Gray Wulf (2020) Musings 1

*Gray Wulf (2020) Musings #1*

Welcome to the lair of the Gray Wulf and the opening up of my musings therewithin.
My hope is that my regular commentaries and tales may be of some use to you in surviving our modern lifestyles.
These blogs are what they are; contemplations, for better or worse.
They will not be answers or solutions. Nor are they are prescriptions.
They will always be my observations, concerns, and ideas.

I don’t anticipate agreement with them and, of course, I am happy to be challenged about them or questioned.
But unless I have completely gone off it and gone out of order, I am going to reserve my right to have them.

Thank you then for joining me and I am hoping that I will stay interesting enough to keep you with me on this new journey.

So, this first musing itself was inspired and came to me from out of work in Cameroon that I am currently involved in.
With a friend and colleague there, we have been setting up a community self-help group to give mutual support for some people who have been affected by the ongoing crisis in that country.

People who have had to face loss, shocking experiences and danger to their lives, as a consequence of civil warfare.

The purpose of the group is to assist each of the members to readjust from the threats they have gone through and to find some emotional balance

Listening to and connecting with members of the group, I began thinking beyond this particular context in Cameroon, about the relative nature of anxiety, stress, and the emotions that arise from suffering and the sense of danger.

Isn’t anxiety and fear meant to be a short term response direct to an immediate threat or challenge? A basic survival strategy?

Yet I seem to be observing so many people that I am meeting in different countries and cultures, with anxiety levels that appear to me on more or less the same scale.

So what is happening to those who are not in a war-torn setting or society? Why are so many living their lives whilst experiencing the same deep tension internally?

Back in history, no doubt our physical environment and living conditions offered a much higher threat and were the main source of our anxiety. Now it is our societies and cultures that threaten us.
What are we doing as parents to make our children feel so unsafe? Do we raise them within a regime of judgments so much that they grow up riddled with anxiety and apprehensions that they carry into adulthood? Are we frightening our children to believe that they are only safe if they are successful if they are beautiful if they are rich if they fit in?
Living in a continuing state of ‘under threat’ from everyone around us. We are vulnerable if we do not compete, anxiety as the antennae of this competition, conditioned by anxiety to conform and play in this game.

Not an original idea. I think it has been called ‘alienation’. Everybody against everybody else. But I think it is the first time I am really seeing us all in our individual warfares.

The system we all live in virtually across the world, albeit in slightly different forms, is, of course, the market-driven forces of capitalism.

Even if you accept or endorse this as the only economic structure for the modern society, it is impossible to deny that it is fundamentally based on competition. On all levels; corporations, organizations, communities, each of us as individuals.

The mindset that fits or drives a competitive world can only be anxiety.
The discomfort or never-ending worry about staying still, not moving forward, not having enough. The fear of being left behind.

I don’t believe that this unease is a natural state for us as individuals or for societies, but it is a product, it is the requirement of the system in which we are existing in at present.

I want to think in my future Gray Wulf musings about whether it is possible to see ways that will allow us to not succumb to this ‘distress’ of modern life.

My faith is in collaboration, passion, a renewal of spirituality.
I will return to these values with you.