Eight Things I Know

Today for some obscure reason I came to realize that despite my University of Michigan education, my years as a avid reader, my extensive global experience, and far too many hours of television viewing, at this juncture in my existence, there are at least eight things I really know for sure. (I am hopeful, even optimistic, that I may have some other basic truths mastered but for the moment these are what I know to be solid and true in my mind). 

There is a God. He, it, she, may be mysterious, the end game may not be an Earthly paradise, and who knows if as individuals we will even have any sense or memory of our identities on this earth but  the simple fact is, all of this cosmic activity is not the inevitable consequence of a "Big Bang" or just dumb "unthinking" coincidence. 

Something intelligent is behind all of this and that you can bank on. 

Love really is the most powerful force known to humans. It does not matter if it is the love of a child, a pet, a spouse, a parent; real, true, non-physical, honest love trumps everything, even your own self survival instincts. This is so true as to be axiomatic. 

This one you are not going to like. Most people are simply not that bright. That is not to say they are stupid or bad or even ignorant they just do not have the capacity to "get it". They move through life in their own narrow field of existence and the big picture never is made clear to them. If you are reading this and do not get my point, you are proving it. 

Empathy is a rare trait in human beings. You would think given that we are mortal, suffer, fear, and die, that we would be more attuned to other humans and other creatures that suffer and endure the same. As a species we do not. We still allow millions of animals who are sentient and who die exactly as we do to be slaughtered for our food, used for our science, snuffed out for our pleasure, despite our own fears of death and pain and mortality.  

Jeremy Bentham once wrote, "the question is not can they think but can they suffer?" We still as a species don't get it. 

In point of fact Bentham's quote was even more amazing considering he made it in the 18th century. He wrote:

 "The day has been, I am sad to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? (From Wikipedia).

I also now realize that having wealth gives you choices and options. So, money is important. I could be trite and say that while money does not buy happiness it does make being miserable so much better.  

That however would not encapsulate the seriousness of what I am saying here. Having wealth in the 21st century (and probably in every century before) gives you and your loved ones better options and choices in living. 

It may not bring happiness but it allows you to make choices that can help you find whatever  your particular brand of happiness or the pursuit of that happiness is at that moment and beyond. 

Life will never be long enough. Living, actually experience is relative. If we live to 60 , we bemoan the fact we wish we had made it to 70, at 70, we wish for 80 but the truth is if we lived too be a 100, each of us who be no wiser and no smarter than we are at 40, maybe even 30. We are pretty much who we are by the time we are 20 the rest is just an accumulation of different experiences. 

99% of our problems are the consequences of our own choices. I always hated this one. I heard it early and from a variety of sources but the damnable fact, is we pretty much make our own choices and we have to live with them. This unfortunately makes us far more responsible for our lives than we wish to be and is an uncomfortable epiphany. Luckily for most people they never come to accept this. 

Finally, most people live and exist and pass their lives in fear. Thoreau was so on the money He wrote,“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

We are a fearful species. As I wrote recently in a blog, a good friend recently told me that " fear was an absence of faith" and that is probably very true but the fact is that most people exist in a state of fearfulness.