very little.

Why is Monsanto making us sick, destroying our food supply? Why is Walmart ruining our country? Because it’s profitable! Stop paying in.

The 1% figure that once you remove the human animal from his natural habitat, he needs all sorts of products. Solution: get back to nature.

For example, once you get back to nature, junk food becomes irrelevant and you don’t crave it any more. I’m speaking from experience.

Just by using nature to re-balance your eating habits, you’ve all but eliminated your need for big food AND big pharma in one fatal blow.

If you eat conventional store food, you put your health in the hands of profit-maximizing corporations. Buy from farms, grow your own.

I wrote an entire article on why we’re sick and overweight: because the 1% want it that way.

The epidemic of diseases like obesity & diabetes is a direct result of big food corporations. Who’s there to save us? Big pharma. Opt out.

The best things in life are free. Don’t let the 1% brainwash you into emptying your wallet buying their crap. Enjoy nature, family, friends.

The biggest tool the 1% use to keep the 99% in line? It’s SHAME. (my article comparing inequality to domestic abuse) 

TV isn’t just for direct brainwashing. It’s to sedate you so you don’t go out & discover who you are & what you were born to do

What defines you? If it’s corporate music, a television show, product fandom or–God forbid–you’re a “Disney family” you need to rethink NOW.

If you watch TV, avoid the ads, and be aware that the entertainment industry almost always promotes a culture of excessive consumption.

Have an identity, have a purpose. Know who you are and what you came to this earth to do. Don’t just consume what the 1% tells you to.

Question EVERYTHING. Learn to ask “why”. Learn to ask “Who says?” “How do I know?” Don’t be afraid to say “When did this become acceptable?”

An “economist” who won’t talk about stopping global warming, over-consumption, or pollution is either a moron or a corporate puppet or both.

And government? Without it, corporations could not have achieved this degree of control over our lives and our nation’s wealth. Opt out.

I’m not saying don’t vote. But be constantly aware that the two-party circus is designed to distract us from what’s really going on.

Get back to nature. That’s where you will find your humanity, your self, your true purpose. You will remember how to see through the lies.

Are you enjoying your life, or does the system own you? My last few days of tweets are to tell you that you don’t have to play that game.

Another part of the broken system you can refuse to participate in (my article about the self-help industry scam)

I get great live-outside-the-system info from preppers, but this is the truth: the crisis is not just disaster in the future. It is NOW.

We do have a choice. Don’t wait around for the government to do something. We can take back our lives now.

What would you add? How do you Occupy your life?

Proponents of “positive thinking” and the “law of attraction” say that you will get whatever you focus on the most. Therefore, if you focus primarily on problems and wallow in negative emotions, you are “creating” or “attracting” more problems and negative emotions for yourself. If you don’t want bad things to happen to you, just don’t think about bad things. If you have negative thoughts or emotions, you must dismiss them and replace them with positive ones–and you’d better do it quick, before you “attract” or “create” something you don’t want.

So. Wanna know a secret?

It’s not that the law of attraction and other schools of thought built around positive thinking are all bull shit, or that all the self help gurus are 100% wrong. However, whatever insights they may have into the way the world really works and how to be happy and secure in it have gotten lost in mass-marketed retail packaging.

The first step in my own journey out of abject poverty was a trip to the local library to check out books on personal development, positive thinking, and the law of attraction. My life up to that point had been controlled by a fundamentalist cult. I didn’t know what wonderful wordly secrets they had been so intent on keeping from me, but I was determined to find them. Adopting an “anything goes” policy, I really did read everything I could get my hands on, resulting in a well-rounded knowledge of self-help ideologies.

Positive-thinking and law-of-attraction gurus promise a certain control over one’s life that can be irresistible to people trying to make sense of the Universe. I felt that draw. I understood why many people would want this hope so badly that they would just buy into these schools of thought without questioning. For me, however, the things I was reading raised some pretty serious questions. Was this “law of attraction” really implying that the poor deserve their suffering because, just like everyone else, they simply get what they focus on?

I withheld judgment on this issue, trusting that the answer would come to me one day. Little did I know that I would have to wait well over a decade.

What strikes me now about mainstream personal-development lore is the overwhelming focus on money and material things. Sure, you might find a smattering of some other basics of Maslow’s hierarchy mixed in (like romantic relationships), but when you think of positive thinking and the law of attraction, what is the first thing you think of?

Money, of course. And why do you think that is?

