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While we claim to admire people and groups who achieve great things — achievements most people think of as impossible — many of us live quiet lives of desperation, resigned to taking various anesthetics to make things more tolerable. Record amounts of anti-depressants are consumed and addiction to various substances and behaviors is standard fare. Clearly we have become a society that has renounced its idealism and traded it for lives of busy nothingness. The best available explanation is we find it too painful to maintain our idealism; the disappointment is too difficult to handle. But we pay a price for renouncing our idealism. We give up a piece of our soul — as people, as nations, and as citizens of the world.
While we have made huge technological advances in recent years, and have gained widespread wisdom from sages throughout the ages, many of us wonder why we haven't achieved the peaceful and secure existence here on Earth we claim to want. In the past century we have experienced breakthroughs of all kinds that allow us to create the kind of world we want for ourselves. So it isn't a matter of the conditions being right. We have the wherewithal!
The cynic's cry, "it will always be the way it has been." This a disillusioned perspective, resigned to the present reality being as good as it gets. This is hardly the adventurous human eager to explore the unknown, setting out on the quest for what lies over the horizon. The cynic has lost the spirit of adventure, spirit of exploration and, perhaps, the spirit of being human.
Let us re-engage that inner explorer in us and leave space to NASA and the other outer space experts. Let us leave the oceans to the people already engaged in those explorations and leave the study of subatomic particles to the world's scientists. With all these people and organizations fully engaged in their adventures into these uncharted territories, there are still at least five billion of us who could start exploring who we are and what we want.
We have everything we need to transform society except, perhaps, the will. The first step is to choose. We must decide the promise of humanity is important enough to stand for it...and stand tall for it with all our might! Then we may get closer to answering the question of who we are and start acting more consistently with what we want.