Posts Tagged ‘human condition’
Our Realities
There are as many similarities between us all as there are differences. I don’t ever want to forget those differences when I write about my experiences. In the time since I retired from a day-job, my world has shrunk significantly to the 20 acres around our home for weeks at a time. A month can pass without a reason to drive my car.
That isolates me from lives that are dealing with issues that involve complications that rarely enter my mind. I don’t worry about where I am going to sleep at night. I don’t need to communicate with attorneys to solve spurious accusations. I don’t hear about problem bosses or annoying coworkers. I’ve yet to need to make doctor appointments for consultations about scary test results. I no longer struggle to get out of bed in the morning due to depression.
When I wax poetic about our experiences in the great outdoors with pets and nature at Wintervale, imploring others to seek health and cultivate love in their lives, I mean no disrespect to anyone who finds themselves struggling to cope with heavy demands consuming their precious energy.
We all have our own realities. I hope that on some level, the stories I post provide a brief escape to another place and a peek into one person’s life who strives for better health with a goal of inverting pyramids of dysfunction.
We watched the Grammy Awards Show last night and I got a heavy dose of reality about songs and performers whom I know nothing about. Those are worlds that are a mystery to me.
At the bottom of all things in our lives lies our commonality. In fact, one thing we all have in common is that we are all different from each other.
I recently found a quote about love from an interesting man named Wim Hof, a Dutch extreme athlete and motivational speaker:
Love is compiled by happiness, strength, and health.
If you radiate good energy because you are healthy, happy, and strong, that’s love.
Today, I am sending love to all who are experiencing stress that I know nothing about.
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Another Way
There is about as much information being blasted into the world right now as there are virus germs and sanitizing spray. It’s all a bit mind-boggling, but the crackpot theories are a particularly fascinating dose of lunacy. I suppose all human conditions tend to amplify in times of global crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic sure has taken attention away from the equally global threatening planet-warming that industry and fossil-fuel dependence has hastened.
The Associated Press provides clean reviews of falsehoods around the virus and politics that serve to expose some of the deviously manipulated claims that then get shared and reshared on social media so many times they gain believability points among the less astute.
Even within the credible reports about which surprisingly common underlying health conditions are making the coronavirus more severe, there is such a vast amount of pertinent detail it gets overwhelming. As much as we assume it’s lungs that are taking the primary hit, evidence reveals the heart is being damaged from within.
As often happens, I find myself thinking about things in another way. As we begin to take a more focused look at how the virus can spread by our actions, it reveals how often we’ve already been sharing. Think about how many contacts we have had without getting incredibly ill. All those sporting events we attended, the concerts and plays, lectures, public transportation, shopping carts, and doorknobs grabbed.
The number of germ-phobic people who hyper-sanitized their way through daily activities was minuscule compared to the majority of us who took our chances and tried to remember to occasionally wash our hands after touching anything publicly shared.
It’s a wonder the time between pandemics was as long as it has been throughout history.
Here’s another way to think about this pandemic. Don’t be gullible to every crazy thing you see or hear. Recognize your emotional response and reasonable fears, and then check and contain them. Seek credible sources of factual information over and above the entertaining drama of wild reports and survival-of-self-above-all-others mentalities.
Participate in and demonstrate actions that are part of the solution to this pandemic and not part of the problems. Don’t become a pawn in the panic-buying dysfunctional human response.
Even though we may not be able to know if undiagnosed people around us are shedding the coronavirus, they still all deserve to be loved just as much as we do.
Yes, even if they believe crackpot theories that have no basis in scientific fact.
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Human Race
This image is a sad statement of an unfortunate trait of the human condition, that this would be allowed to happen.
This year, the weather window for climbing Everest was tight and the number of climbers high. So, people lined up like a train of pack animals to make the slow trudge in the death zone to the peak, and this photo showed the result to the world. It’s not the first time overcrowding has happened, but this image is the most dramatic depiction I have seen, and it reveals that the government has yet to take effective steps to stop it from happening again.
It is crazy that so many people choose (and can afford) to do this, and it is sad that Nepal has deemed it worth the overcrowding to maximize income from climbing fees.
Humans.
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Relative Something 