It’s because we live in the United States of America, and here we play a game called capitalism whether we want to or not. In this game, money is king. When people seek personal development help they are typically looking for ways to win at capitalism. They want ways to “attract” or “create” success and money, which perverse American capitalism leads us to believe are the enablers of everything else we want out of life. The self-help industry, in turn, sells the product it knows these seekers will buy.

The American self-help industry, with all of its ideologies, is built upon the implicit acceptance that capitalism dictates the rules. The assumption that capitalism provides the only possible playing field is never even questioned. What’s more, the primary rule of this corrupt capitalism is: you do not complain. That is, you do not question the system. You shut up, and you work within the parameters given. In order to do this, what do you need? You need the power of positive thinking!

As it turns out, the answer to my decade-old question about the poor and the law of attraction has two parts.

First, the law of attraction that is taught by the mainstream self-help industry not only implicitly accepts that capitalism dictates the rules, it also assumes that capitalism represents a sort of scale model of the laws of the larger metaphysical Universe. It doesn’t. This is why if you ever tried using affirmations about the benevolence and abundance of the Universe only to open your eyes again and again to a slap across the face—well, something clearly wasn’t adding up, and now you know why.

The second part of the puzzle concerns destitute individuals more directly. My blood boils when I hear people say that everyone has an equal chance to succeed courtesy of our superior American capitalist system. Anyone can “make it”, so when they don’t, it’s their own fault for not working hard enough. They must be lazy or expect that they’re going to have something handed to them. The law of attraction as taught by the mainstream self-help industry contains an eerie mirror image of this flawed logic. The implication is indeed there: anyone who suffers poverty is poor because that is what they have created for themselves.

Every wonder how some people can rationalize condemning others to indigence and still sleep at night? Consider this. Both American capitalism and the law of attraction present themselves as fair systems as if each and every individual somehow, sometime, somewhere willingly agreed to participate and can therefore be justly held responsible for his own outcomes. Never does anyone go back to the source and question the original foundational assumption that it’s a fair system. The capitalist system is predicated on our never questioning it’s fairness, and so for many it follows logically the indigent are indigent because…well…they should have played a better game.  But when, where, and how did these destitute, suffering people agree to play? Go to the inner cities and ask the urban poor if they chose this system. Ask the children of poverty-stricken Appalachia, or the third-generation crack babies, or the descendents of former American slaves if they were ever offered an opt-out. Go ahead and blame these victims if you can prove to me that they agreed to play the capitalism game, on this playing field, with this unbending set of rules, all for a chance at the glory of winning big. When were they presented with this “law of attraction”, shown the parameters, and given a choice? Show me, because I really want to know. When was the buy-in?

I beat the odds and won at capitalism, a disappointing, conventional victory I realized later I didn’t want–but that’s a story for another day. Having amassed a wealth of personal development knowledge and valuable life experience, it was natural that my thoughts would turn toward helping others overcome challenges in their lives as well. I rolled my eyes at the thought of having to spend a coaching career distinguishing myself from peddlers of metaphysical snake oil, but I think I can safely say that’s become a non-issue.

I’m not here to help you achieve a dream. I’m here to wake you up.

OK, so I promised you a secret:

Negative emotions are normal and good, and are just as useful as positive ones. In fact, negative emotions may actually be more useful than positive ones.  When we’re not feeling positive, or “bad” things happen–and they inevitably do–the negative emotions that arise are there for a reason. We certainly don’t want to wallow in them, because that wouldn’t accomplish much,  but we absolutely cannot afford to ignore or dismiss them. Negative emotions can drive us upward and onward in ways that positive ones can’t, once we learn how to use them. In fact, we would not be able to change anything or create anything positive in our lives without negative thoughts and emotions.

The idea is to channel the negative thoughts and emotions, using them as motivation and energy for taking appropriate action: to change something that no longer serves us, or to build something we want for your lives now. The negativity dissipates as it becomes part of a creative process. Think of it as “constructive negativity.” This is how we effect positive change in our lives and the lives of others.

I have had self-help gurus link to this blog, indicating to their readers that Occupy Wall Street protesters shouldn’t be focusing on problems since we’re only “attracting” more of what we don’t want. They hold us up as an example of what not to do if you want to create positive change. They’re dead wrong. What we are doing is telling the long-overdue truth about the unfair playing field of corrupt American capitalism, and using the pain and righteous anger of millions as the building blocks for a world where everyone can be happy, secure, and productive instead of just a privileged few. Some of us have a special mission to bring a piece of the people’s suffering and outrage home and truly Occupy our lives in a holistic way. Because of the collective energy of Occupy Wall Street, still reverberating throughout the Universe, the potential to create change is absolutely unprecedented.

