The population explosion, environmental destruction, billions of people starving or living hand-to-mouth, natural disasters, insane dictators, terrorism, corporate greed, urban violence, and unprincipled, unreasoned governmental policies can make the world seem hopeless.
We can be going about our business keeping our nose out of trouble only to have catastrophe befall us because the big players – business, institutions and government – are not playing fair. The world at large is now the stage upon which we are players. Like it or not we must think big picture, world scale. We are not independent islands and must be interested and engaged. But how can one puny person be anything other than a pawn or victim of such large forces?
We are all empowered because we are made of the same organic stuff those who cause the problems are made of. If one person can mess things up on a world-scale (consider the impact of Attila, Napoleon, Hitler, Ossama), one person can make things better (consider Gandhi, Jesus, Buddha, Mother Theresa). Feeling hopeless and victimized can be self-fulfilling. Not only does pessimism cause torpor and permit evil to spread like a cancer, it also robs life of joy, fulfillment and even health.
Hope resides in action, in feeling like you can make a difference and that your deeds and words do matter. Our actions and thoughts can indeed have impact worldwide. This can happen from direct contact networking (everyone in the world is only about 5 or so people removed from everyone else: you know people who know others who know others who know others… one of which will know any certain person on Earth) and from more ethereal mechanisms we are only beginning to understand such as holography, morphic resonance and quantum reality. It may very well be that we are part of one much larger interconnected living whole. There is also the possibility that we humans are not left entirely to our own devices but are guided by forces with an agenda we can neither know or control. Losing hope based on just the events we see and hear is invalid not only because we cannot know the truth of the reporting (bad news is a profit center for the media), but because the reality we can know is only a tiny speck of the total reality.
Consider this as well. In all of my life I have never met anyone I would consider fundamentally evil, bad or ill intentioned. Yes there are jerks, but once you get to know them they seem to be the decent sort as well.
(Even mass murderers get marriage proposals.) How about you? Have you not found that once you get to know about anyone, no matter where they are or what they have done, that they seem to have the same basic goodness as you? That is the thread that holds the world together, the underlying urge within us all to be good people and do what is right, something never heard on the evening news.
We must choose to live life as if we have brains – as if thinking matters – and spread the message of goodness. It is something we can and must do. It may, in fact, be the real reason we are here in the first place. The worst-case scenario is that we try to make a better world and the world does not get better or even explodes one day from a meteor or nuclear fusillade. So we tried. We did the best we could. We tried to act intelligently, selflessly, lovingly and responsibly. Are we not better for it? By living a life of such meaning have we not been alive, healthy and purposed? Might it not accrue to our betterment if this is not all there is?
As bleak as things may seem at times there is always hope. It resides in each of us reaching out with love, searching for truth and trying to better the world. We don’t need hope, we are the hope
About the Author
Dr. Wysong: A former veterinary clinician and surgeon, college instructor, inventor, research director for the company by his name and founder of the philanthropic Wysong Institute. http://www.wysong.net. Also check out http://www.cerealwysong.com
