Building us a future
When we are born into this world we make our own personal beginning in life. By any measure this is far from mankind’s beginning. Each of us somehow “dropped in” into a place and time that was already shaped by others before us.
For better or for worse we landed on a territory which already was on its way and we are obliged by circumstance to take it from there…
If we were to call this “our fate” we have one or two tools in our possession in order to make the best out of it. We can be optimistic, and start building our own future with whatever positive was given to us by those who preceded us. Even the worst of times and places must have something to make our personal start worth it, a start which would define us as persons and beyond. By saying that, it just occurred to me the following thought, which is addressed to my own self: What the hell would you do in the Dark Ages Mario and where could you possibly find “something to make…” in the times of nothing at all?! In the hope that I will not end up speaking to myself, as Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy so elegantly puts it, the answer is that I would have probably become an “escapee of my time”
Another thing one could do is the most difficult of all, and rarely applied regardless of time and place. It is to use his maximum weapon/tool and make use of his thinking. I always suspected it, but never told it much out-loud, but my decades have given me the reassurance that only time can give…
People in general do not use their thinking… Period!
They are mainly not thinking, are lost in thinking, are misguided by their thinking or any other choice in that direction, but this is the best explanation for what I see in front of me when I stare at our world…
It becomes tiresome but it is simply the truth.Our thinking can be as big as we make it since… it has no weight.
And our choices, as narrow or as small as they can be, are the only “way out” from our unexpected “dropping in” into this world. It takes only to sit back and make the choice of what it really is we want to do with ourselves. This is far from what actually happens… Living a life that is shaped by either adapting or reacting to our given time and place is hardly the choice I am referring to. It is survival, yes… But surviving is nothing compared to living your choices!
More bitter news?! One should think of these thoughts when in his teens and not deep in his forties when the horizon ends… And most of all: do something about it before you become the tapestry of the “adapt and react” maneuver.
One might say “who are you to tell us that we don’t think”, but it’s not me. Do you remember the Pink Panther cartoon?! He said it, don’t blame me… He said “Think, don’t Pink”Of course there will always be those who are well accustomed to this world, wherever and whenever they might land… And they have never thought of this “dropping in” business. And they are probably the same kind which look at the future of mankind and have a mirage instead of a vision for it… That is, if we are lucky, since some have no thought or vision at all.
Am I cynical? No way, I couldn’t be even if I wanted to… My mind and determination are dedicated and navigated by my heroes, who had the idea of using their brains… Heroes like Lao Tzu and Heraclitus, Charles Darwin and Carl Sagan, H.G. Wells and Morihei Ueshiba and this list could go on forever… My mind goes to those unknown who discovered in their lives that there is a magic thing called library and it is free to enter and have a look at the heritage of human kind in “person”.
Those who “dropped in” which means all of us, and have a little perception about this fact, know the feeling of how it is to come into a time and place where everything was there but not you… If you haven’t thought that thought, please lay down your reading and take a moment to your first memories of this world… How was our world when you came in?! What is it that you remember?!
If you need a little push I could share my first views, all it takes is to close your eyes and scattered images come to you… I can do it from here where I sit… I remember my great-grandfather’s attic, where he lived, with the smell of the smoke from his pipe… The house of my grandmother with a piece of furniture with two tiny doors that would open exposing a black and white magic thing called television… The cold forest of Essen Germany where I played in the mud and the snow…I remember Elvis on the radio and how was everybody smiling while I “did the shake” to his songs and above all NASA’s Apollo missions… I even remember Hannelore’s long black hair (but I can’t remember her face) a girl that would take care of me when my mother was working…
Yes my friends, it is true! We “dropped in” and we take our lives from there…
The way-out is the same… The world will continue with or without our contribution and others will drop in to make a start from what we have left to them or we have not…
This is why we care about the future, of how the world will be after us and without us. It starts with personal reasons of the things and faces that will outlive us, and will “take care of things” beyond us. But if we look a little bit deeper, it is a wider care for the world, and what it is we leave behind for others, for all others…This is how one can care about the distant future and worry about it from now on. And one of our consciousness’s agonies is that we wish the human species to survive as a whole and do well… We can wish to die in one way or the other, but who would choose as a wish to die by a falling into the earth asteroid that would wipe out humankind entirely?!
August 18, 2012
You see, we do care, and that is why we need to spend part of our lives building us a future that will exceed us… When we came to this world, others have left their treasures for us to find. I will never know Ludwig Van Beethoven but I found his works when “I got here” and they will be there long when I’m gone.
Each generation has its own agony about the future I guess. Nowadays it is the ecological concern… Will we make it in time to “save” our planet before it’s too late?! And if we go by the news is there maybe another concern which is bigger than ecology?! Could financial collapse become our own created World War III?! Ironically, both catastrophes sound “better” and more manageable than the one in which I grew up… We waited for the bombers to take off and the missiles to be launched and everything would take care of itself in seconds! I know that today it is history and “you have seen it in a documentary” but most of you have no idea how it felt to our guts, waiting on our TV for the world to blow off… Today it is just called the “Cuba crisis”. Many more followed during the damn cold war, today just forgotten names for a feeling that is beyond description!!!
All three examples, from past, present and maybe future… handmade! Or to be more correct manmade!
And yet, every generation is claiming that it builds “a better future for our children”. So, where is it?! It should be here by now! We do feel the agony of passing on something that would be a better future, but we ignore our acts here in the present. As a result, we have never experienced a civilization that would be a model in order for us to follow… A civilization which would be an example even if it would be destroyed… No, we only move from past to future changing the quality, the quantity and the names of our own catastrophes.
The secret does not lie in leaving a better future for our children but, to use a well put borrowed phrase, in leaving better children for the future…