Gently, Turn Away

by Jaimy Weiler

Sometimes the only thing to do is turn away.  To stop feeding insanity with your further attention.  Insanity that wants to be insane will not be affected by your analysis, your admonishments or your proposed solutions.  It will not heed or even address your cries of sadness, pain or despair.  Insanity that desires to be insane is deaf to the calls of the common people looking to increase meaning, integrity and accountability.  The best we can do sometimes is just turn away.  Stop wasting energy and resources on that which will not look beyond its own self-importance, its own unending greed and self-deception.  Without abandonment, we must find a way to turn away.  To end the vast pillaging of our personal resources, our time, attention and money.  Without abandoning that which we turn away from, we must find the courage to trust ourselves and turn toward sanity.  To support and attend only to that which is simple, basic and fundamental to the global good.  We now need to stop feeding ‘evil’ by talking about it, by being appalled, aghast or shocked by what ‘evil’ does.  What if we, without condemnation, turn away from the advertisers, the news media, the politicians and leaders, the corporations and products that promote the common insanity?  What if we stop fighting them and hating them?  What if we stop giving them our time, money and attention?  We can stop buying the stories, the dramas and deceptions, the addictive products and programs.  We can stop complaining and criticizing.  We can turn away.  And turn toward our families, our friends, our selves and everyone else in our day-to-day world.  And love them.  With a respectful and mature love.  And when we find we can’t love so well, we can use all the energy we were spending on the common insanity to teach ourselves how to love.

This darkness, this global insanity, when deprived of its diet of negative attention, opposition and aggression, starves and cannot grow.  And when darkness is met by mature, unwavering loving-kindness, it little by little, melts and dies.  We must teach ourselves how to love.  How to hold in deep reverence the worst this world has to offer.  And not be seduced into joining it or opposing it.  Just to love it. To offer it a strong, humble, compassionate heart.  And turn toward and increase that which is sane in this oh so beautiful world.

This piece was excerpted from the book Light through the Heart, ©2005, by Jaimy Weiler.

Jaimy Weiler is a consultant, author and speaker living in Southeast Michigan.  Her background in manufacturing, quality assurance, and finance combined with her centeredness, wisdom and integrity bring simplicity and clarity of purpose to others and the projects they value. Please visit and participate in her blog at www.LightThroughTheHeart.blogspot.com.  She can be contacted at (248) 546-9904 or Jaimy@OneHeartWaking.com