Dear World,
I want to
let you in on part of a conversation that happened in my own living room
earlier today. My father in law, a man of few words, was over for a short
visit. Through the course of the conversation yesterdays 2012 Symons Lecture
with David Suzuki came up. My father- in-law, summarizing the gist of a
newspaper article on the lecture says, "so in the paper today it says that by
2100 things might be over". Two of our
three children were sitting in the same room as us. He didn't actually say the
word "over", rather he just hand jived it. We all went on to the next
conversation as though he said nothing. And why not? A big part of the reason
we have got ourselves into this mess is because we can't truly understand the
world we are living in or the consequences our daily purchasing choices exact
on all systems: social, environmental, economic. In all actuality, we are
living lives alien to our life support, engaged in "Lifestyles "that
are highly unsustainable and extremely toxic.
I personally
have had a mighty hard time living in
this strange and wonderful world. Since my teens over twenty years ago I have
suffered a great deal of pain trying to understand the reasons behind the toxic
way we are choosing to live. I've become depressed and anxious many times
considering my own role as a modern consumer who buys into a toxic lifestyle.
Sure I buy organic and local as much as I can, but I still buy imported fruit,
eat things wrapped in plastic, throw away whatever can't be recycled (with the
painful knowledge that it will either be burned or buried) and buy into the
notion of gift giving seasons of excessive consumption and so called
"celebrations". As a mom of three I've ranted and raved over
ways we "should be living" and frustrated my family greatly because
of my negativity and griping. In time I came to practice the
gentler way of "quietly making change and letting others go on with
their choices" but have found I still tire of the snail's pace at which
our society changes. I frustrate easily over the choices our governments
continually make "on our behalf" which allow the continuation of our
destructive path. At other times my own choices contradict my strong
beliefs and I become confused and disappointed with myself.
While in my mid teens I wrote a lot about the collision course I
thought our civilization was headed on. My parents said I was depressed. I
wrote about my confusion over our civilization being considered technologically
so advanced, yet somehow in our never ending search for bigger, better, and
more refined, we missed the fact that our advancements do not come
without a cost, a cost that inadvertently has set up our own demise. In my parents
defense I was depressed. How could I not be? I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist
at age seven as being able to intellectually understand much more about the
world than I was able to emotionally deal with. Thirty years later I feel like
the same train wreck I was then. But now I can better ask "Does anyone
have the emotional wherewithal to handle all the bad news about the very grave
direction we are headed in, in fact already experiencing?" Wait a minute,
some of our elected officials seem to. Maybe I should have been wired a little
more like they are. Without question many of us are choosing the distractions
of mind numbing reality TV and technology, mindless consumption of goods and
services, and extreme busyness over a clearer view of our current trajectory
and the true toll our course is taking. What kind of change do we really need to make to make a difference? Are you happy and healthy living the way you are currently living or are you, like me, feeling more and more exhausted just trying to make ends meet when the ends just keep seeming to get more frayed and further and further apart? Would it really matter if we just decided to buck the systems that are no longer serving us well? If we said "no" to some of the current models of living such as the way we school our young people would it actually hurt anyone? It would seem to me that we are using our public education system as a public warehouse for insemination of ideas perpetuating the current outdated model of living. In so doing we are wasting precious resources to inefficiently teach our kids to read, only to have them learn so that they can open today's newspaper and read that some believe that within this century we will see a partial collapse of the human species. See today's actual headline from The Guardian, our local newspaper: "Suzuki delivers dire warning, cautious hope over future of humankind". View here
Perhaps it's time to make some real changes that represent viable hope in tomorrow and just as importantly, in those tomorrows that we ourselves will never see. Doing what we know in our hearts is the right thing can't be as wrong as popular culture would lead us to believe, can it?
What if we each bought less stuff, went far places less often, Loved the world more, fought less, learned to make do, ate less processed food, bought local, Forgave ourselves and others, Shared more and Smiled often? Just imagine! Or better yet, Let's give it a try? What do we have to lose in trying?
The last two summers I had the fantastic opportunity to manage a collaborative project I created to engage the public in thinking about how we are living. I called it The Creativity Project. Probably, no definitely, it was a gentler means to the same end as this blog post. You might have enjoyed it more. I did. Here's a link to it online: thistownissmall.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/the-creativity-project/ . You can also look it up on thistownissmall under Art in the Open P.E.I. 2011 and 2012. Our project link is under the Victoria Row location.
The willingness of the general public to take part in our fully interactive exhibit both years was awe inspiring. It proved to me that not only do we still have the capacity to think creatively about problems we are facing, we also have the heart required to make creative solutions a reality!
Yah. What else can I say? At times it seems as though we are human animals living like alien robots. Continuing to buy into a disposable lifestyle and preserving every moment of it in photographs and scrapbooks will only ensure that our species becomes disposable with much of our demise preserved in plastic memory books and hard drives. It's high time to make some changes in our world! What say YOU?
Love Jill
Postscript
January 2nd, 2013
I've just read Gwynne Dyer's 2012 year end article The key moments of 2012 and although I do generally take his words with a grain of salt due to their endlessly "dire" nature and the negative focus he writes with, I concur that his highlights largely are grim due to their factual nature.
The following paragraph caught my eye:
The world's drift towards global catastrophe due to climate change is becoming impossible to deny. This northern summer saw droughts and heat waves ravage crops from the U.S. Midwest to the plains of Russia, and soaring food prices as the markets responded to shortages in food supply.
He certainly uses dramatic language to get his points across, yet clearly his points are difficult to deny.
Happy New Year 2013... This year I remain hopeful because I know that the possibility of change, although difficult, is ever present so long as we have hopeful hearts!
