CAPACITY TO BE PATIENT
Saturday, September 25, 2021
Patience is something we all have, but not in equal measure.
Is that because we see things differently, or because we are fundamentally different?
If so, is that part of our human DNA or environmentally based on family and life experiences ….
I have zero medical training, so I’m going by what I see and feel – that’s my knowledge base.
I think it’s about how we see solutions and perceive problems, more than learned experiences in decision making.
But here we all are, in 2021, mid-pandemic.
I think it was Churchill who said, “If you are going through hell … keep going!”
Why?
Because, whether or not we solve anything, we aren’t much good to the world or those we care about if we don’t just hunker down on one trouble at a time because we have too few solutions and too many problems.
Is that not true of most people, families, governments, corporations, and countries?
Much credit is due to those innovators who are trying to invent solutions to things we don’t yet see as problems, but marketers will take care of that – they’ll tell us their solution is new, improved, innovative, ground-breaking and life-altering.
I get it, and we need to have marketers, spin-doctors, and political marketers – they need work to do so they aren’t stuck on a bread line somewhere.
But what about the problems nobody is trying to solve?
Every day we are bombarded by messages about global warming, climate change, and renewable energy – those fields are rich in cache and cash these days.
Poverty, disease, illiteracy, social injustice, mental health, despotic governments and 3rd world strife aren’t getting that brand of attention and/or funding, but aren’t they are most pressing problems.
We need and want it all, but our priorities are misplaced. Our leaders, focused on getting elected more than on leading, and our corporations, more focused on shareholder value than on societal impact – as if they can only have one by sacrificing the other.
Each child born today will likely see the 22nd century.
What will that look like?
I was listening to and reading coverage of a spectacular fossil discovery, Titanokorys gainesi in the Burgess shale recently – fossils of a creature that lived 300 million years before the first dinosaur. We are descendants of all these ancient creatures who roamed the earth and swam the seas. They didn’t have vaccine passports or solar panels; they just lived, survived and thrived until they died off.
This pandemic won’t kill us off, and the next one likely won’t either – but we should have enough evidence that all species do not survive. We’ve been here 200,000 years, which means we are ‘barely out of the box new,’ so if we want a future in the 23rd and 24th centuries, we need to start looking at new ways to be better people. Sure, we need invention and discovery – new cars that produce fuel rather than burn it, cars that exhaust a better atmosphere than they take in …
Our future of humanity will be in the fossil record in a few hundred million years from now – possibly to be found by humans of the day, but just as likely to be found by some other species, one that doesn’t exist yet.
Reader feedback:
Good morning Mark. In today’s column you wrote, “Everything good that is going on right now is a product of the choices we each made” W e’ve talked about this before. I’ve made some tough choices in the past—we both have— some with what seemed at the time disastrous results. But if the sum of those choices led me to the delightful place I find myself in with you I wouldn’t change a thing, HW, Calgary, AB