Yesterday we spoke of peace and goodwill toward all humankind. Another way of saying it is survival. Survival plus quality of life. The latter reflects on goodwill toward all humankind, I think.
Survival. To be or not to be. When we speak of peace, aren’t we stating uncategorically that we wish to survive and thus repudiate war? And then, is that the opposite of peace?
I’m not certain of that. There must be people who will argue endlessly that these terms are not only different but disconnected from one another. My soul believes otherwise. Of course, you knew that didn’t you?
To be or not to be, that is certainly the question as Shakespeare’s Hamlet asserts.
Facing that question on a very personal level, I tend to make deals before answering the question. Example: would you ever like to go back and live your life over again? The answer is yes only if I can go back knowing what I know now. Well, that’s not a fair answer. If I were to live life over again it would be on the same basis as my original life – start from scratch and learn day by day how to survive. Would I live it differently the second time around? Probably yes, but not because I knew more; that ‘condition’ was rejected.
Yes. We know people who seem to live golden lives. Somehow they knew the correct response to stimuli and lived life well. They skirted problems we had to run straight thru, brambles and all. I truly doubt we would live any differently the next time around.
The brambles teach us valuable lessons. One is to see them before hand, realize what they are, and avoid them. Although we would have missed the pain of the brambles, we would not then know what the pain would be like. Experiencing pain is part of life, part of the learning cycle. We learn not to touch the hot stove eventually. Same with brambles. The pain, however, is the motivator of avoidance.
Life teaches us many things: pleasure, joy, sadness, loss, love, thrill, laughter, and much, much more. So we live this day and sleep expecting the next day to appear. It is a rhythm we come to know. It is natural. When we witness another person’s loss – of life or a loved one, or the threat of that loss – we realize the opposite of life is possible. Death. Absence of life. We don’t know what that is because we would have to die to know what it is like. Of course we cannot know this and remain alive.
I have some clients who have died and returned to life. They believe this fully. They were in accidents or suffered severe health issues, died and were resuscitated and came back from death. They share their experiences of being outside their body and ‘seeing the activity around me’ without the me feeling anything. It is an external perspective. Then a blip or two later – they know not the length of time elapsed – they are back in body and breathing. When they awake from unconsciousness, they remember the experience. They associate with one another now because they alone can share this happening. It is something they each relate to; not you and I. We have not known this phenomenon; we have no basis upon which to share.
If we value life we make efforts to maintain it, prolong it. We even invest in enriching the experience of life. But is the enrichment as basic as that of surviving in the first instance? That is what I mean by existential concern. Our existence alone is the core fact. What do we do to maintain our life? Can we accurately project that concept to vast numbers of people and seek commonality in survival alone? Is this question even answerable?
Perhaps this is where we begin the discussion on seeking global peace. The what and why in the personal instance is the starting point for each discussant. Now the trillions of dollars spent world-wide on military capabilities come into focus. If such were not needed, what would we do with that wealth? And why?
September 3, 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment