Man-Stupid

Ah Tony, you do make me giggle. How I wish we were sitting at the same table bouncing off thoughts from our archives of philosophy and randomness. Your words just reminded me of a story from a Taoism book. Where a visiting enlightened monk stays in a monastery and has a non verbal discussion with a foolish monk using only hand gestures. So the story goes the foolish monk interepeted the conversation as a personal insult and quickly became annoyed. The enlightened monk interpreted the same conversation that the other monk was so passionate about Tao and taught him a life lesson, he then left humbly in respect to find further enlightenment before he felt ready to challenge the foolish monk again!
How you remind me of this enlightened monk!

For my words man-stupid was not an insult to any man, but rather calling myself man-stupid :)I read in a passing junk email some true words about intelligent, attractive and ambitious women facing similar relationship problems in finding love and the right man. The problem is that career minded women think that because they are successful in work, they will be successful in anything else they do including love. However women do not realise that their skills are non-transferable and their thinking is in fact detrimental to relationships. So smart in every way but man-stupid. Hehe

I do not think men are stupid. That is a generalization that I would not put my name to. I think mankind on the whole are ignorant, myself included. I believe that since developed intelligence of the mind, we have been struggling to find self-realisation which in turn leads to enlightenment. People are too concerned in finding themselves out in the world and letting it mold them from their experiences. How they have handled a situation only says a fragment of who we are and is no way to collage these experiences into some solid bottom line about who we are. I only say this because at some point in every ones life, we will do something we don't want to do. We can only say who we are from our experiences when we have done something from the heart wholly involved.

My eyes have opened to a world I never knew existed, delicate and beautiful like spring blossom loosely attached to the weathered tree. It cries to be touched and held yet fluttery disintegrates if one tries to take the flower. Therefore, I can only let the image burn into my minds-eye for I can not take a piece away with me. It holds true that the best times of our lives are when we cannot take a physical picture of the image before us but only to love it when it is there now. I now see with this beauty the impact it must endure from the human hand. It is naive to think that we have no significant consequences either collectively or individually. For each breath we take on our world is changing it. After breathing which is our unconscious action, we should all stop to think what are the conscious decisions we are making that impact our surroundings. When I was younger I was very supseptable to this message and to this day there are little things like turning off the water when brushing my teeth and using cold water for the dishes that I carry forward. It made me sad that I knew I was aiding the death of our fragile planet. Even still when I speak of it, people brush me off with a "what can we do" attitude. The fact is there is a lot we can do, but most people do not want to sacrifice their luxury for it. Over time, I too took on this approach that one person cannot do anything so why think about it. But now it is hitting me hard again. A book called "the green imperative" has put it all in black and white the true cold facts about our dying planet and I found it hard to swallow and absorb the enormous problems humans have created for ourselves. There are already good alternatives for energy sources and materials but the people that can make the big changes refuse to do so out of fear for the economy. If we covered 4% of the worlds desert in solar panels, it would supply enough energy for the entire globe. The only desert that is natural is in Australia, the rest are man-made. This to me a message that arrived to me in bold flashing neon lights. The Egyptians were so advanced for their time they were using solar panels and light bulbs in the pyramids. This is why mankind is ignorant in the 21st century. We had everything, of course we could not have progressed without some detrimental effects to mother earth but no real attempt has been made to counter-act these actions. It has thrown nature out of balance completely and now we are already feeling the effects from the era of mass production which only started less than a century ago. Earth has maintained itself for 4.5 billion years yet the most dramatic changes in such short period of time are consequences of man kinds demands. We have known about holes in the ozone since 1956 and what a huge and important role this protective layer provides us with. Without it, life on earth would never exist! So what are we doing about it? If you ask me, I would say not enough.