We are herd animals. We live in groups and depend on each other for survival, food, defense against hostile forces, and the elements. We believe that we are in an orderly Universe, that the future is predictable, and we can be assured the sun will rise tomorrow. But our day-to-day existence is governed by chance and accidental events, over which we have little to no control, more than we care to admit.
We are entering the third year in which our lives have been ruled by trying to avoid a 3 micron particle of Ribose Nucleic Acid wrapped in a fatty envelope, that likely was enhanced in a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Whatever they say as to why they were helping that little bundle of proto life become more robust is of little importance now. The front window of a vehicle is bigger than the back window because what is in front is where we are going. Looking forward is more important. It is here now, and it has killed 5,000,000 of us. It keeps us confined. It makes us wear masks to filter the air we breathe, although not all that efficiently. And it mandates that we get injected with fragments of it so that our immune system can develop complex molecules to destroy it if we are invaded by it. However, that has also turned out to be only a partial and temporary protection at this point. Science is not the whole truth. However, science is our only hope to find all of the truth eventually. Science does not lie. When new evidence comes along, we swap out the more recent version for the obsolete version.
Much of our life revolves around controlling our environment to make it safe, habitable, and provide a pleasant, abundant, and enjoyable life. We learn an occupation that will provide some of those amenities. We build a shelter to protect us from heat, cold, wind, rain, etc. Some of us spend the majority of our waking hours in that pursuit. One person that has imbibed too much C2H5OH (alcohol) can wipe that out in milliseconds of incoordination on the I-5, and those kinds of accidents kill about 40,000 of us every year.
Forty percent of us will eventually contract cancer, a disease of the DNA that makes our cells multiply for no apparent reason, destroying other cells essential to existence. About half of us eventually succumb to that process. How do you get cancer? We still don’t know, but it has something to do with DNA getting the wrong message and making useless cells that overwhelm the good cells. We learn to avoid things like radiation, certain chemicals, and certain viruses, but we haven’t got the foggiest in most cases. Life is a crapshoot! Some of us are lucky, and others are not.
So how do we deal with all of this? I have learned a few Universal Maxims that I believe will help us. GOOD IS BETTER THAN EVIL. You must do the right thing and avoid the wrong. Admittedly there are times when it is difficult to tell the two apart, but most of the time, we know. And with that goes, TRUTH IS BETTER THAN FALSEHOODS. Telling them apart is easier said than done. We have evolved eyes, ears, and a brain. We must use them to differentiate truth from lies by using our senses and our sense. We must rely on ourselves and not take others’ judgment to be correct. At a minimum, we must evaluate all others’ opinions before accepting them.
Every morning when we wake up, we have a choice, we can look at all the evil and all the bad, or we can look at what we can do to improve it. We have a choice to be sad or happy. HAPPY IS BETTER, and it is in our power to decide which it will be.
If an activity is worth doing, it is worth doing well. Good enough is not good enough! EVERY TASK WE TAKE ON SHOULD BE WORTH DOING WELL. And if a job you did has issues, you need to accept that this was your job, your responsibility, good or bad. Pointing fingers is what the weak use to avoid responsibility.
Life forms adapt to the environment. That is what life is all about. If there is a virus that is killed by specific antibodies we can’t make, we have invented vaccines to give us those antibodies.
Adaptation is a characteristic of all life. My mother’s favorite words to me were, “You must learn to adjust!” Humans have adapted in order to survive. Survival beats the opposite!