GAMING THE SYSTEM

Version 2.0

© 2011 Howard McQueen

Many of us
 are seeming blessed with:

  intelligence
  good looks
  the gifts to gab and entertain
  parents and/or elders who invested in their dream for us
  a skin color and features well-suited to mark the check-box “white”
  born to live in the plentitude of the US of A

Many of us
 with a modicum of effort and struggle:

  navigated into the safe harbor of a rewarding career path
  rose to a level of financial comfort
  enjoy the flow of excess money (or credit)
  entertain ourselves with indulgences in the habits of:

    eating out
    traveling
    surrounding ourselves with the ten-thousand things
    constantly feeding our appetites for security,
     that coddle us with creature-comforts.

Many of us
 try so hard to belong to contrarian, counter, or gatherings to try to evolve the culture: 
 we sometimes earnestly work to clear roads to becoming authentic

 and, much more often, we like to pretend we are in the company of
 those few exploring the vanguard edges of human potential.

For a growing few of us
 what was once just a distant, aching emptiness
 has gained the critical mass of an urgent, ever-consuming immediacy,
 which calls from within

   to drop the charades
   to stop the people-pleasing habits (like the over-used and falsified exuberant masks of humor)

AND

just settle up
with becoming
simple
flawed
and true to our authentic self.

In this inward exploration with Self,
we discover, amidst all the strewn pieces,
the grand interconnectedness.

We realize, be it through
music
painting
poetry
and in every simple, every-day expression of sharing life,

each life, fully-lived
is awe-inspiring.

This is when we discover we can drop all the “gaming the system” agendas
and simply be present.