In This Life: Managing & Administering Lack

How to deal with the hunger, the need, the deficits, the emptiness, the lack? Does it control us, define us, determine us? Do we allow the lack to make us the rapacious consumers of innumerable communities and cultures (and what might History be but one long lack-inspired nightmare we dream to awaken from)? Do we allow the emptiness to drive us to rape, murder, and pillage on the darker-side... or to co-dependent relationships and gross consumerism on the more socially acceptable side?

How do we deal with the hunger? Meaning, how do we deal with the hunger in ways that are not totally destructive and debilitating? How do we have a relationship with someone in an intimate way without being a consumer of their soul and person? How do we deal with lack?

My own suspicions tell me that this is the fundamental question we are dancing around... beating around the bush of... can't get out of our head... are unae to elude or escape in this human lifetime: How are we to manage the sense of lack that just is, and do so in a skillful way?

Does lack send us to the pill rack, the liquour store? Loneliness. Lack of companionship.

Does lack have us playing the lottery and the slot machines so that our kids are left with ketchup sandwiches? Finances. The economy stupid.

Does lack turn us into a consumer of porn and cheap sexual thrills? Stimulation. Simulation.

Does lack make us wonder why there is lack, and how we are meant to wrestle with absences our whole lives? Moral inquiry. Ethics. Psychological insight and discovery. Philosophy.

Does lack inspire us to become wise and compassionate? Or are we sent on a feeding frenzy, literally sweeping over the planet like a marauding band of scavengers with an appetite fit for a planetary-strain of human pirahna?

In other words, will I/you/we eat others, whether alive or dead; consuming all in our wake in the unconscious attempt to make ourselves feel full (American epidemic of obesity anyone)? Or will we embrace lack and dance with absence and engage emptiness with the skill of an artiste' and the heart of a lover?

Can we make the (w)hole a part of Being?