Pădureni Sustainable Community

We are the updated versions of our parents.

We are the updated version of our parents, the updated version of those who came before us.

On November 1 or 2, depending on place and custom, the Western world celebrates the Day of the Dead or All Souls’ Day, a Christian, Roman Catholic tradition of remembering, honoring, and reflecting on those who have passed away, those whose journey through the physical world as we conventionally perceive it has already concluded.

Ancient wisdom recognized the importance of understanding the context into which each of us was born, raised, and lived.

In a largely unconscious world, a day was set aside to remind us that we are part of a transgenerational chain with significance for Existence itself.

This journey gains meaning, coherence, and continuity in our awareness if we examine it attentively, understand it in depth, and choose to follow it towards maturity—and perhaps even contributive interdependence.

For some time, I intended to clarify this title’s theme, yet the decision to truly write about it came only two weeks ago. Until today, November 1st, I had little more than a title and a few notes from past thoughts on the same subject.

Today, with the city already filled with flowers and candles specific to this celebration, I too “brightened up” in that classic forehead-smacking way, understanding that everything, including this article, happens at just the right time.

It’s natural, logical, and both simple and complex at the same time. Perhaps embracing this perspective brings clarity to our individual search for purpose.

“We are the updated versions of our parents,” which means:

  • From our earliest moments of perception, with or without filters, we’ve instinctively copied the identity roles our parents demonstrated, their relational dynamics, likes, dislikes, accomplishments, and struggles.

Experts hold diverse, evidence-based views about the timing and mechanisms by which our brains adopt these patterns, but that’s less relevant to this article.

  • From the womb and through our early years, our parents provide our only resources in every sense, forming the exclusive foundation of our life and survival—a term used conceptually to describe the fresh-born’s initial approach to life.

Later, as we progress through stages of development with the ultimate aim of independent maturity, our reliance on parental resources should, at least in theory, decrease in direct proportion to our growth.

Practically speaking, as long as perception remains governed by basic instincts—chasing pleasure and avoiding pain—all our likes and dislikes remain pre-set by early dependencies, impacting both our environment and our “inner landscape.”

  • Thus, each of our mental maps is formed, filled with survival strategies, which operate unconsciously until we actively develop consciousness that transcends these default programs.

We mimic behaviors, masks, boundaries, and lenses through which “our people” perceived life—just as they did from the generations before them. Were we to live isolated from the outside world, we might remain mere copies.

But life means experience, relational dynamics, growth, transformation, adaptation, endings, and beginnings; resilience and regeneration; a constant process of updating, learning, awareness, integration, and expansion of consciousness.

Because, as Wilfried Nelles insightfully writes, Life knows no way back.

The strategies we copied are tested under the stress and heat of mental challenges in a world in perpetual change, and it’s up to each of us to either cultivate adaptability, elasticity, and expanded perceptual clarity—or to let these traits rigidify over time until a certain fragility and brittleness might prematurely end our journey.

“When I was young, things were better…” or “Back then, the world was more…”—these are thoughts, words, and attitudes we recognize in our elders or perhaps even in ourselves.

These are signs of weariness, rigidity, and brittleness, indicating that autopilot has managed much of our lives, that updates haven’t been applied, and that the system risks “crashing.”

The informational update that Life provides—aligned with the evolutionary conditions in which we grow, develop, and mature—is available to us in every conscious here & now.

If I examine my ancestors’ lives carefully, their struggles, achievements, and unfulfilled dreams, the specific context of their lives, the reality of their deeds, those openly spoken and the whispered, shadowed ones—if I bring the everyday manifestation of Life through my ancestors into the light of consciousness and trace the vibrant pulse from roots to budding branches, I can glimpse the vast, encompassing logic of Life expressing itself through me, as a result of the Evolution shaped and carried by all those before me, so that I, the One Who Is, may Exist.

As the updated version of all who came before, I can know where I come from, who I am, and where I am headed, without a trace of doubt about life’s purpose, simply because I Exist.

If we can agree on the evolutionary paradigm—that Life makes no room for randomness and is purely evolutionary with the “goal” of Existence—then I can understand the natural continuity of human form’s evolutionary presence.

Seeing things this way, I can perceive in myself a journey, a privilege, an honor, a responsibility toward the “investment” that I am. Delving deeply into the genealogical context brings clarity, and ultimately, I understand the world I live in.

Among my predecessors were a great forester, an architect, a miller, a community tax collector, a locomotive mechanic, a geologist, an officer entrusted with secrets, and strong womens who gave birth raised, and buried children, formed, managed, and sustained households and families, surviving wars, refugee crises, famine, typhoid, and societal upheavals.

They taught entire generations the subject, predicate, and arrangement of words in the logic of expression.

Today: