Your Life is Not Yours
". . .Your life is not your own. We are entrusted to these lives. For what? Certainly not to achieve the consumer dream—a big house, meat- and junk-food centric diets, high carbon holidays, etc. Do these things really bring joy? Temporarily, perhaps, though they also come with many health and financial costs. And they certainly do not provide meaning. No one will remember you for the stuff you had in your life, though you might be forgotten because of it: if you spent all your life earning money to afford the consumer luxuries, or playing with those luxuries, instead of spending time with your family, instead of participating in your community, instead of working to heal the Earth, then you wasted your life. (Even if the majority of media, marketing, and cultural messages tell you otherwise.)
One of many Internet memes telling you it’s your life, do with it what you please.
It’s not your life to waste.
You—with your consciousness that the world is burning and racing toward irreversible tipping point after tipping point—have the opportunity, no, the responsibility to take action. In some way or another. Whether that be engaging with global environmental campaigns or neighborhood efforts, or anything—or everything—in between.
Of course this is not a new sentiment. For example, you can find this in Hinduism in the concept of dharma or duty. The famous dialogue between Arjuna, a warrior, and Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, reminds Hindu readers that they must follow their dharma even if they don’t like or understand it. Now I might argue with that example, as Arjuna then goes off and fights a bloody war, and without context of whether the war is just or not, perhaps he was right to question his dharma. (According to Wikipedia, the war was one of dynastic succession between two groups of cousins, so Arjuna may have had a point in balking at his role in this.)
But in the context of life on a sickened planet, we have certain, undeniable, incontestable duties. This life is not yours to do with what you please. Rather: . . ."
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