I Was Made for Times Like These… ✊🏻

📍 Coordinates: Uvita, Costa Rica.

📖 Reading Time: ~3 minutes.

🏴 Vibecheck: I came across a social post by Zen teacher/abbot Joan Halifax that inspired this post. In recent weeks I’ve found myself incredibly overwhelmed, angry, and depressed at times. It’s been tough. Too much news/social time I think, at least partly. The idea/mantra expressed in this post helped ground me more, and I hope it proves fruitful for you as well.

AFFIRM: I was MADE for times like these…

Repeat it like a mantra. 

When I was growing up in Canadian suburbia, one of the common social tropes was “I should’ve been born in a different generation.”

Listening to the Beatles on the newest iPod Classic had every angsty teen thinking they should’ve been born in the ’60s.

One of the limiting narratives I put out into the world was that I felt ‘alien’. I didn’t belong here. It seemed like everyone else understood this human thing and I couldn’t grasp it. Somehow I missed the comfort-with-reality that I projected onto other people. 

Increasingly, you can find the ‘RETVRN’ movement in corners of the internet – those who advocate a return to the deep traditions of our ancestral pasts: the Roman Empire, Indigenous ways of living, etc.

All of these narratives—the nostalgic longing for a decade that you have no experience of, the feelings of disconnection or alienation, and the growing pre-civilization traditionalists—all forget one critical point:

YOU WERE MADE FOR TIMES LIKE THESE.

The gnawing feeling you have inside of you that something different is possible isn’t a confirmation that you don’t belong here, it is precisely your dharma calling out to you in the present. 

It is that which you are meant to shepherd into the world. 

You are a prodigy of the most adaptable, resilient, innovative, inventive, and explosive species to ever exist.

There is nothing that exceeds your capacity. 

YOU WERE MADE FOR TIMES LIKE THESE.

Those final moments, when humanity’s collective back is up against the wall; when the night is darkest before the dawn; when you have exhausted your physical capacity and are running on willpower alone; when all hope seems lost but the beacons of Gondor are lit—this is where the human spirit shines.

And my child, you have inherited the brilliance of this spirit.

The fires of your ancestral inheritance burn inside of you now. You are not alone. You have the collective wisdom of the evolutionary chain of the human race sewn into your bones.

How many countless times throughout history have we had catastrophes to overcome, individually and as a collective? Can you imagine the black plague? 30% of the world’s population gone? Can you imagine the millions of challenges that every single one of your billions of ancestors had to overcome to pass on their genes for you to be here?

Every correct decision, every bit of wisdom, every strength of will lives inside of you now.

And I affirm once again to you now:

YOU WERE MADE FOR TIMES LIKE THESE.

All of human history is nothing more than ‘times like these’. Archetypal battles between good and evil, something and nothing, life and death, here or there, now or later, vice or virtue, affirmation or negation, courage or cowardice. 

The choice is yours. 

Don’t fool yourself. 

You don’t belong anywhere else. You are destined to be HERE and NOW.

Reality is right in front of you my brothers and sisters.

YOU WERE MADE FOR TIMES LIKE THESE.

Rise. Claim your inheritance. Reclaim your pride in the human spirit and become a paragon of excellence in this lifetime.

You are an unbelievably miraculous, highly preposterous, devastatingly gorgeous, brilliantly courageous, inspired spark of vital life force. 

You were MADE for times like these.

With love, EB.