In the 1992 vice presidential debate, Admiral James Stockdale stunned a nationwide television audience by stepping up to the microphone and asking: Who am I? Why am I here?
    
The questions caused confusion and embarrassment because it seemed an odd beginning during the highly charged and carefully orchestrated event that is a modern political debate. The event went on with more expected questions and answers, but these questions remain — perhaps even more pertinent to today than it was then, as millions of people truly seem to be sleepwalking through life with such thoughts nagging in their subconscious.
     
The fact is that our world is skewed, it is out of balance, it is frustrating and often nonsensical. Adding to the daily grind of violence and insults, anger and brutality that seems exponential in its growth is the very real understanding that we often don’t know why we do the things we do or how to change things, or even if things can be changed — both on the world stage and in our individual lives.
     
Perhaps it’s time to do a little reverse engineering. That is, to look at our lives much as one would a working airplane and take it apart to see what parts are extraneous and what parts are essential to its function. I’m reminded of the story about the woman who made meat loaf the same way her mother had made it. She put the ingredients together, formed the loaf, then cut two inches off one end to throw away before putting the loaf in the pan. One day, her young daughter asked her why she threw away the two inches on the end. “I don’t know,” the woman said. “That’s the way my mother did it and I learned how to make meat loaf from her.”
     
Months later, when the mother’s mother came to visit, the young girl asked her grandmother why she threw out the two inches on the end when she made meatloaf. “Oh,” the grandmother said, “I did that because the recipe I learned from my mother was for a 10-inch pan and I only had an 8-inch pan. It was just easier to throw the end away.”
     
Often, we do things in life because that’s they way we learned them, whether the conditions that applied in previous times exist or not.

We live in a world that is rapidly changing. The myths and paradigms that men and women adhered to before us no longer apply. The great, untold story of the past 50 years is that women are becoming the major opinion and decision makers in Western society — just as they were for thousands of years in indigenous societies around the globe.

You might even say that we’ve been living in an experiment of patriarchy for the past 20 centuries that has failed, is finally collapsing of its own weight, and will inevitably revert to a more balanced system. The only question is how destructive is the shift. And that is determined by how we (men and women) evolve with it.

Women are changing in their lives, beliefs, habits and lifestyles; the facts of demographics clearly show it. The facts of sociological profiles also show that men largely are retaining outdated beliefs even in the face of overwhelming change. They are suffering because of it, as are families.

In this time of change, it becomes essential for men — if they are to adapt, if they are to become the men that they can be, engaged, and in the moment, self-actualized and progressive — to take the essentials of what men believe about what it means to be men and ask them to assess their beliefs, their identities, their way of doing things.

Why do I believe this? Does this serve me? My loved ones? Does it serve society? Does it fit the world I live in? Is it me? To do that, fully and completely, requires a philosophical standpoint of neutrality, not to say men are bad or women are good, or that men must behave one way or another. To be honest and true, it must eschew any particular ideology or political point of view. It requires a rigorous honesty, that men themselves see how they evolved the way they did and decide if or how they need to change to meet current demands and expectations.

It is fundamental to men being men as they are that they see that history may, in fact, doom them, that the way of always doing things the way their fathers did, or their fathers’ fathers did, has brought them to this impasse. As such, to answer the fundamental questions of men about themselves requires a new look at the history of civilization – a view that is broader then found in the history books. It requires looking at the matrilineal societies of Native America (and ancient Europe) in order to show that what is happening now is not new, radical or to be feared.

Equality in relationships is actually far older than our Western ideas about society, which largely derived from the Roman ideal. Indigenous peoples around the globe lived for eons in harmony without women being subordinate. Therein lies the secret for a more balanced self and a more balanced world in the emerging definition of “modern” life.

In order to find proper relationships, with ourselves, with those around us, with our changing world, we must like Admiral Stockdale first ask: Who am I? Why am I here?

And if we find that we have been wasting nourishment with 8-inch meat loaves and throwing the rest away, we can accept that fact and decide to simply change the recipe or buy a bigger pan.

Jim PathFinder Ewing is an award-winning journalist, workshop leader, inspirational speaker and author in the fields of mind-body medicine, organic farming and eco-spirituality. He has written about, taught and lectured on Reiki, shamanism, spiritual ecology, integrative medicine and Native American spirituality for decades. For more about Redefining Manhood go to www.findhornpress.com.