Holistic Worldview
The Earth that supports life is a well-balanced system. In our ignorance, we’ve decided that some components of this system are unlimited and therefore ours to exploit while others are disposable altogether. As a result, our ecosystem is out of whack and we entered the climate change era.
Our human world is a system that requires a balance to function well, too. Social, racial, economic, climate, or political injustice interferes with the functioning of our neat system even today. Why are so many injustices still present, tolerated, and accepted? Because in this case too, we arbitrarily decided what’s right and what’s wrong, while failing to exercise common sense, and ethics, or anticipating the consequences of our actions.
Your immediate world is no different. You are surrounded by people with various jobs, with different educational backgrounds and economic statuses who enable the smooth functioning of the economic and social system near you. All the diverse people and their efforts are needed for the systems to run well. Are at least the systems closest to you great? Not really, good healthcare, college education, living wages, and opportunity still aren’t available to all.
You are no exception to the rule of a balanced system, either. Your health, mind, and selfhood require ongoing care. When the complex universe within you and the network of your relationships work harmoniously, the world is your oyster. When they don’t, your physical and emotional health suffers. The good news is that YOU create, manage, and control your immediate system.
Why the speech about all the systems? Systems are interdependent. You are affected by various systems and you have an effect on them. This means that each of us has private freedom as well as responsibilities to – and for – the systems we are part of.
We are too busy and too jaded for this kind of thinking. That’s the world we were born into. This is our “normal”. We rarely ask whether the “normal” is good because somewhere along the way we were convinced that we are powerless. Well, that’s not quite true. YOU shape the world with your choices every day.
Try this: starting as soon as you wake up, take note of the choices you’re making.
• What are you wearing? Good quality clothing you may eventually get tired of and donate to charity OR fast fashion that will end in a landfill?
• What do you do for a living? How do you feel at work? How do you feel about yourself, after work?
• How long is your daily commute? How much carbon emissions are you personally responsible for, daily?
• Whom did you interact with today? How were you treated? How did you treat them?
• Did you check today’s news? What got your goat? How did it make you feel about the world you live in?
These are only a few examples of how every move you make, every emotion you experience is a choice; a choice for you and a choice for the systems you are a part of.
Things are the way they are because we have either chosen or accepted them. From this perspective, what will YOU choose or accept tomorrow? The familiar and comfortable or the new and challenging? Give it a thought. Change is a choice. Sometimes, change is the RIGHT choice.
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