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Monday, August 22, 2016

Beginnings: Getting Out of Limbo

It’s been a year and 3 months since I graduated from the University of New England with my Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences and Environmental Science.  And in that year I have been taking a long break, exhausted by completing the demands of a double major in four years, in order to reassess my life, both where it stands and where it is going.  I am astonished to find that much of what I thought about my life is not what I believed it to be, nor are many facets of life where I want them to be, and many of the things that I wanted out of life have not progressed as desired.  I am not where I need to be in too many ways.  For the last year I’ve been working in a job that I enjoy but is keeping me comfortably in life stasis.  The words an acquaintance from UNE put on social media resonate with me in that respect (which are paraphrased here for privacy).  In their words they, “have taken a second job, this one full time, in order to pay off student loans” and it is keeping them pretty busy since they are still working at another job, expressing a desire that they “still want a job in their field in the near future” and that the second job is a necessary step to improve one thing that will allow for the improvement of others.  It ended with “I hope everything starts working out better for me soon. I am sick of living in limbo,”.

I couldn’t feel more in sync with that attitude.  While it is not completely the same as the situation I have (loans for example have long been worked out and paid for without me having to worry about it, for which I do feel guilty as that is advantage and privilege that very few amongst my generation possess) I understand completely how this person feels.  I came back home to work on feeling less held back to achieving my goals and to find a way around, to surmount or remove the obstacles that were preventing me from surmounting the obstacles to my goals.  And I have progressed in that direction.  But I’m done with being stuck in stasis, even if I make progress regardless of that and enjoy the time I have spent with the people in that stasis and am grateful for that time and appreciate the relationships I have formed and friends gained despite being rooted in limbo.  I’m done hitting too many dead ends, having too many dead-end outcomes and too many dead-end conversations.  I’m restless and bored of not working on my career, my life, myself and being the most positive person I can be with a positive impact upon this world in the process.  I’m done being stuck in limbo.

To those who are left reading this it’s time for me to stop living in limbo.  It’s time for this blog to stop living in limbo after its nearly year and a half hiatus so I could get through my finals at the end of senior year, rest and recuperate and then remove the obstacles that barred my own progress, both those put up for me and by me.  I’m done with and tired with stasis and stagnation in my life, in my interests and in the world I see around me.  It’s making me more than tired; it’s making me sick; sick at heart, sick at mind and sick at body.  It plagues my conscience day in and day out that I’m not doing what I was put on this Earth to do and fulfilling my life’s purpose.  And that’s continuing to happen to so many other people in the world that it has become the norm, even if there has been a minor shift and a continued drive to shift away from that, and it needs to become the exception.  And I have to start being that much needed new norm, ironically by being an exception, if I want it to become the norm as a whole.   The time is now and I have to start now and really I needed to start long ago, even though, personally, it would’ve been the wrong time for me.

And if we don’t start now, we may never get the chance to start again.  In the one year and 3 months since I’ve been out of action, taking some necessary time from the exhausting experience of tertiary education, I am astonished at how far the world has slipped closer towards permanently self-perpetuating chaos.  Climate change consequences have just entered a scary new phase and its curtain raiser has come to the point that I am worried that it has either passed the point of no return or the momentum to take it there is almost strong enough to be unstoppable.  What with the floods in Louisiana being the result of a series of 500 year storms that has killed 11 people, the heat waves baking the Middle East, the number of towns and cities in my home area under severe drought having increased by 420% in one week following only receiving half our normal rainfall, Antarctica hitting 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere and it melting at a terrifying rate, the continued pressure to develop fossil fuel infrastructure amidst all this, and the social and political upheaval around the world, such as the emergence of ISIS as a global force or the Venezuelan sociopolitical/economic upheaval heavily centered around food prices and the combined impact of the Olympic Games and its own inherent problems stemming from a powerful elite living and performing at the behest of a much poorer majority, it is clear that the problems that have gone unaddressed, ignored, hidden or intentionally put aside for centuries and millennia that have been increasing in breadth and depth in the name of greed and corruption driven profit are now poised to overwhelm everything we know and love and what makes life worth living as well as take away all of that and the chance to ever have that again.  It is time to act.  It was time to act long ago, definitively, whether we knew it or not.   Now it is definitely time, and many of us know it.   The questions is, do enough of us have access to the resources, information and understanding to “know” enough that we act on it?  That is what remains to be seen.  And I plan on doing something, everything I can, about it.  The Earth is fracturing and cracking under the oppressive weight of humanity and humanity is going down with it at an ever faster pace.  And still the governments of the world and their collective response to this emergency remain sidetracked or distracted into looking away from the issues or gripped by partisan gridlock, especially here in the U.S., thus letting and allowing the situation to slide towards oblivion.

