The Challenge
(Or One of Them)

We live in a time period when a lot is expected and even demanded of all who are on their way to awareness (or trying their best to get there), and it doesn't make any difference where on our paths we might be: beginning, middle or end; we are not being cut any slack. And a lot of us can't help but feeling overwhelmingly pressured to perform, to become someone many of us don't feel quite ready to be (even assuming we knew for sure who we wanted to become).

Everyone and everything around are inspiring (or rather, urging) us to take major action, and immediately. Something about the fact that we don't have a lot of time left. The news. The prophets. New Age books. Movies such as An Inconvenient Truth, Fast Food Nation, Supersize Me, Sicko, etc. Everywhere you turn, it's doomsday approaching by the minute. It's do or die. Although all that information is very necessary and fulfilling a vital service by educating us, one of its side effects can be that of creating a state of paranoia and panic, and freezing a lot of well-meaning but overwhelmed people into depression and inaction (not to mention that, according to the law of attraction, it can actually reinforce this very reality we want so much to change).

I happen to be one of those who chooses to believe that the "end of the world" as we know it actually means the end of an era and the beginning of a shift in human consciousness. Just how traumatic that shift will be is the part that still depends on us, on our chosen courses of action. In other words, it seems the shift will be happening with or without us sticking around to witness it.

Like so many of the "children" of the New Age, I felt that I should be doing something, but I just didn't know what, how, which, when. And, more specifically, who I had to become to participate, to contribute. "Become" being the operative word. I did not believe that I could just choose to do something, to participate, to create without becoming somebody else first. As in, becoming better; improving myself as a person. Not that I have anything against the idea that we all should put an effort into becoming better people.