Tomorrow
This morning in Church the pastor took the easy way of giving a homily sermon, by giving some sayings about time like the “The Time is Now” and than asking us for sayings about time. There were many of them, some persons contributing a number of sayings. My contribution was “There is a time for everything.” At the end of this first day of 2008 the phrase about time that rings in my mind is “There will be time tomorrow.” I say this since all the self-improvements I thought of working on the coming year, I probably did not keep today: watching less TV (did a lot today), eating too much (did a lot today) exercising more (did not do today) and on and on. Well there is always tomorrow but tomorrow will be built on today no matter how much I will it to be different. In my growing age, I have come to realize, if not always practice, that change comes slowly and there are many more forces behind what we do than will power. In fact in most changes, like in nature, we must let go, before we can change.
In nature there is a lot of interdependence but not much independence. Change happens, and when nature is left to be, the change is good — at least in the long term. In my too much TV-watching today I saw an interview on PBS with Vandana Shuiva, the Indian scientist whose book “Earth Democracy” I have been reading and quoting recently. She was being challenged for her worldwide leadership against the forces of economic globalization. The interviewer was challenging her that her fight for the rights of small sustainable farmers was keeping persons in poverty, as her critics have contended. She took the challenge on and showed how just the opposite was true, that globalization was making a small class richer but the overwhelming majority of the world was become poorer. “Earth Democracy”, as she calls economics for us, is a return to basic values of working for “common good”, keeping in common, not privatizing nature and its forces. Change in this type of world would be natural and be built on our interdependence rather that our will to be independent. The common good would reign over the individual good. The interviewer brought up the old charge that in this type of world, with a lack of motivation to accumulate individual wealth the world would suffer. She pointed out how in the world of nature that the inderdependent creatures are the fittest. In her book on p 54 she quotes the scientist and philosopher Peter Kropotkin who writes:
So my prayer today, the first day of the year, is that tomorrow, I can let go and be more in touch with my nature which is to be a person for others, and in this way find the time for myself.
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