Page 23 - Introducing The Gratitudes

“Is there some lemming-like death wish buried deep in our genetic makeup? Are we, as a species, collectively insane?
“As individuals, few of us knowingly want to doom our species to extinction. As individuals, we don’t want our children and their children to live (or die) in a global cesspool. As individuals, we profess to be very concerned by the contamination of our air, water and soil. As individuals, we recycle our rubbish, we join and support Greenpeace and the David Suzuki Foundation. We sign petitions imploring our political leaders to give environmental issues a much higher priority.
“As a species, however, it’s a different story. We continue to support an economic system driven by unlimited resource extrac- tion and consump- tion. We tolerate an unfair distribution of income that dooms billions of people to poverty and squalor. We buy and drive motor vehicles that poison the atmosphere. We dump raw sewage into lakes and rivers. We clear- cut forests and exterminate other life forms. Ultimately (and perhaps sooner than we think), all these odious practices will combine to destroy our so-called civilization.“
– Ed Finn
aged answers satisfy fewer and fewer people. Solutions and ideas that appeal to a particular place and time reveal themselves to be painfully narrow-minded in a global world. Many of the answers people still turn to were born in a world where one couldn’t see beyond the confines of one’s village-where what existed in the next valley was foreign, exciting, and mysterious. But this will no longer do. Nostalgically holding on to the past is not going to help us face a real- ity that’s changing at breakneck pace.”
The present world is both an awesome and aw- ful time to be alive. We are at every moment a few steps away from absolute self-delusion, and a few more from even more absolute self-de- struction. We are also, thankfully, only a few steps away from creating a better world that could exceed the imagination of the most opti- mistic prophets from our past. We are dancing on a razor-thin tight-rope stretched across the metaphysical abyss, the destiny of the world in our hands. The weapons we take into the strug- gle are heart, vision, hope, and creativity. What we need are imaginative solutions that reflect the increasing degree of knowledge, skill, expe- riences, and stories that are required to trans- form the modern world from an arid data uni- verse into a garden of metaphorical and meta- physical delights.
23
INTRODUCING
THE GRATITUDES
Field Guides to Learning and Living Everyday Values
Coming to understand that testing our most sacred values against different options will only strengthen us, not matter the difficulties in doing so, is liberating and elevating. We really have nothing to lose by being open-minded. By seeking, we either con- firm the best of the current world, or find a new world that better suits us.
Remember: “By creating things, by thinking up new combina- tions, we counteract entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even.” Just so. And turning our creations, structures and wholeness into the daily detailed threads of our lives, our rituals, is equally important, as explained by Canadian philosopher Ronald Grimes in his 2010 book, Mar- rying and Burying: Rites of Passage in a Man’s Life:
“Anything, absolutely anything, can be done ritually. Marrying, burying, birthing, and coming of age are not the only events of ritual significance. One can stand ritually, or sit, run and walk ritu- ally – even breathe ritually. So ritual is not only a what but a how. Notice the domestic ritualization already going on in one’s life – after-dinner walks, tooth brushing, bedtime stories, Saturday night movies – activities that provide order and predictability.