Holding the future on tip of our fingers.

What a year 2020 has been. Huh? So many ups and downs, both individually and collectively. How often did we find ourselves staring into the abyss during 2020? Quite often, I would say. But, it also retaught us our long-lost ability to adapt to adversity. Which is resilience.

Unfortunately, we are quite unwilling to realize how challenging our early ancestors’ lives was in the ancient past? We are so used to the comfort and luxury that we naively assume that it is what it was in the past. But, we tend to forget how many daily challenges our ancestors had to overcome continuously. They didn’t have today’s comfort of all the necessities of life that we have today. We can read and understand all this, but we are simply too comforted and distracted by what we have in our own lives.

We are also so reluctant to look at our own ancestors and feel uncomfortable. We do not feel the need to think about the tales from the past. But, if we could have another look at our ancestors, and try to feel how they feel and think what they think, wouldn’t we be so proud to be part of the same family tree? Just take a look at the family tree of all living things in our planet. It is fantastic.

The best part is that 99% of us have overcome the climatic issues that our ancestors had to deal with. Just think how difficult life could have been for our ancestors in ancient times? The icy stone age polar region could have been very scary and challenging. It was so long ago that we just couldn’t imagine how our ancestors lived there. They had to endure the harsh chilly weather conditions. The icy cold climate was literally with no heating. They had to make their own natural warm fur and all their ancestral instincts to survive. The same could be said about our forefathers in the equatorial jungles. The hot and humid weather, along with the occasional visits from the wild beasts, (which sometimes conveniently killed individual hunters when their number increased), must have made their existence hell. They were a much better pair of individuals compared to us. And they were more willing to sacrifice their well-being and life in order to sustain their lives with their family and left behind children for the next generation. So, they must have been much better people.

That’s why I don’t think we are as much special. We are not a much evolved version of those who have gone before us. We would be very fortunate if we could survive another few thousand years. What qualifies us to achieve that? Everything we have as comfort in our lives and the circumstances that we have in modern times, could easily be lost in the near future. The comfort that we have today could become a very rare luxury in the near future. We will enjoy it, but will it also survive? So, I think that our ancestors must have been more special. They must have been more better and much more interesting people. Why shouldn’t we emulate and learn from them? We might not have the same challenges as they did, but we might have many of the same life challenges and eventually we might even face way greater challenges.

I may not know why politicians today are doing what they are doing. I am trying very hard to understand why and how they can be so gullible. They must have their reasons. I also know that the world is more connected now. But, why do we have a tendency to not listen to each other? We often don’t look at each others’ point of view. We are too focused on our own point of view. We tend to isolate ourselves. And that is unfortunate. We have to learn to listen and get into people’s minds. No, it doesn’t mean that we should think the same, but we should understand that both ways to see things are right.

We all want to be better people. And, we all want to live a better life. Somehow, somewhere we just lost our path. We truly desire to improve across all aspects in our lives. For example, we desire to be a better provider for our families and our kids. We want to be better parents, better at work, and even better lovers, if we can. But, why can’t we achieve so easily what we were striving to do?

I always felt that we cannot go through life without being able to feel pain. The pain has to be part of our daily existence, a constant companion that makes our lives meaningful. We may not always know why we are actually suffering, but we know that there must be a reason to suffer. We want our suffering to be purposeful. We want each of our suffering to count. If we can reach a point of understanding the purpose of each suffering, then, we would be the happiest people in the world. We would be so contented that each day with pain would be meaningful. Moments of suffering could bring us so many positive outcomes. It could be an emotional pain that we could rush to for our pain relief or a physical pain that could be a warning from our body that we are pushing ourselves too hard.

So, suffering must be part of our lives. After then, we can bring meaning into our lives. Pay attention for a minute, please. I don’t say we have to suffer in order to make our lives meaningful. What I say is that we have to integrate suffering into our lives in a way that we can understand and learn from it. Otherwise, we would feel that we are only wasting our other time on things that bring us no purpose to our lives. We would be very dissatisfied. But , the good news is, sufferings are not necessarily always bad. Yes, sufferings can be very challenging. It could be so distressing at times that we could want to scream with all our might, many of us don’t quite have a clue about the meaning of suffering and pain. We just want it to end. These types of situations could force us to have a deeper understanding of the dialectics of suffering. We could also realize that we humans are so resilient. The more we suffer, the more we could draw strength from our pain. Sometimes, the pain could even help us to improve our lives in the future. Therefore, we must be able to transform our suffering into the greatness.

Now, we are in the challenging times. Invisible monster called “Covid-19” is all around us, political leaders are struggling to come by something sensible, climate change is slowly turning Earth into the giant microwave. It is obvious. The time is now. We must fight for our right to change the world for the better. Let us reawaken ourselves to our purpose so that we become the great people that we are supposed to be.