What is Raptitude?

“He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”

-Albert Einstein

So you’re human. Somehow, out of the cosmic soup of time and space you ended up in charge of a human body and a human mind. Surely you never asked for these dubious responsibilities, but you’re stuck with them.

As a human being, you are a beautiful, powerful, and supremely ridiculous creature. Your mind and body may not be perfect, but they do make you an astoundingly potent being.

Ideally, you’d take full advantage, and use these priceless gifts to achieve glorious triumphs, experience great loves and adventures, fulfill your dreams and leave the world better than how you found it.

But it’s so hard. We can only do what we know, and often the results are uninspiring. We end up with careers we don’t like, goals that have slowly become idle fantasies, feelings of lack and regret that won’t leave us alone, even disdain for human beings in general. Some fare even worse than that, and find themselves drowning in debt, poor health, depression, and addiction.

It’s so hard just to be human. We’re plagued with incessant needs, worries and nasty feelings, and nobody is necessarily going to teach us how to deal with them. Even the kindest among us still get angry, jealous, lonely, and resentful. Our newspapers and history books are filled with violence, desperation and suffering — all the result of people dealing very poorly with the conundrum of being human.

Of course, the messes we make are completely understandable for such a volatile, overpowered creature. Contending with our own humanity is tricky! Our unique emotions and social structures are what make us human, but they can easily dash us on the rocks if we don’t make a point of understanding and appreciating why we are the way we are.

Raptitude is a blog for getting better at being human. I see being human as a skillset — something you can get better at if you take it upon yourself to do so. You can learn to temper rotten moods, shed your insecurities, shore up your weak points and sharpen your strong ones. Human minds and bodies are complicated vehicles for which there is no manual and no training, but we can learn to drive them a hell of a lot better than we often do, if only we make a point of it.

And glittering prizes await! Consistently agreeable moods. Unshakable gratitude. Strengthened relationships. Abundant days and sleepful nights. Capabilities you never imagined were in you. Relief from boredom, envy, frustration and complacency.

A little skill and insight go a long way.

Who is David Cain?

To make a long story short, I used to find life very difficult and now I don’t. For a while I was having a rough go at it and I scrounged deep and hard for anyone who could tell me what I was doing wrong.

I experimented. I sought peace and ease through all the traditional means: piles of self-help material, religion, overindulgence in drugs and food, sheer hoping and wishing, misanthropy and cynicism. I tossed out what didn’t work (mostly) and kept what did, and somewhere along the way, something clicked, and life got about ten times easier.

The best way to understand where I’m coming from is to read my articles here on Raptitude, and you’ll get the idea. The essential themes are:

• Learning what humans are not so good at, and getting better at those things
• Moving away from conformity and convention and other human limitations
• Appreciating humanity in spite of its faults
• Cultivating self-reliance and a healthy mistrust of the status quo
• Examining what makes humans tick on the micro and macro levels

Raptitude is for anyone who recognizes that humankind is consistently selling itself short, and wants to learn how to do more with our gifts.

I don’t leave my personal life out of my articles. Real life gives the best lessons. I’m accessible and personable, and you can email me anytime through the Contact page. I respond to just about every message, unless you’re just trying to hawk your wares :)

At any rate, I’m glad you decided to stop by. If you don’t know where to begin, start here.

Thank you for coming. Make yourself at home.

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Photo in sidebar by Nicole Benisch of Pika Ayurvedic