The optimism of accepting the inevitability of death
War in Context
… with attention to the unseen
Nate Hagens recently gave a presentation (on a video over at energybulletin.net) in which he said that pessimism is a form of cowardice. As an avowed pessimist, I felt the sting of that. His point is that we use it as an excuse to evade our responsibility. But I think that we have reached such a stage in our relations with the planet, that there really is no reasonable individual response to the catastrophe which we have created. The only real possibility that is left for us as individuals is to mourn our collective as well as our individual passing with equanimity and a breadth of vision sufficient to see the beauty of nature’s inevitable processes of birth and death and rebirth.