Alive and Breathing

Life's not easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it.
(pic: Hubble deep field. i.e. the universe as it was 10 billion years ago)
No matter where you look, so long as you aren't staring at the world through rose colored lenses you see despair, hate, greed, and poverty. I don't claim to have a solution to everything, hell there's that much context and interconnectedness today that there is no way we can commit to any sort of change without everybody, every single living person, making a change themselves.

If we want to feed the poor in Uganda, we need to stop eating so much ourselves, so that global food prices can relax.

I don't mean to claim that life is getting harder for us, in fact its the opposite. 340 years ago, there were millions of people dying of bubonic plague. In 1918 over 50 million people died from a H1N1 strain of the flu known as 'Spanish Flu'.
Thanks to today's modern medicine we hardly see such panic, except from the media.

Through Medieval times violence, murder and war were a way of life. Although people think that crime is worst today, it pales in comparison to even 20 years ago thanks to the technology and research available to today's police force.

The point is, no matter how bad we think things are today, they have been a lot worse.

It almost seems that a lot of the grief, especially in westernised culture, is somewhat self inflicted. Depression, drug addiction, and biker gangs are all mostly the result of too time and nothing constructive, or seemingly worthwhile to do.

People look to a lot of different things in life in the pursuit of an answer, be it addiction, stamp collecting, motorcycles, violence, we are all looking for the same thing. An answer, a minute of clarity, even just a sign.

In the murky depths of my soulless existence, when thinking of what will become of the dust on my bones, I like to remember that for this brief moment in time, the 60 odd years I have, that I was here, and alive and breathing.

Its all I can ever ask for.