christopherhildreth

Sunday nights I’m involved in a conversation that has blossomed into a real reach into the inmost areas of what it means to be human and to follow God. One of the areas of interest that has caught my attention is the human condition and the way that we relate to each other.

The following is an excerpt from the book Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales.

Cox (a police officer on a small nature park describing instances of people becoming lost on a piece of land one mile long and three0quarters of a mile wide) went on to describe the astounding failures of mind he had witnessed on this tiny spit of land. He told me about a group he’d found on top of the tallest dune in the park. They had noticed that they could see the Atlantic Ocean to the east and asked Cox if the water to the west was the Pacific. He said he had rescued many people who’d become lost and were unable to think through their panic and recognize that they were only a short walk from a heavily traveled road (you can hear the cars from just about any spot in the park). He told me I’d be surprised by the number of people who ask him how far it is between the mile markers on Highway 158.
 
Cox seemed to take it all with good humor, but he also seemed a bit in despair of the human condition. Referring to the numerous injuries that occur when people fall while trying to run down the dunes, he said, “Yes, gravity still does apply here, even when you’re on vacation.” He told me that people come here suffering from what he called “a vacation state of mind, where all the old rules are suspended.” I’ve used this phrase since, and I owe the concept to Ranger Cox. When we find ourselves in a jam, we can often trace the cause to our vacation state of mind. “

Since a vacation is coming in the near future, I thought this to be appropriate for a single thought. How do we embrace the joy of being in the moment of “vacation” while at the same time retaining the anchors of a life lived on the planet Earth? Perhaps a better question would be, “If we were living a life fully aware and fully connected with the Source, would we need or even relish a vacation at all?”

This entry was posted on July 15, 2008 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Awareness, Cultural Ideas, Life. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.