A different point of view

I got this message from the boss yesterday, after my missionary post. As always, he has a big point to make. Thank you my darling!

Seems you maybe didn't quite get what I was saying. I absolutely don't believe that this world is dying. To believe that we brief humans can kill the Goddess is arrogant at best. 2.4 billion years ago, cyanobacteria, the first photosynthetic life, had released so much oxygen into the atmosphere that the oceans and the rocks couldn't contain it any longer. The result was the almost complete exctinction of all life on the planet. Yet life prevailed and even took use of the toxic oxygen that now filled the air. Now, oxygen is almost synonymous with life.

The moral of this story is two-fold. First of all, She holds death in one hand and life in the other. By bringing new souls from Her chalice and cutting them down with Her knife, the wheel turns and moves along its mysterious way: Human destruction of our surroundings is no less a part of nature. Second of all, the planet is big and tough and can take care of itself. The question of what we are doing is not about whether we are going to kill Gaia. It is the question of whether we are going to kill ourselves.

I know I'm light-hearted about these things but I find it almost impossible to hide from such things once I've thought them through so laughing about them and making bad-taste jokes is my way of not being scared to death every day. I always think of the older generation saying how glad they are that they would not live to see it but it seems likely that we will and this attitude of total individualism where the Universe begins at one's birth and ends at one's death is completely evil to me. Even if its not gonna be us but our children or grandchildren, what can be done now, by us, for them? We are one moment in the stream of life, taking spirit from our ancestors, changing what they gave us and passing it to our descendants.

So am I pessimistic about the future? No! Our best predictions are telling us that disaster is coming and to pretend that it isn't is not true optimism but tacit acceptance. I don't think we are going to change our ways as a species so we can only hope that our own streams of life can flow past these events and into the future. I do want to find somewhere to live a sustainable life because that may be the only life possible in an anarchic world without oil.

But who knows, maybe we'll find some magic solution to preserve the planet we know and ourselves but in any case. Disaster or no disaster or somethingelse, finding a more sustainable existence and working each days to improve ourselves a little at a time can only be a benefit, no matter what tomorrow brings.

I guess I was thinking too much with the view of humans and not so much with the view on the whole world. Do we still have a reason to care? Even if we know that the headache will go away by itself with time, we should try to ease the pain right now, to show that we care, don't we? I think I would.