beyond ourselves

At the end of our wants is nothing. Our desire to go faster means to blacken our skies with muck and smog. To get rich is to pollute our minds with greed for money. With the advent of technology and consumerism, we are driven to move faster and receive instantaneous gratification. Everything is just one click away, within a few minutes car ride, or lavished with extravagant packaging only meant eventually become waste. To beat our competition is to provide faster service or to sparkle our products with prettier looks.

As our minds become more habituated to faster and better services, we fail to regard the rest of the world. The world becomes our trash dump as we pour out or waste product for the sake of selfish satisfaction. Slowly, mother nature starts to bear the marks of our demeanor. Her face wrinkles as we tear down her forests and replace them with landfills. Her eyes are clotted with the plastics of our toys and the careless pollutants we endlessly pour out into the sea. Her tears become dried in water contamination and she carries a fever of global warming.

And everyday, we still deny it. We still cast away our trashes hoping that these problems will be taken care of by another. We shove away our responsibilities to indulge ourselves like gluttons. We always want to consume, faster and better. And as we become filthy rich, we toss away the filth to clutter the world. Slowly, we "endure death without thinking about it", killing nature by turning away from our problems. At the end of that day, we are still hungry, and our insatious appetite has only grown larger. Sitting in our luxurious, marble tiled homes that starkly contrast the landfills where death covers the grounds, we realize that we might've "gained the whole world, but [we lost our] souls" (Matthew 16:26).

Yes, despite what I proclaim, it's all rhetoric. Sure it is possible to scare each other into action by stating that global warming will make the earth uninhabitable for us. Or perhaps suggest that donating to charity by telling a story about some pitiful animals losing their homes. These things might work, but it will only be temporary because at its roots rhetoric is still selfish-it appeals to our own sense, and our own logic and our own selfish desires. We will care about the environment so long our one wellbeing is threatened, or endlessly donate in front of our peers to look good or to feel good about ourselves. Everything is still about ourselves, to consume, to fulfill our own desires, and to be convinced by logic that is sound to us.

No, to save our world, we inherently must be selfless. We must look outwards beyond our own desire to give ourselves up in service of the world. We cannot be convinced into saving the environment by things rhetoric, pity videos, or anything that isn't our own created will. By finding ourselves first, we can then give ourselves up. Only when we realize the conversation isn't about us, everything else that exists in the world becomes a lot more significant and we can make the choice to live selflessly. And maybe then the day will come when nature will recover her youth and the rivers and trees will rejoice in harmony of all that is living.