If it matters to you, act like it matters. Express it. Do something! Maybe this has to do with someone beloved in your life. Perhaps it’s got to do with a situation in the larger world.
It is a very big world. We have our up-close concerns (family, friends, life decisions, our own health and well-being). But we all exist in a context. We cannot have our eyes on only our immediate situation.
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Yes, there is the here-and-now, this very moment. Registering the smell of something in the room, on the breeze. Focusing on what needs getting done this day. Sometimes the present moment is felt as a radical immediacy, a timeless stillness, where the larger world has ceased to be. This can be true even if you live in a war zone. There are oft-told accounts of that very thing, a bizarre and impossible-seeming moment of peaceful ease in the midst of an unmitigated nightmare. In the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, for instance. In kindred times and situations where it would be unbearable to “occupy” that surrounding circumstance, because it was (is, right this moment) truly perilous. In Sudan, say.
If you are fortunate enough to live in a part of the world that isn’t in an ongoing war or famine or flood — if you are lucky (as I am) to live in a country that is allegedly “free,” including free to vote — then express your gratitude for that blessing by taking the action of voting.
It really is, after all, one world.
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Citizens of the United States are paying a good deal of attention to the upcoming election. We in the U.S. are (more or less) free to express divergent views, to protest. Some of us have protested the violence that continues unabated in the Middle East — even, as I write this, verging on all-out regional war. The world as a whole is in peril. As if the climate disaster weren’t already sufficiently imperiling.
It really is, after all, one world. That said, some parts of the planet are less subject to violence and poverty and war than others are. Some people have more freedom than others to take action, to express ourselves. I, for instance, have enough food and water. I’d like to say I’m not in constant danger of having a gun aimed at me, but alas, in the United States no one is free of that danger, not even the beloved children in school.
With all the mess of the country I dwell in, I count myself fortunate indeed to be in what calls itself a democracy. I have the ability to vote. And so I do. It matters to me. If I have this freedom — as so many do not — and do not exercise it, I am a fool.
I am not getting political here (though I realize it may look like it). Nor would I ever judge anyone for declining to express their values at the ballot box. The man I dearly loved for many years never voted in his life, so far as I know. It was up to him. That is one of the things freedom means, eh? I myself didn’t vote for years after I was old enough to. In that era — Viet Nam, Nixon — it seemed it was pointless to vote.
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Never assume it’s somebody else’s job to take care of something that matters to you. It’s your job. It’s mine! However “lucky” or unlucky you are, wherever on the dear earth you dwell, do what you can to relieve suffering. To make it a better place for us all to carry on — as one planet. Take the steps you can to show you love your immediate world, but also the earth as a whole. Educate yourself, as I am trying like hell to do. Feed yourself, if you’re fortunate enough to have food. Provide for your little ones, for your elders, your neighbors, if you are able.
And if you live in a democracy, for God’s sake vote. Whatever your politics. If you don’t open your mouth and say what matters to you, then you don’t get to complain if things don’t turn out the way you wish they had.
Then, when the results come, accept what’s happened. You did what you could. There’s nothing for us all to do but to move on, from there. To be in that new now, whether or not it’s the one you would have chosen.
Be kind, regardless of other people’s beliefs. We are shaped by the world we grew up in, by our particular experience. In some sense we cannot help being who and what we are.
Nothing matters more than love. Period.