Today I Am Wise

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. 
– Rumi

(Click on the picture to enlarge and read.)

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This post is a culmination of ruminations that can be found here and here.

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As it happens often when you open a random page of a well loved and much read book it pithily lays bare the path out of the labyrinth that you had been spending months (if not years) trying to decipher.

In another life I worked in the development sector. It is no secret. Nor is it a matter of pride– or embarrassment.  Like so many other things in the world it just is. Leonard Cohen, in a brilliant interview in The Guardian said, “All I have to put in my song is my experience.” Similarly when I say, I left the development sector and found the path to true virtue (I make no claim to be virtuous though I hope to get there), it is based purely upon my experience.

In an attempt to reach the kernel of ‘why’ I felt discomforted in the ‘company’ of ‘organized do gooders’ I may have written what could amount to a decent sized thesis. Though I could summarize it in these few word– Doing good* for the sake of feeling good about you. Intentional acts of kindness performed in the belief that by being charitable one is not just good but somehow better than other living beings that inhabit this planet. That was something I couldn’t abide with. Because Intentional Virtue is not Virtue.

The picture above is from The Tao Speaks: Lao Tzu's Whispers of Wisdom, adapted and illustrated by Tsai Chih Chung, translated by Brian Bruya.

*The good is italicized because like all value judgments what is good is not only comparative but also established by people living in a particular time and age. That is why morality is a double bind and also one of the fiercest and most destructive constrains devised by man.

Blog Action Day: Choices

Whenever we are asked to question our habits we run and hide behind that enigmatic word ‘choices’. Choice is a decision to choose a course of action when presented with two or more options. And then our choices go on to produce consequences. That is in fact, one of the most quoted laws of physics.

So we can choose to make our choices, refuse to accept the responsibility of our actions and ignore everything that brings to notice the consequences of our actions. That is indeed one of the options available to a few of us. Not surprisingly, as a consequence they are largely concentrated in certain parts of the globe.

So while a billion of us are obese, a result of the "English malady" whereby they "have ransack'd all the parts of the Globe to bring together its whole Stock of Materials for Riot, Luxury, and to provoke Excess ... Is it any Wonder, then, that the Diseases which proceed from Idleness and Fulness of Bread, should increase in Proportion...?", a billion of us starve "even though food output per person is as high as it has ever been, which suggests that hunger isn't a problem of production so much as one of distribution."

Can one just dismiss it as a choice they make? They just chose the wrong option didn’t they?

And what about the Dongria Kondh? They choose not to let their way of life be destroyed by a mining company. However the real question is do they even have the right to make a choice? And who arbitrates that some choices are more important than the others?

On this blog action day as we debate and discuss climate change maybe we also need to look at the choices we make because for some people in the world the only choice that is left is one between life and death.