Mindful solitary walking, like a cloud in the deep blue sky (imagery inspired by Happynicity’s blog post “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” at
) can have personal and spiritual dimensions. One can reflect and connect, re-embody and re-envision one’s place in the cosmos—this is core and existential stuff.
Walking, like many other activities, can be a spiritual occupation—a profound and meaningful activity that evokes growth and actualisation, immediacy of being and wholeness, stillness and centredness, connection to the wider context in love, and transcendence beyond words and ideas. Walking alone like this requires mindfulness and presence, alive and awake like a joyful cloud moving across the vastness of space. Carefree. Quiet.
In our world today, there is a dearth of mystics who can walk mindfully and deeply with insight. This kind of walking entails that we walk lightly on the earth, learning to see beyond the surface of things. I recall Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s words to the effect that the true miracle is to walk on earth … mindfully, like kissing the earth with our feet. I agree.
There’s more: walking like a cloud can be a solitary path as well as a journey connected with others in mutuality and togetherness. For distinct clouds can spontaneously merge to form a beautiful tapestry of co-solitude in the unimpeded sky. But each walker will need to be a mindful mystic of sorts.
I feel there is a serious gap in our education system that has failed our young ones. We have failed to teach them how to live, to question life, to make a life, to breathe beyond themselves—in short, to be mystics on earth but in a pragmatic grounded way that is in touch with the covetous, hostile, and suffering world without getting stuck in it. We have failed by teaching them what is peripheral rather than what is quintessential. We are obsessed with making a living, but forget totally about making a life. Why live at all? Why drain ourselves making a living if we don’t know why we are alive and for what reason or purpose we live?
We have failed our young because we have failed ourselves. And we have failed ourselves because our elders have failed us. All have been caught up in the deluded propaganda of unenlightened society and false programs of the reified ego rooted in erroneous seeing and conceiving. Together, over generations, human consciousness is asleep and entrapped in delusion. Suffering arises out of this delusion.
Some may say that our education system is what it is because the dominant mindset is that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This mindset is a common but lame excuse. This is simply another name for inertia. The truth is: the education system IS broke. But educrats (my term for career educational bureaucrats who get top dollars for corporatising education and driving its soulless systems) and their political masters are simply unable or unwilling to see it. For seeing demands action. Action is subversive.
And while young people now may seem to have more resources to help them learn about this or that, much of these resources are of dubious quality amidst a cacophony of noise and endless superficial choices. The current environment—physical and digital—does not conduce to mindful stillness and deep inquiry, rigged as it is for the perpetuation of neoliberal predatory capitalism and technocratic materialist consumerism in its multiple shallow iterations.
This distraction and decay is especially true in societies with embedded top-down governance and a robotic subservient mindset as the public norm. In such societies, transformative impetus needs to come from leadership at top to middle levels. For they are the ones who have the power to elicit momentum for change. But one caveat: these leaders will need to have renewed their consciousness and experienced deep transformation in themselves in order for this to happen. Of course, they also need to be working hand in hand with grassroots and community groups to jointly steer things in the right direction. As of now, we lack leaders like these.
Ultimately, I think society needs nothing less than sovereign grace to supervene, for deep lasting transformation to truly transpire in persons and their worlds. And with that, much suffering of humanity and the planet has to eventuate before any mass awakening is possible, if at all. But if in the rare chance that such transformative change does happen en masse, then perhaps we will see a new world of peace and a new culture of awakening ensue where mystics will be the rule rather than the exception, valued for who they are and what they bring to universal human society.
