It is important to say; you can never approach any matter truly objectively - we've all been taught our own particular socio-religious conventions & institutions, and, unless you are a very young child, you will always have some bias. Even that isn't quite true, language itself can add bias or alter perceptions depending on its structure & grammatical rules.
Because of this schism in human perceptions, I've always found travelling and visiting other places can give you a new angle on the way others do and think things.
It's tough to say what I find so attractive about travelling. I am quite a solitary guy so it isn't necessarily about meeting new people, although it's nice when it happens. I enjoy seeing the beauty of the land, and nature is in it's very essence gorgeous, as are we all. I suppose in fact I do go to see people, but exactly that, to watch, to observe, find out how different demographics view the world and the differences in societies. Maybe I hope this will imbue me with a greater understanding of our species as a whole and allow me to gauge where we're headed.
The problem is, I think we are headed for disaster, not for the planet, but disaster for humanity, and we're going to take a lot of nature with us too. The environment has been so altered by man's attempt to control nature, to 'tame' it out of fear it'll consume us and make chaos out of our nice structured little world. It is because of this and some warped sense of head long 'progress' that we find ourselves on the brink of ecological genocide.
But man grew from this earth, from this universe, so why do we find ourselves so at odds with nature? It seems to be a deep-rooted fear somehow that what we've started will be reclaimed, taken back by nature. We kill weeds for the sake of neatness, we are wiping out the bee population through reckless meddling for our own benefit, we are destroying the forests through greed & ignorance.
The bee issue is a particularly pressing one. If bees disappear because of us we are only serving ourselves a delayed death sentence. You see everything is interconnected in nature, what may seem to us as conflict (like the predator/prey relationship) is actually symbiosis when you look at the big picture. In fact, when we start breaking down the whole web of web and start classifying relationship & form we totally lose sight of the absolute interconnectedness of everything. Every forest we destroy, every piece of land paved over for our convenience is another nail in the coffin for both us and much of this web.
We have to start thinking about where we as a species want to be down the stream of time. Do we have to survive? This is a big question - why do we need to survive as a species? This goes back to what I said before about underlying bias. Most of us, at least in the West, have been raised and told 'you must survive'. Why? Is this a genetic pressure? Or do we cling to life like it's a life raft in a raging sea?
When I was a boy I used to think it would be great to live out of the land, to go back to our hunter gatherer roots and live in the jungle, surrounded by beauty, living in some kind of harmony with the voices of Gaia, as it were. Unfortunately I think we've come too far down the road we as a species are travelling for that to happen.
Let's have a look at what brought us here in the first place - 'progress'. Why do we feel everything should get 'better', which is such a subjective term by the way? We are never happy just stopping, taking a collective deep breath and then analysing what we really desire and what we actually need and what makes more sense looking ahead. I suppose that is because many of us do not know what we need or what we desire. This is entirely normal and nothing to fear, but most of us, I'd say probably over most of the world, have been implanted with the desire of material wealth, having a lot of pieces of paper which you can use to buy things. But where does the money actually go? What do we use it for? To buy objects which we use as luxury items, and then dispose of after we've had our fun. There is a culture in the West in particular that you can buy happiness through gadgets, fast cars, status symbols etc. Many of us, and I know people like this, will tire very quickly of their 'life enriching devices' and then buy another to fill some kind of hole they feel inside. This is fundamentally unsustainable. Not only is it crazy but it's damaging the environment even more, more carbon in the atmosphere, more plastic choking the shores and tundra of this earth and strangling life. And fundamentally what an empty life that is, to exist to buy, to be a good consumer and never to appreciate anything natural, to spend ones life in a concrete jungle always looking for the next 'treat'. What we really need is food, drink, shelter, companionship. The rest can go to hell as far as I'm concerned.
I think experience is the only "real" thing in our lives, personally I want to try everything there is to try, and by that I mean all sensations, tastes, textures, smells, sounds, FEELINGS! What more could you possibly want from life? And if you want a family and all the responsibilities that go with that, good for you, go for it, but do it because you want to, not out of some sense of duty or some twisted loyalty to your family name or even your genes.
Ultimately, as I intimated earlier, I think we're destined for doom as a species, but does it matter? Science has brought us to the point where we now know an asteroid or comet will eventually wipe us out if we 'stand still' so everyone is dashing around like idiots trying to force 'progress' on everything. We ARE nature, if we go, we'll be back around, in some other form maybe even on another planet. And we'll likely make the same mistakes again and repeat the cycle over and over, but why is that such a problem? Why can't we just enjoy experience & life and forget saving ourselves from every possibility of danger? By enjoy, I don't mean just enjoy per se, what I mean is we should all be natural. Feelings come to us by themselves, if we want to weep, we should, not hold it back because of some daft macho motion that 'boys don't cry'. That's society talking right there, not reality, not what you feel! So you are free to enjoy, or to be sad, angry, frustrated, the entire gamut of emotions, because fundamentally this is what we are after all.
When you think about it past and present are abstractions, there is only an endless now, so when people say 'live in the moment', it may sound like a cliché, but where else do you exist?