There. I didn’t make millions on a best-selling book with dozens of chapters, or charge people hundreds of dollars to get their feet burned on hot coals. I did build a meaningful life from practically nothing, and I can honestly tell you that actively solving problems and using negative emotions in constructive ways is absolutely critical. Don’t let anyone charge you money to tell you otherwise.

And question everything.

[cc photo courtesy of stofiska]

When we were children, we learned about animals and habitats, and how each species thrives only with its own special home and food. Pandas live only in temperate forests in China, and eat only bamboo. Certain types of fish live only in certain types of water. Cheetahs need wild, open grassland and desert where they can chase prey animals at speeds reaching 70 miles per hour. Any of these creatures would soon die without its natural environment.

But what about humans? We are used to thinking of ourselves as completely different, even from other mammalian species, and completely separate from the natural world. We never ask: “What is a human’s natural habitat?” Whatever it may have been, I sincerely doubt that the average American lives in anything even remotely like it.

We don’t think of ourselves as animals, but that’s what we are. High obesity rates, staggering numbers of people desperate for relief of depression and anxiety, and other disturbing statistics indicate a general lack of health and happiness that is widespread amongst our species. We put ourselves into an unnatural environment, artificially manufactured in almost every respect, and called it progress. Now we’ve reached a point where our own failure to thrive is staring us squarely in the face.

“Some of our most alienating work environments, in the sense of separating us from nature, are often the modern office building, where people are in these very bland, hostile environments with no access to windows or any experience of the outside or natural environments. Ironically, if you tried to do that to a caged animal in a zoo, you would violate legal statute, and would be prevented from doing so….We don’t see ourselves like that tiger in the cage, that we’re just as much dependent upon those experiential connections as the tiger is.”  ~Yale University social ecology professor Steven Kellert (Quote found in “The Nature Principle”, by Richard Louv)

I talk a lot about workers confined to cars and windowless workspaces for most of the hours that the sun shines, but it’s not immediately obvious how humans in cubicles are analogous to tigers in cages. After all, no one is shooting you with a tranquilizer dart, shoving you in, and locking the door. Also, humans and tigers don’t really look alike.

There is a scene in the 1986 comedy film “Back to School” where a scientist leaves Rodney Dangerfield in charge of his monkeys. The scientist returns to his lab to find the animals watching television and eating pizza. Your first thought is for the poor monkey’s tummies as they try to digest something they shouldn’t be eating (although I’m sure no animals were harmed in the making of the movie). If you’ve developed enough suspicion about our society’s health to be reading this blog, your second thought is: “Why aren’t we more shocked when we see a human in a windowless room watching hours of TV and eating greasy, processed food?” Seeing an animal so closely related to us engaging in unnatural behavior gives a flash of insight.

It raises some interesting questions, and I’ll give you some answers. We don’t think of ourselves as animals with critical dietary and habitat needs because we’re conditioned not to. We don’t think of ourselves as forced into cages because the trap isn’t a physical one. We simply allow ourselves to be coaxed out of the environment that makes us truly happy and healthy because we’re afraid of what will happen if we don’t. We are kept constantly insecure, dependent on the system, blackmailed with our own instinct for survival. We get into our cars, sit in traffic, sit in cubicles, sit in traffic again, then sit in front of the television–seemingly all of our own accord.

If we understand ourselves as human animals, living outside of our natural environment is like getting drunk or taking a hallucinogenic drug. Even if you are aware of what is happening when you ingest the mind-altering substance, all bets are off after that. And make no mistake: we have shown an incredible ability to adapt and survive in this unnatural world, but we live in an altered state. This is true even of people with jobs that keep them outdoors most of the day but in unnatural surroundings (construction sites, for example). We are under the influence, with absolutely no idea how it is shaping our behavior.

This 2009 article from LiveScience nicely encapsulates my mental image of dopey scientists and health officials scratching their heads over Americans who continue to eat processed, packaged foods and spend most of their time sedentary when they know it’s killing them. Some unhealthy Americans even seem to enjoy this lifestyle, but now that we’ve examined the environment trap in a little more detail, it all starts to make sense. Away from the guidance of nature and under the spell of our new and unnatural environment, we seem to have unlimited potential for self sabotage.

