So, Pilgrim, I see that we have made it so far. Well, isn’t that nice. Your history and my history culminating in this moment. We can discount the future because its speculative which means you live entirely in the present, right? Of course it is, even though you think its funny to answer rhetorical questions most of us think its tedious, just read on. So we meet again.
If you think about it, the next thing you may do this rainy afternoon, is to nip across the road for a cup of coffee and in the process get run over by a vehicle of your choice and killed, then what you are doing right now is the very pinnacle of your history.
WELCOME TO THE GREATEST MOMENT OF YOUR LIFE!!!
Of course I don’t believe that you are going to be killed by a – what was it? A stagecoach? – therefore it is safe to assume that you will move on to the next greatest moment of your life. And that fickle fiend the future has snuck in again. But wait. Don’t go. Just because the future holds the Next Greatest Moment of your Life doesn’t mean that it is going to be a Better Greatest Moment of Your Life. Oh No! For that to be true you would have to already have a naked person next to you. None of you have that. Really? OK, then, as it happens you do, well aren’t you the lucky one. OK. I know better. You go and enjoy. I’ll wait.
Meanwhile the rest of us can carry on.
I don’t know where you are sitting but I live in Cape Town near the city centre, and it has become an issue in South Africa that the old power grid can no longer cope and new power stations need to be built in a great hurry. In order to lighten the load on the system each area suffers ‘load-shedding’. In other words all electricity to an area is switched off for two to four hours to reduce the load on the system. This means that at pre-arranged times the area in which you live or work is dark. The times are annoyingly set at the times when the load shed is significant. A lot of money is being lost by businesses.
There are positives. During one of these power outages I saw the most beautiful night skies over the city. Not just your everyday, common-or-garden supermodel variety of beautiful, but awe-inspiring beautiful.
Still, everybody is grumbling.
It struck me that if you look at it objectively an interesting thing occurs. Do you remember the exercises they did to try to get us to grasp the enormity of Time? Where you squash all the time since life graced the world into a single year? In that case humans appeared in November, the first civilisations appeared around Christmas and electricity was invented at 23h59.45 on December the thirty first (Approximately! Point is that it is an insanely short time). We have survived all the eons and epochs in that whole year without electricity – the lighthouse at Cape Aghulas was powered by the fat from the tails of Fat-Tail Sheep. Yet in the last few seconds we have become so reliant on electricity that without it our global civilisation will perish.
Now that made me think, Pilgrim. How stupid is that? For thousands of years the fabric of our society stayed firmly in place, yet in no time at all – comparatively speaking – we have put ourselves at risk of slicing a great rent into it because we are enslaved to electricity. So perhaps all the load-shedding is inadvertently training us for when we switch off finally. No, that’s not what I’m advocating. I see it as inevitable. Probably going to be a victim of global warming.
Just like when in the seventies, everyone was saying that pollution would kill the planet. Nobody really listened and now we have it return under the guise of Global Warming. It’s that nobody reacted to the warnings. “The smoke from the exhausts of cars is going to kill us all.” “ OK, that’s tragic, but we need to sell more cars every year to show growth. It’s my grandchildren’s problem, let them clean it up.”
That I suppose is a callous assessment of the situation but that doesn’t mean it can’t be accurate.
Hang in there, Pilgrim, I need to deviate from the subject to explain something else here. If you have heard of Gaia, then you will know what I’m writing about. It’s a concept that’s not so much a science as a new perception of our place in this world. And it is gaining respect in academic circles. In short the view is that all life on Earth creates one bigger organism. Exactly how that all connects together is, in my imagination, something like an intelligent swarm. Consider the humble cell, (WARNING: What follows is not really provably true to my knowledge, but used as a metaphor for me to understand the how of it, it works) The humble cell, unaware of anything, yet a fundamental unit of life, brainless. It knows nothing of the life led by the person he contributes to forming. It is truly beyond even a wish to grasp the consciousness that we are. So, too, every living thing contributes its energy to this single organism, called Gaia. Romantically associated with Mother Nature, The Goddess and all the feminine deities that represent the Earth.
Earth and nature behave like a single organism. Ok, consider this. It’s another metaphor. Mankind is a virus. Mankind is consuming all the planet’s resources away. I read what the estimates are somewhere on the Internet and it’s a gloomy forecast. Famines have been with us throughout history so it may be wise not to read too much into the starvation in the world today, but when I see the ice shelves breaking off and glaciers melting away, I’d say the Earth was running a temperature.
Ever see a satellite photograph of cities? (Oh, go to Google Earth) Doesn’t that spreading grey mass of urban structures look like mould on an old orange? The Earth responds by evolving diseases to combat the virus, us. A couple of years ago a new strain of incurable TB surfaced. It had evolved to become immune to our drugs. Which would be more or less the way our bodies would respond when infected. Our bodies develop antibodies to combat the diseases that infect us constantly. Now and then one takes hold and resists the body’s attempt at eliminating them and in the ensuing battle on that viral level, we get sick.
No, I don’t believe that the Earth is queasy, sweating lava and getting shivers.
However, Global Warming is very real. Some places already feel its effects. Ask New Orleans.
The urban lifestyle that we have adopted is out of harmony with nature. The population explosion (which we also warned folk about in the sixties) allied with an economic system that promotes consumerism, have had an impact on the Earth. Mankind have had the same effect on the earth as a parasite has on its victim.
Its an awful thought. We have such a horror for parasites that comparing us to them is a tasteless exercise and I must be a horrible person. As awful as it is, it is what every man-jack of us will have to confront and the sooner the better.
Still, that’s not the end of the world….
We are NOT parasites because we have the ability to be aware of ourselves and can see that it cannot go on and we must change our way of life.
When we can admit to our status we can change it. We can change our behaviour. In fact it will happen without effort. If each one of us can admit to the fact that the whole of us is behaving like a parasite, then it will bother us so, that we will make changes gladly and unconsciously.
Here is the thought to take with you: If you want a beautiful life you can achieve it by living life beautifully.
Try it, Pilgrim, only you can make your life beautiful.
Tags: idea, ramble, Spiritualism, thought
