Our Life in Paradox

I came across something in my facebook feed the other day and I have been thinking about it ever since.  It was a piece written by the Dalai Lama about all the paradoxes that we live under these days.   His statement read:

"We have bigger houses but smaller families; We have more conveniences but less time; We have more degrees but less sense; We have more knowledge but less judgement; we have more medicines but less healthiness; We have been all the way to the moon and back but we have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbors; We build more computers to hold more information but we have less communication; We have become long on quantity but short on quality; These are times of fast food but slow digestion; Tall man but short character; We have steep profits but shallow relationships; It's a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room."


I have thought a lot about this for the last couple of days.  I've read it over about ten times.  Each time I came to the same conclusion,  how did this happen?  How did we, as a society, get to this point?  Where did we lose our way and how can we back track to make it right?  The short answer, I think, might be one idea at a time.  Take the first statement "We have bigger houses but smaller families."  Where the Dalai Lama comes from multiple generations live under one roof.  Grandparents, parents and children all in one house.  If you have lots of children then you might need a bigger home, but why does a small family need nearly a palatial home?  I'm looking for a house right now, and I had to think about what I wanted vs. what I actually needed.  What I found was that I needed a lot less house than I wanted.  What I settled on was a little more than what I needed  and a little less than what I wanted.  I met my needs in the middle.  

I think what many of these statements boil down to is greed.  We have become a culture of wanters and takers.  We want it, we take it, right now.  Instant gratification has become the norm.  It used to be you saved up for things, but now you just plunk down the credit card and it's yours.  Sometimes people use their friends this way too and that is the saddest thing to me.  They take, take, take, never offering to return or pay forward the kindness.  It makes people resentful and less likely to want to help each other.  I saw that first hand at my job a few years ago.  We were having to take a lot of on call time, and we were working a lot of it.  At the end of a long stretch we were tired and crabby and then you had your week night of on call.  Some people tried to give their on call time away or asked others to help them out.  There were a few people who would help, but then when they were tired or needed a break they couldn't get the people that they had helped out to return the favor.  What happened in that case was that EVERYBODY ended up tired and crabby and essentially they turned on each other.  It was awful.   Nobody won.  No culture or society can survive that way for very long.

After reading of these paradoxes of our time I have decided to revisit the story of the little boy on the beach with the starfish.  Remember that story?  The beach was FULL of starfishes and the tide had not yet turned.  The sun was warming up the beach and killing the starfish.  A little boy was picking them up, running out to the water and throwing them back in so they wouldn't die.  A man walking along the shore told him, "Son you can't save them all."  to which the little boy replied star fish in hand, "Maybe not, but I just saved this one." as he threw it in the water, he picked up another star fish, "and this one..." he kept on showing the man what his intentions were.  No he didn't save them all, but he was doing his level best one star fish at a time.   That's how I intend to "right" a few paradoxes of my life, one starfish at a time.