The environment trap damages our natural drive to eat healthy foods and keep our bodies in joyful motion, which in turn leads to obesity and depression. If you live in an unnatural state, and you will inevitably become overweight, anxious, depressed, or develop other health and relationship problems. This is a natural effect of the environment you are in. It is not your fault, and there is nothing wrong with you. Self control and “personal responsibility” don’t even enter the picture, except in one respect that I will explain now.

Self control is a precious commodity in any given human, and we only have it in a limited capacity. If we use too much self control without enough time to build ourselves back up, we won’t have enough for subsequent challenges. A scientific study showed that people suffered from decreased physical stamina and poor impulse control after solving complex problems, suggesting that their ability to focus and control themselves had been used up. My personal experience and observation applies this same theory to the windowless-workplace lifestyle. It’s not necessarily the work we do while in the cubicle that saps our ambition to find happiness in a  new career, work on our relationships, or do anything other than eat and watch television until we forget who we are and what we wanted out of life.

It’s that–whether we consciously realize it or not–we use up all of our self control to not burst out the door and make a break for our natural habitat.

For most of us, the unnatural world is probably not going to go away any time soon, and this means we need to find ways to align ourselves with nature if we are going to be healthy and happy. The good news is that re-aligning with nature is something you can do right now–today–in small ways that will make a big difference. Just step outside.

]]> http://www.pricelessearth.org/2012/06/animals-and-habitats-humans-and-cubicles/feed/ 0 http://www.pricelessearth.org/2012/06/memory-of-a-kindness/ http://www.pricelessearth.org/2012/06/memory-of-a-kindness/#comments Tue, 12 Jun 2012 21:35:09 +0000 Rose Anderson http://www.pricelessearth.org/?p=1863 [cc photo courtesy of David Baron]

There I was, on the side of I-83 between Pennsylvania and Baltimore. I can see myself standing there on that bright spring morning years ago as if I were looking at someone else’s life: a young woman in a floral dress is standing next to a car with a flat tire, her shoulders slumped. She is desperately clutching a tire-iron in her grimy, bleeding hands as she scans the passing traffic.

What’s the most powerful way to spread a message? Stories.

My life did not start from a place of advantage, as you may already know, but on this day in particular it was as if I were perched precariously at the intersection of two parallel universes. In one universe, I got to start the job that would launch a successful career in IT communications. Were a mere puff of wind to tip me into the other, all of my work up to this point would be in vain. That’s the life of the working poor: any given moment could mean the difference between a single step forward and falling all the way through to the bottom. There is no margin for error, and the safety net is damn flimsy.

After fleeing my abusive situation in Kansas, I had found myself looking to the “big city”, as I naively imagined it, as a way to find a job that could provide some kind of future for my three small children. I’m skipping a few chapters to say that I ended up in York, Pennsylvania, in a $300-a-month apartment on South Queen Street, thinking this would be the most affordable access to Baltimore. The meth lab upstairs, the prostitute out back, and the drug-gang shootouts in front of the building are stories for another day. Suffice it to say that having come straight out of a sheltered fundamentalist upbringing, I little understood the harshness of the real world.

As educated in arts and languages as I considered myself to be, I suspected I’d need some real-world credentials if I was going to be paid to do anything. I had thrown myself thousands of dollars into debt for a few months of technical schooling, and saved a precious hundred dollars to have a resume done. I studied hard, and I searched hard for a job that would give me just a foot–or even a toe–in the door.

I found one. They called me. I interviewed, and I got it. Me. Rose from that fundy place in Kansas.

And there I was, the morning of the first day of the rest of my life, knuckles dirty and bleeding, unable to budge even one of the lugs to loosen the flat tire. No cell phone. No AAA. Perhaps someone just one rung above me on the ladder would have had these things, but I didn’t.

I stood in a limbo between two cities, on a precipice between two possible worlds. What must be the joyful abandon of these people’s lives, I thought, that they can continue to speed by me in reliable vehicles I could only dream of ever owning? The fabric of my floral dress fluttered with each passing car, and I was utterly alone.

Suddenly, they were there: an older couple in an older station wagon, telling me to get in.

English wasn’t their first language, and I think they may have been from the Middle East. I remember some conversation during the drive. They may have told me they were on their way to a business they owned and that my new job was just on their way, so it was really no problem at all. The memory is blurry now. They brought me right to the front door of my new office, and I walked in just in time, as if nothing had happened. I pretended I looked great, that I hadn’t left my car somewhere out on the highway, and that my hands weren’t bleeding. I don’t know that anyone was the wiser.

I let the couple in the station wagon slip away, out into the world, wondering how you can ever thank anyone enough for something that may literally have changed the course of your life.