But that’s what this blog is for.  That’s what Life in the Anthropocene is all about.  It’s a blog about “the issues, obstacles and challenges associated with the early part of the 21st century”, which will exceed all the other challenges that have come before in human history.   The time to step up to the plate, the last time, is NOW.  It is a blog meant to help all of us on our human journey of realizing our full potential and progressing as individuals seeking self-realization, wisdom, happiness and peace so that we might continue to have a livable, sustainable future for all humans and the precious life forms that share this planet, especially in this time.  Over the course of the next century, most of which I have a reasonably good chance of living through, humanity’s past history and present decisions will determine our future existence, for better, worse or both, for our species and for all life.  Life in the Anthropocene is a blog for the Human Condition in the Human Era.  I intend to have it serve as a guide to, and as a forum for discussing and understanding, the challenges and responsibilities of our time associated with a human dominated world and to utilize it to accomplish exactly what I outline below.

I need to, as well as other individuals, cultures, nations and the human species as a whole all around the world, start progressing towards a happier existence and creating that existence by bringing about and working on the shift toward a more sustainable future that preserves biodiversity, enhances human well-being, respects finite planetary resources and biophysical boundaries and restores cultural diversity.  And I want to help lead the way.  If we don’t start living our lives and being happy with them, our choices, our career, our legacy, our relationships, and our time here on Earth, there won’t be anything left to be happy about.  We need to start living in balance with the Earth more, respecting what nature provides and appreciating it for all its beauty or it will no longer be able to provide, to sustain such beauty, and there will be nothing left to appreciate.

We should’ve started long ago.  But we cannot go back into the past.  There is only the moment and the moment after that.  And, at this moment, right now, we stand on the precipice of it potentially not mattering anyway because the situation may take on a process of permanent self-perpetuation that we truly cannot stop.  Our world isn’t just dying; it’s breathing its last breath.   But it’s not dead yet; I say we give it some serious CPR.

What with all that’s going on the world, we are in the first year of what should be considered a global state of emergency.   And yet the status quo, stasis, and “business as usual” is not only still present, it is stronger than ever and being used to argue that we are doomed anyway specifically because humanity has inflicted the most damaging manifestations of the attitudes that assure this terminal outcome by default in the first place.  As the first species to be unhappy with our own nature/what nature made us into, the nature of the world around us, and what nature provided/our role in nature, what are we going to do when there is far less about the nature of the world to be happy about because there’s nothing left to provide life and nothing left to live for or fight for because we didn’t live and fight for that life in the first place?  I’d wager were going to do some pretty awful things and that’s a massive understatement/terrifying thought as a person familiar with the broad strokes of the last 50,0000-1 million years of human history and activity on this planet.

The Earth has given us everything and it has and continued to do so as we continue to progressively inflict more damage at an ever faster pace with every passing year, risking its neck to heal our human unhappiness. The planet is now entering a beginning phase where it can no longer sustain the demands upon it combined with the forced destruction upon natural systems caused by humans.  Instead, it is time to risk our necks for the Earth that has been so kind to us.  It is time to dive for the rope that humanity has just snapped by straining it with the weight of our demands, so the whole world doesn’t go off the cliff.  I am diving for it and pulling my weight to keep the world from going over.  

But that’s not my question with this post.  My question is, what is everyone else going to do?  Continue on in limbo, stuck in stasis, perpetuating “business as usual” and status quo?  Or are we going to get our rears in gear and pull our act together as individuals, cities, countries, nations and as a world to save us from the destruction we are bringing upon ourselves?  Or are we going to let everything slide for the last time?  What with the worldwide chaos that has enveloped the globe, such as the aforementioned global glacial/ice cap melting, severe New England drought, devastating Louisiana flooding, deadly wildfires in the U.S. west, political upheaval in Venezuela and the ballooning in ISIS, as well as the planet-wide ongoing deaths of corals, plus the announcement  that sea level rise has just accelerated and we almost certainly have put ourselves on track to blow past the 1.50C of warming since pre-industrial times, we have probably just broken the back of Earth’s systems and without immediate, widespread fundamental measures in contrast to the ways of the past we will take the last fatal, terminal step to our own demise.  How much further is this going to go before we all decide to wake up to and tackle the severity, scale, depth, and spread of the problem?  It is a testament to the collective, civilization-wide blindness that has led to the global sociopolitical, ecological, economic, and cultural crisis we find ourselves in that we only realize how far the drop is and how long the way down is after falling off the cliff and being forced to hang on by our fingernails.   I for one will not allow it to slip any further without pulling all the stops on my part.

            We still have a beautiful, biodiverse, plentiful world full of good people and good things worth saving that can provide us all with a wonderful, enjoyable, pleasurable existence for humans and all life forms.  But that will not continue for much longer if we continue to treat it with abuse, neglect, and punishment.  Even if you, my readers, start right now en masse (as in like right after reading this post) to aid in this crisis and we start making the life decisions and forming the personal attitudes and cultural momentum to counteract this process, we’re probably just barely going to avoid the worst of it by the skin of our teeth.  Personally, I will not accept allowing this to happen on my watch no matter how many other people choose the other option that defaults us to our doom.  I think its high time, and that the true time came long ago, to begin to move away from this path.  It is time to create a world of greater compassion, understanding, kindness, sensitivity and well-being because this is a crisis of a deficit of all those and much more.  So, here we go.  Are you with me?

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