I’d like to take you on an imaginary trip today. I think we
all need to get out of here and imagine a life free of pettiness,
disappointment and clawing selfishness.
Now, I’m not at all interested in utopia (from the Greek, eu=good, top=place); Sir Thomas More first coined the term in 1516 in his book
by the same name. He wanted what we all want; a peaceful, secure society in
which everything moves smoothly.
Unfortunately all attempts (fictional or actual) to create a
utopia have ended in death and destruction – John the Savage hanging from the
lighthouse at the end of Brave New World,
or the horror that was the Soviet Union, which, for the “greater good,” starved
30 million people. Given man’s unending twistedness, utopias inevitably become
dystopias (dys from the Greek – bad,
ill).
The problem with More’s approach is that it depended on
outside systems to arrange the copacetic conditions he dreamed of, and outside
systems always depend on outside force which means that people die. What I
propose is internal and dependent on no one but our selves. After all, that’s
all we can really control.
I’ve been reading an amazing book entitled Choosing Gratitude by Nancy Leigh DeMoss
and it has me thinking – what would America look like if we were still a
grateful nation – if a large percentage of us quit complaining and spent our
thinking time in a state of praise and thanksgiving? Let’s imagine…
We’d hear a lot less whining about anyone’s “fair share.”
We’d be so glad that we live in a land where there’s an opportunity to get rich
that we would begrudge no one his success.
Years ago my brilliant son-in-law had a chance, through MIT
where he was doing his graduate work, to go to Northern Pakistan, high in the
Himalayas, to study insulation possibilities for the homes of people living in
inaccessible mountain villages. The people there subsisted mostly on bad goat
meat and dried apricots, sheltered by precarious mud and stone houses.
