December 2003
A Message to Sustain You Through Life!
The last few days of any year are the most hectic for us all. With Christmas looming, an increasing number of tasks in each of our agendas and the daily pressure to meet our self imposed deadlines before the year ends: does this sound familiar?
However, I believe as we approach this festive season, all of us must try hard to find a few minutes of quality time to sit, undisturbed by the encroaching outside world, in order to reflect on what sort of a year we are about to put behind us.
My period of reflection lasted 15 minutes before the realities of life rushed in and dragged me out of this contemplative mode. The most lasting effect of this short process was that I became aware of my inter-relationship with the world around me and realised how privileged I have been!
Firstly, I feel privileged for both ending the year alive and well and for being part of an ever- increasing awareness in mankind, realising how beautiful, giving and forgiving mother earth can be. It supports life and me, as part of the greater scheme of being, in order that I can see how enormous the Universe could be, and how precious, and unique, life on this little blue planet in some corner of the Milky Way actually is!
However, I also realised how fragile the system is and how bio-diversity could be affected by our activities. It made me realise that if human activities result in destruction of the habitat of many more species of animals and plant lives, then we will deprive our children of feeling the joys that we have been privileged to experience, like the feeling of being alive and seeing the wonders of the world. Imagine if there were no tigers or mountain gorillas and we were to refer to them in our children's story books just as we now refer to a dodo: as an extinct animal! These are beings of enormous beauty and complexity that could not compete with mankind and could not protect themselves or their habitat from the destructive powers in all of us. Extinction is forever!
I believe it is our responsibility to increase our collective wisdom and awareness and to better understand that life, as we are privileged to experience it, will be adversely affected if we do not feel the enormity of the responsibility of protecting its diversity at all costs. We must realise that we are the only beings with the power to nurture the right of other beings to share the joy of life on our planet. In order to achieve this, we need to understand that if we protect mother earth with passion, then it might just about be able to forgive us for the neglect of the past three hundred years since the start of the industrial revolution.
I am an optimist and believe that more and more people are coming together to look for alternative ways of thinking about our roles and responsibilities. This in turn, is changing the way we are thinking about the future of: manufacturing, recycling, transportation, generation...., work and play, living and finally being. Hence I am optimistic we are now beginning to live in a more sustainable way.
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