My friends and I have imagined for years a beautiful land far from others (hopefully a tropical island) where we will live when we are old. We have already established our mayor, social worker, physician, teacher, pastor, and other community leaders. We know what our house and shared living spaces will be. There will be no need for government as we will create a test for those who would like to live amongst us to see whether they have common sense or not. We will not fault others who can not stay but we will not include those who don’t see things our way. The name of our ideal community: Common Sense.
Before you run off to report us and our collective imaginations to the thought cancellers of our day:
Stop and consider if you and your closest humans haven’t done the very same thing. Is this part of your imagination for a future that seems only possible in your dreams? Or could it be the circumstances in which you unintentionally live today?
The reality is, my friends, that the beauty of common sense is something that we experience when we think of our best selves living with the best of others. But it is something we miss and long for when we think the best of ourselves and the worst of others.
Our worst collective circumstances are created when our inclination is to choose to think about the best of ourselves and the worst of everyone else. This inclination creates an internal negotiation to try to restore a sense of common peace. We lose our minds to the thoughts of others and leave our brains to fend for themselves in an impossible balancing act.
The evidence of history, science, and personal experience prove this to be an impossible task for our individual brains, bodies, and souls. The negotiations leave us fatigued, mentally frazzled, diseased, distracted, and with less hope of better days ahead. In the extremes, we become dangerous to ourselves and others constantly battling for the power of common sense.
A community of elite peace is one that lives in the conscious and constant tension of best and worst in such a way that the humans in the circumstances are not being judged and the thoughts, perceptions, and shared experiences over generations and between groups lead to a common agreement of how we all live together peacefully in the short days and long years of life.
Communities can be as small as two people or as large as a nation. The common thread in a peaceful community is that the scale is set to balance at the common rather than the uncommon. Hope comes from the knowledge that the common will draw in the extremes that jeopardize the common sense of safety. Feeling safe, each individual holds a healthy tension within themselves between the extremes. And the group lives in a common sense of well being through anchoring the tension in the common.
Leaders in these communities go first by holding the tension of the extremes so the anchor is always on common ground. Followers know their way because all are safely tethered no matter how far they are from common ground.
A community of chaos, anxiety, fear, conflict, shame/blame, toxicity, and rebellion is one that lives without holding the tension between best and worst. There is an “all one and none of the other” mentality that leaves no room for a common mindset to come back to when the community finds itself in those extremes without a tether.
In this type of community, you have to choose one or the other in every situation. All in or all out. You are either right or wrong in every thought, action, and circumstance. And the community lives in a common sense of sickness because there is no common thought to return to when you are confused, emotional, vulnerable, and feeling untethered.
Leaders in these communities, untethered from the middle, seem not to be heading in any common direction. Individuals become lost with a longing for a better sense of direction with no way back to common ground. Workers (no matter their job role or pay grade) run to and fro hopelessly trying to restore balance between two opposing extremes without knowing that there is a healthy land they have been untethered from.
Once untethered, we abandon the commonness of humanity in favor of the common chase after the extremes no matter the harm done to ourselves or our communities. The group that defines our common sense becomes just the voices in our own head negotiating for the imaginary of the virtual and untethered from the real.
The cure for extreme conditions that divide larger groups into smaller groups and smaller groups into individuals and individuals into poor mental health is, quite simply, a common sense that unites a larger number of ordinary (common) humans with peace in the realities of the circumstances of the day in history. A peace that is tethered in common ground and protected by leaders willing to hold the extreme tensions come what may without losing sight of common.
The essence of common sense is that it is only common or sensible when we release the power of creating the test and embrace the common ground to which we are all tethered.
Our virtual world has expanded our communities into numbers that are extreme. Our common ground has expanded beyond sight. The opinions, diversity, human behaviors, metrics of performance, demands from experts, and inequalities that we are faced with bringing together in our own minds are as numerous as the world is big. And as artificial as the world is diverse.
What once was common has been lost to the community and falls to each individual to find for themselves. The common sense of today’s circumstance is a sense of fear, anxiety, and dread leading to a common act of commiseration that makes us believe the worst in ourselves, each other, and the times in which we live.
But, my friends, I am here to report that there is hope for you and I to start a new day of common sense right where we are! In our minds. In our circumstances. In our families. In our work. And in our communities!
Together we can think commonly and still uniquely, act in unity even when we act differently, find true collective peace, and live with the beautiful common sense of health for generations yet to be.
In hindsight, my friends and I had one thing wrong about our dream community. We thought it would be us who creates the test for those who are in and those who are out. We weren’t malicious, just young. The mysterious truth that we have discovered in our many years together is that it is life that gives us the commonsense tests. And it is us that decides if those tests lead us to the extremes or to the common — dividing us or tethering us closer.
Each of us, my friends and I, has been tested to the extremes (both good and bad) and yet we still come back to common ground every chance we get. We still imagine the best in each other living together somewhere in the future with a common sense of a life well spent because it was well tested and well tethered.
Instead of a test to exclude others life has given us a larger sense of common experiences that have included people we have now changed our minds about. (Admittedly we do still hope that we will live together on a tropical island someday.)
Life is both short and long if you read the whole story. What if in the short we start to rewrite the long, so the best of the story doesn’t get lost?
If you start to think differently for yourself tethered to one other person —maybe a coach ;)— truly any one other person, you can improve your common sense of health for at least a moment. I guarantee, when the moment is past, you will both be on your way to a better sense of self in a circumstance that you can not control.
This better sense of self will be the contagion that will spread to a better sense of common for all.
Let us stop commiserating and start collaborating to build a new land of common sense!
Find someone to change your mind with, one thought at a time, for the beauty of common sense!
And that, my friends, is enough for today.