society

Role Models, Where are They?

/ inkspeare / Leave a comment

I think that younger generations are lacking something that was very important for older generations – role models. Our society has decline in this sense, and instead, a younger generation is filling that void with role models found in Hollywood celebrities and even AI, wherever they can find the ideal, even when it may be a bit removed from reality. If you had an influential and positive role model in your life, count yourself blessed. When we are young, we might not recognize the significant influence of a role model in our life, but later on, in hindsight, we realize how blessed we were.

I had two strong role models in my life, both women, and they contributed much to the woman I am today. One of them, my grandmother, the strong, courageous, and righteous woman who raised me. I can honestly say that she was the living image of the woman in Proverbs 31. I learned so much character and wisdom from her (and much more) throughout my childhood and my early younger years, but her teachings lasted a lifetime.

As a young and married adult in my 20s, I met my second role model, a Jewish woman who introduced me to business concepts, an area of my life that had no previous exposure as far as learning. I value her teachings to this day because she inspired in me a learning for such things and gave me a view of myself that I never had before in that sense. She inspired me to dream more, for the first time.

These women, very different but similar in character, and from very different cultures, upbringing, religious views, education, and socioeconomic backgrounds, shaped much of my thinking in a positive way, and I am so grateful for having them in my life at an early age. When I think about what I consider a scarcity in role models these days, I see a correlation with the erosion of our value system as a society. Times may change, technology may modernize and influence the way we do daily living, but core values should remain and not get lost within a rapid changing culture. These are basic rules of engagement, of humanity and societal goodness that we ought to pass on to the next generation.

Simplicity

/ inkspeare

Simplicity – The quality or condition of being simple.

Simple – Easily understood or done. Plain and basic or uncomplicated in form, nature, or design.  (Oxford English Dictionary)

 

Over the past few years my quest have been to embrace simplicity. It seems that it may be part of human nature to make things less simple. We take something basic and we build or design other things around it, whether material or non-tangible such as rituals, ceremonies, celebration, protocols, and so on. We are embellishers by nature. We may become obscure, and sometimes obtuse, for the sake of completion, in our search for becoming whole. We attach rituals and a series of steps to spirituality, and even tools and other gadgets to complete the package.

Many times, all the preliminary stuff diminishes the joy and meaning of our intention and makes our target feel farther than it is. Why do we do this to ourselves? Is it in the name of wholeness, greatness, status, or self-preservation? Is it the nature of being, and therefore inescapable? Of having the experience in the material and the spiritual? Our entire civilization, society, speaks of it. We have taken the concept of shelter or the basic need of eating, for example, and built around it. Hence all the gadgets and toys we enjoy, the mansions, the fine cuisine, and all the emotions and meaning that we attach to these things. Even in the search for simplicity we overdo or complicate things – meditation groups and techniques, lists and journals, gadgets, rituals … .

Do we go back to find simplicity because we had enough or because we lost that part of us, the sense of it? Is it because without it we do not feel whole? At any point of our lives we may try to return to it, and the quest begins (sometimes with all the bells and whistles that we may attach to it). Is it the beginning or the end? Or a circle, a cycle of life?

This post is an example on how to take a simple concept and make it complicated.