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I'm certainly aware of the doom scenario(s). In one sense they are a challenge to the rational, on the other
hand they are crazy and end up wasting precious energy. If a wise road is struck in the way humans deal with
life now, good choices are made, emphasis is put on the right centers of gravity, gradually something
happens, imperceptible but dramatic when you look back over a few centuries.
The first struggle I had as a writer was justifying the writing life if everything was going to end
anyway. If the bombs were coming to wipe the slate clean, if nature was going to uproot the restless beings
in it, if a galactic event were to pulverize the dear planet, then what could one do? Why write? Why think for
that matter?
I began to realize that life is larger than the mind that attempts to capture it. One learns the sublime
art of letting it go, letting it be, letting it reveal itself and it will, over time, reveal more by a loving desire
not-to-control than with the need to control everything, including the nature of doom. Human beings, ultimately, wake up to the authentic signs of something gone wrong. They voluntarily change
when the evidence is stark and full of truth. They do not want to collaborate with their own demise.
It's necessary to monitor what is vented from the technological civilization as it is necessary to
constantly monitor the depletion of the raw materials, the base foundational materials.
I don't think it would be a kindly transition from what we have now to a world of scarcity.
Doom does not occur to a culture that is happily creating beyond what it inherited.
At the very least, the doom scenario requires us to think about human habit and life-style. In other words,
the "examined life," which has been a precept for as long as I can remember. And I'm the first to
admit I examined too much.
Wisdom has always taught that insatiable desires are never requited and they always pop up at the end of a
repressive era. But then they attempt to make themselves the norm and the whole begins to reject it or
break down. It's an impossible task.
On the road to the pursuit of happiness one runs into nuclear annhiliation or the asteroid scenario or a collapse of sustatinable nature. Consciousness of a life that has so much richness, yet is so close to extinction is an existential moment for modern people. Those who want to distinguish themselves from the old pack of generations safely tucked away in history at any rate. But perhaps we discover what many in the past did; that our consciousness of extinction is our best ally and we give ourselves over to protecting the richness, a portion of it, in defiance. Our happiness.
I always felt happiness was the alignment of the self to its fullest, most productive energy. One resolves the unhappiness you
automatically inherit as a member of a family.
Happiness is an authentic state of being as is freedom, difficult as they are to define.
We compromise with them but, then, we compromise with unhappiness and necessity as well.
There is the flash of new recognition that the world is this way. We live in it all our days; it takes us down a
wooly path where the new is put out and we resent the young now coming of age.
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