Okay, this title is rather self-explanatory. The end. No, really, so very much depends on how you look at things. Even spectacularly important big things, things that seem so obviously “good” or “bad”. Maybe a better way to say this is everything is relative, but that seems to scare or offend many people. Remember, there is always a seed of Yin (“good” or “bad” or whatever) in every drop of “Yang” (once again “good” or “bad” or whatever). Still another way to say this is “everything is change”. Sorry, it just is.
We of course see this when we look at tiny things or really big things. This reveals itself at high super high energies and ultra-low ones as well. I really wish that the revered tomes of the great religions and philosophies had an explicit succinct line in them somewhere that said “Everything is relative”. I know that to many this would be heresy, but to me it would be the boldest, most loving, most humane, most beautiful thing possible. It would allow us to finally become human and finally start living and loving. We need to get out of our heads and into our hearts and guts.
One concrete example of this, one particular rabbit-hole that I will now be plunging us down into, is to reflect on my career at a major oil company working as a chemical engineer many(many!) years ago. Of course, we could invent a similar story for someone at a social media company or drug company or religious leader or politician or soldier or whatever or whoever, but I will speak from experience. Consider a twenty-three-year-old chemical engineer working at Big Oil, inc. Some of my friends virtually disowned me when I accepted a job with Big Oil and not in Big Pharma or consumer products or virtually any other space. But, what did I actually do there? I generally worked on projects to reduce pollution in the environment and human contact with nasty chemicals. I was actually making the world cleaner and healthier. But, dig a little deeper, peel back that onion, I was also enabling the perpetuation of hydrocarbon reliance and social inequity. Absolutely. There was Yin in my Yang. But keep digging (or peeling or changing the angle you look at things) and you must consider that if I wasn’t doing that work someone else would. The hole just keeps going down and down. What would a different person in my position have done when asked explicitly to manufacture data to support the construction of a novel process (at high temperatures, pressures, involving humans and flammable hydrocarbons)? Would they have done better or worse or the same as me? What could I have been doing “better” with my time and talent? Would developing drugs that allowed us all to eat even more processed food and exercise even less and still live have been better? Or if I helped cure cancer but the products of my work were only available to the wealthy, further solidifying our world as not one but really two, those that have and those that have not? Maybe the above is just self-justifying guilty nervous energy. Was my subsequent time building furniture and art and raising a child “better” or “ more correct”? Importantly, could I have even built furniture or helped contribute a beautiful smart compassionate new human into the world without working to reduce benzene in the motor gasoline pool? And where did that benzene go?
How about the Ukraine. Are we doing good by supplying weapons into a warzone? Would we be doing better if we also sent troops? Should we do nothing? Should we recreate prudently? What if we start a nuclear war with Russia? Would that be good or bad? We don’t know the long game for the universe, we don’t know this will “all play out”, this iteration or the next after the next big bang, called unofficially Event 27.4KL.
Don’t judge. Be present. Love your neighbor. Love yourself. Be brave. Leave things better than how you found them. Listen more and talk less. Be kind when it is possible. It is always possible. You are a good person. You could be doing better, or worse. That is what it is to be human, relatively, more or less!
