And I Say To Myself….

It is a bright and beautiful day. The sun shines down and its life giving light feeds the grasses and plants and makes them grow. It rained a bit recently and the ground is still moist. The bougainvillea is flowering ad the mango and avocado trees are taking a winter holiday before pushing forth new life, new seeds, new fruit. Light miraculously transforms into green life every second of every day and the animals and fish and humans eat that life, that light and are sustained.

There are children playing and laughing, there is bright musica playing across the street, the bass line held by a thumping good tuba.

There is food in the cupboard and the roof barely leaks.

Around the world on this bright and beautiful day, kittens are being born, and puppies and baby giraffes and lemurs and tigers and ponies. Right now…at this very second, two young people have just found their first love together and are looking into each others eyes and can see nothing else.

The sun is shining as it moves through its paces dictated by the the course of the universe, our pretty little planet rotates around it, and our beautiful moon rotates around us. And we rotate through our little but vastly important lives. Going about our daily business and smiling at each other when we can, and as Louis says…

“I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do, they’re really saying…I love you.”

The vast majority of humans are good and decent (if not too bright, lol) people who merely wish to be left alone to try to be as happy as possible. They wouldn’t consciously hurt anyone else if left to their own devices and we have invented a society where they can mostly do that. Where they can grow up and fall in love and work hard and build a life that is safe and satisfying and make some children and grow old. They can have triumphs and see and even create beauty and celebrate milestones and achievements, and watch their children grow and share in their triumphs and achievements. It’s a wonderful world.

We can smell a Spring day and taste marvelous food and hear glorious music and see astounding landscape and moonrises and sunsets…and feel the people we care about touch us with loving kindness.

And this is true for all of us here on this planet, even those who are cursed. Cursed by either the circumstances we were born into or circumstances that happen in our lives. Whether we were born into crushing poverty or have lost a loved one or had all of our material goods taken away or stolen or been injured or are ill. Even in those lives there are moments of beauty and grace and peace….if moments only. And since humans are mostly good, sometimes, if we ask for help, it comes. What is more beautiful than that, when you are as down as you can be and someone comes along to help. Or when you are doing ok and you have the opportunity to truly help someone, to change their lives in a good or meaningful way. We may not be able to solve their problem, but we can almost always help….even if it is just with a smile.

What a wonderful world….where you can help someone even if just for a moment by simply contorting your face in a pleasing way.

There is another curse in this world as well, though not on the magnitude of the curses above…and with some very good side effects….sometimes.

The curse we all share here…the curse of compassion, the curse of wanting to help, the curse of trying to make the world a better place, the curse of being compelled to reach out and to…..try.

Robert Anton Wilson said that to be TRULY happy in this world there are vast parts of your self that you must kill off. He was talking in part about compassion. We could all ….individually….be much happier people if we didn’t feel that curse, that need to try, that need to help. Ignoring the many and varied and neverending woes of the world and the plights of our fellow humans and finding and creating and living out our little lives in the bliss that we see all around us, the bliss that ignorance brings.

But we are not built like that, we are cursed, cursed to care, and care deeply, and to turn that caring into action, to try to help.

As curses go, on this world, it is not a bad one to have. We may not ‘win’ very often….there may be times like the one we are in now, where everything pretty much sucks and it looks like all of our caring and trying and helping…doesn’t help. Like there is just nothing we can do to make things better.

But look back, with your non-blissful, non-ignorant little tiny human brains. Look back into the history of the humans on this planet. See where we have come from see what we have achieved, even with these tiny brains and all the nasty impulses and instincts that go along with them and go along with having our (wannabe) noble spirits encased in big sacks of meat that we have no choice (due the above mentioned instincts) but to try to keep alive. To keep alive, and after that, to reproduce and to try out of our good instincts to create havens and civilizations where we all work together (when we are not killing each other) where we and others can do the same.

Just as the scientifically accidental existence of life itself is a miraculous thing, given the odds… and the fact that 99.9999999% of the universe is made up of killing cold and lifeless vacuum, the fact that we mentally thick and and at times emotional brutal animals have even gotten this far is a bloody miracle.

It is a miracle produced by one thing above all others, compassion. If we were only our instincts, if we only listened to the animal side of ourselves, this world would be quite different. So though it may suck sometimes to be one of the humans cursed with compassion, cursed to care and to try…against all the odds…to move humanity forward, we can take heart that there has been any progress at all. And we can take credit as well!

For without the caring and trying and helping people of the world, there would be no hope, no chance, no future for the smiling laughing playing children and for the artist trying to hew beauty out of brutality and…for things like justice and truth and fairness and caring and compassion.

WE did this, we cursed little humans have created a world that is FAR from perfect, but that really does get better every day. Moves forward everyday. As we learn to talk to each other, and learn that we are all the same, and learn that we all want the same basic things, the People of the world create …in spite of all the obstacles thrown up by those who would drag us all down into the mud as long as they are on top of the pile…a new world. A world that slowly and painfully progresses. As the People of the world slowly and painfully come together and realize that despite what we have been told by those “in power,” that we are separate, that we must fear each other, that all men and women are not brothers and sisters, but are instead enemies…As we grow and learn and talk to each other…the People reject the the vision of those in power. And we learn that cooperation and compassion ARE the keys, ARE the way to live. We learn, slowly and painfully that we can live together and create a NEW world, a new society.

And this occurs for one reason. As some people hide and huddle in fear…there are the others, the ones like us, who reach out to them, against all the odds and instincts and fear…and hold out our hands to them and say, my brother… there is another way. We that have this curse have always been here, we have always tried….and though our victories are not as flashy (WE never get to stand on aircraft carriers in cool flight suits with banners behind us announcing victory!) we DO constantly win the battle, we progressives ARE making progress.

And we will not stop, and we will not give up and we will not stop caring. We will continue our little individual fights for a better more loving and compassionate world.

A wonderful world.

So, no matter how bad it looks, no matter how hard it is, it is because WE…the cursed, lol….never give up, always keep fighting…REFUSE TO LAY DOWN that we have gotten this far….

In other words…

YELL LOUDER! and keep on Yelling!