ROAD TEST INTO THE FUTURE
We live our lives on the assumption that the future holds promise, that no matter how hard was today, tomorrow we'll rise with the sun and fight on until the nightfall. It's in our human nature to look for the stars in the dark to find a way home or a place in the universe.
On this Earth, with all the challenges that shook the fabric of our lives, not having other place to go, we are doomed to hope while cleaning the mess we did on so many fronts. Are we going to heal for good or just pretend we are fine and move forward, as we did so many times.
History provides us with many examples of bravery, but also a similar amount of cowardice and cruelty, which describe the range of our freedom of choice, as proposed by the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola. "It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine." (Oration on the Dignity of Man) It takes some wisdom to decide which part of the history should we value and internalize. The choice is easy if we seek the common good, but we are not there yet.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
After hundreds of thousands of years of evolution (since we get a consciousness) we are still asking the same question: to be or not to be? We are still here, so the answer is clear, but we played the odds so many times and we barely survived and not because the nature turned against us, but because we turned against each other. And now, as we reached the evolution puberty (unapologetically called Anthropocene), we turned against the nature, we set our house on fire.
We are drawn to hope, but also to make mistakes, to fix a few, to forget a lot, to repeat all of it, to pretend we are in control. The world's a stage, life's a game, and we are the sorcerer's apprentice. Powerful, yet reckless; too young to rule, too self-righteous to wait. We fought our way up the food chain and as we reached for the stars, we discovered how small we are, how dim is our light, how petty are our fights. Was it worth it?
We learned that knowledge is power, but we failed to know ourselves, and now, once again, as we cross the doorstep of the new year, we have to make a choice for the future from a place of hope and not a place of fear. The faith in humanity will be restored because the survival instinct is very much real and, as in the Japanese art of kintsukuroi, we might be broke, but we are still beautiful and worth being pieced together.