“Excuse me, I am looking for an optimist. Have you seen one recently?” Negativity has achieved epidemic and global proportion and it feels so matter of fact to me. We have polarized opposition wherever you look and whatever the subject. Certainly, our president is the poster child for this fractionated behavior. Disagreeing with each other has taken on catastrophic proportions, a threat to everything we hold dear.
Hope is a joke, because there is no longer any safe, fertile place for it to gestate. We are facing the greatest crisis in human history, a climate raped for generations by greed and for the convenience of those who already have more than they need. Science has crafted a road map that can lead us from the precipice of our demise, but its urgency has been muted by those who continue to grotesquely profit from the status quo. A dangerous wave of ultra-nationalism is sweeping across the globe, equally at home in the US and Sudan. It’s a disease caused by money, competing Gods and/or skin color.
For the most part, each of us belongs to a kind of chorus, voices blending one into the other and it is too easy to feel lost, smothered by the harmony of hopelessness. A couple of days ago, the voice of Pavarotti, embraced my entire body, piercing through my headphones, as I hurried to go nowhere on my stationary bike. For a moment, I was at a loss to imagine how anyone could sound like that. It had to come from some higher place, where the Gods reside. At that moment, all of sudden, everything seemed wrong to me. Of course, I cried, something that happens to me when I feel at a loss for words, stepping onto unfamiliar ground.
The only thing I could think to do was to write the title for a story that was somehow going to come from this feeling, putting down the only words I could match with that special moment. Whenever I have these flashes, lighting me up inside, I think of the Buddha. He is my teddy bear, embracing him when I feel lost. He has said so many things that resonate for me. He understood the dilemma of the human and why we suffer the way we do. We are victimized by our desires, wanting to be more than who we are, always looking outside ourselves. The truth is, we are all Pavarotti.
I spent my thirties in therapy and it was all about change, becoming more than who I was. It felt like some kind of apology to life for being myself, filled with inadequacies I needed to overcome. Then, the Buddha came into my life and I reversed direction. Before you think I have gone off on a psycho tangent, I am bringing it home now, OK? We are, each one of us, the angel we are looking for outside ourselves. I believe it is our life’s work to keep stripping away all the distractions and find that extraordinary goodness that is in each of us. All our pains are these layers of deception we use to smother who we are and the one deserving of all the love we are capable of having. Like the Buddha, Jesus believed that God lived within each of us. This core idea, occasionally reappearing has altered the lives of millions and moved mountains.
This essential premise is a blinding light that illuminates the darkness and causes it to disappear. It makes the suffering of others seem wrong, not humane, not how we ought to be treating each other. It needs to have a voice that soars into the sky. I don’t hear it anywhere, certainly not from those in positions of power. Nobody dares to say we are better than who we are today. Manipulation and pandering are the diet we are being force fed and almost not a single voice can be heard that says we need to do more for each other and for our planet.
When children are behaving very badly, it has long been fashionable for parents to call a time out. This allows the kids to get back on track. Now, it is the children who are calling a time out, because their parents have lost their way, distracted by lies and omissions, perpetrated by those chained to the status quo. Time and circumstance have a way of putting distance between ourselves and that goodness of the heart that the Great Ones discovered and shared with anyone who’d listen. The children are early on their path and their hearts can hear the voices of the angels, the best in all of us.
It is tiring and depressing to vent about our myriad predicaments, looking for others to blame and feeling overcome by a choking helplessness. I am guilty. I write quite a bit about my age and how the view from the mountain of decades is so difficult to describe. Well, all the way up here, I have been following a remarkable, young Swedish girl, by the name of Greta Thunberg. I guess around a year ago, she decided that every Friday she was going to stay out of school to protest the global inaction regarding climate change. Once again, she is living proof that huge change can be precipitated by the actions of one person. Religions have begun this way and saving the earth can be the work of the angel that lives within each of us, regardless of the years.