My answer to the EcoTrain Question of the Week.

If not you then who?
If not now then when?

These are hard questions to answer and somehow seem related to me to the question, “What’s the problem really?” I think that we tend to rationalize away a lot of problems by making them seem less of an issue than they are, or we ignore problems that are very important.

If somehow we don’t identify something as a problem we don’t feel as bad about our own role in causing the problem or our lack of help to fix things. Really understanding the scope of the suffering and problems in the world can be overwhelming.

The Weeping Buddha:

Sometimes too, people have spent a lot of time and effort in their lives doing things a certain way and they can feel like back in those days things were much better. I once got in a bit of an argument about how bad for the environment burning coal is and got a, “If we hadn’t stopped burning coal all our problems would be fixed,” reply.

It is hard to say much after that kind of statement especially to someone who carried sacks of coal around for many years and is suffering from the health effects of such work. I appreciate all the things everyone has done in the past that make us who we are. I do think we need to really objectively look at what we are doing now and see what changes we can do to help our future. Going back to the way we have done things in the past would not be the best choice and not even a possibility with the number of people alive now.

So there can be a lot of different opinions on what the problems really are. There can be equally many opinions about what good solutions that improve our future can be. Additionally there appear to be many people who do not have enough ability to really understand the difference between fact and opinion. Some belief systems even tend to further blur this distinction.

So it is hard to find motivation and hard to identify good solutions. It is even difficult as an individual to grasp what the real problems are.

Yet somehow as a society a lot of things get done. New technologies are coming out daily that are totally amazing. The way we live now is very different than how we lived even a hundred years ago.

At a certain point I think you do know what action feels right to do. I believe that the more you are able to stay mindful of the present moment the better the outcomes of your actions tend to be and the more you are willing to try to do something new. I think that the more we grow in consciousness collectively the better solutions we will find to these questions.

Thanks for reading! I always value your support and comments. The pictures were taken by me with my Galaxy S9+. Text and graphics copyright lightsplasher & litesplasher.