Are We at a Tipping Point?
If Armageddon is around the corner, there is only one thing to do
The world’s problems are big and have grown exponentially in the past year. They feel giant, like a monster towering overhead, so big they seem to obscure the world around me. Humanity appears on the brink of chaos, the planet is at a tipping point, the world’s future questionable.
What am I supposed to do?
What are you supposed to do?
What are WE supposed to do?
The only thing I know for certain is that if I don’t want to be part of the problems that are taking our world to the edge of annihilation, I have to oppose those problems; I have to be on the opposite side of them. I have to be part of what is propping up the world, instead of tearing it down. The only thing I know that is stronger than all the problems, any of these problems, is LOVE.
Why?
Because love is God incarnate. Love is what we feel when we are not over-thinking, over-feeling, reaching beyond our capacity, doing more than our bodies can tolerate. Real love, true love is peaceful, warm, enveloping, simple, and easy — totally, and completely without reservation, expectation, explanation, or condition.
But here is the catch… It is only available in the moment you are living — in the here and now. Old love is but a memory, future love is nothing more than maybe. We only have the moment we are in, each moment as it arises, lingers…, and passes. In any given moment we can choose to be present. We can choose to turn off the thinking, the worrying, the ruminating, even the remembering. We can also choose to stop thinking about what will come, what may come, what could come. We can just be here now.
True, turning off the taskmaster, the thinker, the all-consuming multi-tasker is hard. It takes practice, consistent effort, a willingness to struggle, and the passage of time, but it is possible, and it is worth the undertaking. Only by coming home to the present moment can we learn the value of what that moment has to offer — peace and love — if we are willing to slow down enough to see it, know it, value it and embrace it.
In that instant, the past and the future fall away and there is just you, your soul, whatever you are being or doing, and the creator. That single moment is the greatest gift I can imagine. It is everything.
It is why we are here — Life — simple, unequivocal life. No judgment. No fear. No anger. Just life.
It is only from this vantage point that we can begin to truly live again, live into the next moment, day, or lifetime. This is perhaps the only space from which we can view our world unobscured by the galaxy of problems threatening to engulf it.
The longer we can stay in the present, as each moment occurs, the better we become at seeing our way through, discovering something new and different, and creating a future that each of us might actually want to live in. The only place from which to create a better future is from a blissfully loving present moment. I want that.
And I want you to want that, because if more of us don’t wake up and cherish the moments of life, the world will, in fact, tip over.
Last week I wrote an article about “making a difference,” and I included the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, but their poignancy grips me again, and so I repeat… “the quality of being determines the quality of doing.”
There is a Greenlandic word — pinngortitaq — which literally means “to come into being.”
What will we collectively bring into being with our present moment?
