If you ask people to name the problems facing our country today, you get a fairly uniform set of answers:  economic stagnation and political stalemate are likely to head the list.  If you ask the cause of these challenges, agreement is likely to end.  Very few people will answer, as Michael Meade does, that we suffer from a poverty of imagination.  In a recent blog article on The Huffington Post, Meade says:

“Stagnation in the economy and “stalemation” in the political system stem from a collapse of imagination and increasing blindness about what a culture is supposed to cultivate and what a civil society is truly about…The problem is not simply a lack of work or a paucity of jobs. The problem is that genuine solutions to persistent problems require the kind of vision that transcends single-minded ideologies, rigid belief systems, and exaggerated self-interest.”  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-meade-dhl/be-yourself_b_1640162.html

Meade reminds us that while any job may look good if we don’t have one, it’s not enough to satisfy the soul.  What we really want is to find our unique calling, in an atmosphere that now seems especially toxic to such a search.

This post is another in Meade’s ongoing series on the theme of our inner genius and how we might learn to listen and see what it wants.  He doesn’t offer simple or short term answers, but he does remind us of how much the quality of our lives depend on the quest:

“To become nobody but yourself, to struggle against the tide of sameness and the false security of simply fitting in — that is a fight worth having. To become oneself by finding a way to contribute one’s god-given talents and natural genius to this troubled world; that is the job to keep applying for. The real work in this life is not simply to succeed and “become somebody”; the real issue is to become one’s intended self.”

I encourage you to read this article and some of Meade’s other posts on becoming ourselves.