Progress and Success

We look around our world today and say that we are moving up. Moving out. Getting better, greater, more advanced. We see what we have created and we give ourselves a hand and then get back to work to make more and create more and hate more because we can’t produce fast enough.

We see all the progress we’ve made and we decide it’s the only way to success and happiness, so we force it on other peoples, other cultures, other mentalities, with the perverted perspective that we are helping them by puking on their culture and customs, throwing out their traditions and pace of life, by convincing them that our way is better. That to do it faster is to do it better.

Instant oatmeal, instant rice, instant gratification, instant convenience, instant satisfaction, instantaneously we have lost our knowledge and trust in something greater than ourselves. Than production. Than progress.

Is progress our prerogative? Is the American dream a privilege? Is moving faster improving life? Or is it destroying it?

We move so fast that we don’t even know what’s flying past. Our shoulders are bumping with the most beautiful things imaginable but we don’t even look over because we’re so focused on our own goals of success and mobility. We can’t even see the revelation that the radiance of the rainbow holds because we’re so entangled in our complaints of how we can’t advance the company with weather and inclemency.

We thing progress=success, that faster=better, that advancement=prosperity. But I challenge you. Look around you. Slow down enough to allow your eyes to focus. But I warn you, you may not like what you see.

There’s a reason people go on mission trips and come back moved because those people had nothing, yet they had everything, and it was reflected in their moods and interactions with the world. Those people have nothing. In our eyes. they don’t have things. They don’t have luxury, convenience, progress. They are “underdeveloped, third-world, or even developing.” Yet developing into what? Monsters who are blinded by their own ambitions and dreams of achieving success that they step on all who get in their way, sacrificing family, friends, and more just to score that thing which they think will bring them happiness. What they don’t realize is that happiness has been at their door all along, just waiting to be let in. but distraction and convenience and hope for achievement has prevented that door from being unlocked. We think that’s too easy. It must crawl through the window. We must earn it. Sweat for it. Progress for it to come.

But its already here.

There is a deep beauty in the way a tribe takes its time to cook. No stoves, no boxes, no mixes. Just food cultivated with their own hands. Yes, they could save so much time if they adopted our lifestyles, but it would destroy a piece of who they are.

We already have replaced our roots with boots that can brave any weather, so we can get to work and make our lives better, to the point that we don’t even know who we are. We get in the car and go to do meaningless things which we assign meaning to in order to cope with the fact that we are not happy. We mask reality with a medicine that we think is good. We progress into progress and are left hopeless when it doesn’t alleviate all the pain. The American dream doesn’t crack up to all it seems. We think we have it all when we look at the Africans and how everything they have is small and “insufficient,” but I think we have it all wrong.

I do not think progress is evil, but when we worship it like our culture, it becomes an all-consuming idol that robs us of life. Complexity replaces simplicity, achievement replaces proximity of family, success replaces happiness.

I do not think they are all at odds, but I think we must examine the lives we’re enshrouded in and realize that maybe we don’t have it all right.

Humility plus eyes to see equals beautiful reality.