To be oneself is to express one’s individuality and eccentricity without shame.  It is to know that, as a well-meaning person, there’s nothing wrong with what you are saying, doing, and being as long as it excites you and makes you feel alive. 

The excitement that is stirred-up inside of us in a stimulating conversation, in a lover’s kiss, on a walk to a beautiful beach, or in a work of art is nothing other than nature nudging us toward the path we are supposed to walk.  We feel pulled in certain directions simply because those are the right directions!

Outside of our necessary work and responsibilities, life should not feel so boring and dull.  Conversations should not come with such great effort.  Impulses to do, to say, or to create should not be stifled for any reason – not for acceptance and not even for love.  Most of us have become so well-adjusted to the inevitability of feeling stifled that we have come to accept it.  Yet, to accept it is to accept a state of living death.

We live among the living dead.  There are the people in our lives who bore us and who return nothing in exchange for the generous offer of our time and energy.  We care about and love these people partially for what we see in them (or what we want to see in them).  We bend and adjust who we are and what we do.  We so carefully monitor ourselves in order to earn their acceptance.  Yet, when we actually earn that acceptance, we feel no reward and we are left only with exhaustion.  In a state of  boredom and exhaustion, we offer nothing and have no non-economic value.

The extent to which a person is living dead is the extent to which they offer nothing.  There is nothing in their words but a muddled-up echo of the establishment media, the corrupt governments, and other self-serving institutions.  To live among the living dead is to attempt to say and do, in practical terms, nothing at all.  The unspoken and unarticulated ideal, which is unknowingly held so dearly by the living dead, is to say, to express, and do nothing.  The purpose of their lives is to leave the world just as it was...to leave the world as though they, themselves, never existed at all.  So our definition of “living dead” is complete.  What do we do about it?  We let nature work.

The burden is not on us, we the fully alive, to carefully select the people in our lives.  We need make no decision.  No effort at all is required to change the people we love and care about.  We need not beg or plead for them to become more like us.  We simply need to live openly and according to our nature.  We simply need to openly follow the path that excites us and makes us feel alive.  The choice is actually theirs to make.  The people in our lives need to decide whether to accept us for who we are.  If they cannot, they will make the decision to disengage.  In doing so, we can be grateful because our time and energy is freed-up to become fully alive and to live among the fully alive.

May we all find the courage to follow the path of that which excites us; even as we whole-heartedly and willingly take-on all of life’s responsibilities, challenges, and burdens.  Life can be exciting, beautiful, and simply great.