So I was sitting on my surfboard a few weeks ago on a glorious Australian morning, while the first golden beams of new light were piercing the clouds, morphing into a perfect soft pink. As I watched the sunrise I couldn’t help but have one of those moments where the world seems almost perfect, with so much potential.
The only problem with this equation was that when I turned to face the beach, in order to catch a wave, I couldn’t help but see all the cars and buildings on the shore line, to see the paradox of the human condition.
There are two things that come to mind when I see the human condition around me. The first is, is it too late to save the world? Have we come so far down a one-way road now that our situation is irreparable? Is a terrible finish for the human race now just a question of time?
The other is, if there is a meaning to life, why don’t we know what it is? Should we expect the answer to this seemingly unanswerable question to be as simple and obvious as the answers to so many of the other historically seemingly unanswerable questions like whether the world was flat or where the variety of life on earth came from.
Surely after thousands of years of civilization we should be closer to knowing the answer to the question of good vs evil.
There is so much sadness, cynicism and anger in the world, I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to hear some good inspiring news on the TV at night.
If I’m honest about my thoughts, most of the time I try not to think about these sorts of questions because I can never find a feasible answer and it only leaves me feeling depressed. There are only so many times you can whack your head against a wall hoping its going to break. I generally like to tell myself it’s other people on the planet that are the cause of the problems.
But that’s the frightening thing about the human condition. The title “condition” would suggest that it involves all of us, possibly it’s my own selfishness, my own egocentricity that is the cause of the problem?
What can we do about it? I’m no genius, I’ve had a pretty good education and I’ve been lucky enough to come from a lovely country, but I know, as I said, I spend most of my time trying to block out the questions that leave me feeling helpless.
And if the profits that created some of the great religions in the world or philosophers like Plato, couldn’t solve the issue, then who can and where will it come from?
While I don’t know the answer to the human condition, I do know that I have an unexplainable feeling that we will one day explain the paradox of our nature.
Those beautiful sunrise’s simply remind me of that.