Anxiety.

It forages among our unexpressed thoughts, nibbles away our best energy, like termites tunneling in a foundation. The free-floating dis-ease can fulminate from symptom to crippling malady, depending on how plugged in you’ve made yourself.

Our culture distributes anxiety most insidiously and perniciously through television, through the medium’s endless barrage of titillating headlines, shocking images, and random data. To watch a sports or news broadcast is to be pulled and twisted into a brain-fuck netherworld.

When I gave up watching TV seven years ago, I actually experienced a sort of withdrawal. I realized, with no small regret, that TV had succeeded in hollowing-out of my initiative.

I believe it’s a fundamental human tendency to be a lazy ass, snack-munching bubblehead. We can indulge this occasionally. However, once we find regular comfort in sucking the tit of the toxic media sow, we full-on spiral down into sinning against our singular talent. We congeal.

Congealing produces splendid results in cooking and terraforming, but not so much with human souls. From our media, we learn to believe the messages delivered in slick seductive commercials about how we (especially women) should look, and how we can be good little consumers of gadgets and goodies that ultimately do not and cannot make us happy.

The trick is never to congeal – to keep rearranging our inputs and outputs to serve a grander purpose

– our unique purpose.  Each of us is honored with one.