In my recent article, “Getting to the Heart of the Matter: Living and Loving After Getting a Pacemaker,” I described my recent visit to the doctor and the unexpected news that I needed a pacemaker. Test showed that I was having life-threatening arrhythmia, even though I was not aware of any symptoms.
As my wife, Carlin, and I move into our 80s, we are both aware that our time on earth is limited, though we are doing everything we can to continue to live fully, love deeply, and make a positive difference in the world. We have six grown children, seventeen grand-children, and six great grandchildren. There are some things I have learned that I would like to share with my own children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren as well as others who are seeking guidance during these times of transformation.
I was born in New York City on December 21,1943 during the dark days of World War II. My father had been an actor in New York City and we moved to Los Angeles, California shortly after my birth. They were able to purchase a small house in the San Fernando Valley for $4,000 from a man who had worked for the phone company and built it himself with telephone polls that were given to him in lieu of pay during the war.
I remember my parents had a “victory garden” to grow our own fruits and vegetables and raised chickens. I enjoyed playing outside and though the area was becoming more urbanized there was still a good deal of open area and wild spaces where we could play. The winding Los Angeles River was a few blocks from our house where we caught crawdads in the summer and watched it rage wildly in the winter.
The world I grew up in is very different than the world of today. To address the challenges and opportunities my children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren will face, we must understand our place in the community of life on planet Earth.
Cosmologist Brian Swimme and historian Thomas Berry, authors of The Universe Story, offer the following timeline [dates are approximate based on best science at the time]:
- 15 billion years ago: The universe begins as “a primordial flaring forth.”
- 4 billion years ago: The first life appeared.
- 216 million years ago: First mammals are present.
- 2.6 million years ago: first humans evolved.
Clearly it took billions of years for the first life to appear on Earth and millions of years before mammals evolved. Our human ancestors have been here for a relatively short period of time.
The Challenge we face today is that many of us have forgotten that we are one species among many in the community of life. Most other species have found their place in the community of life and have been here much longer than us. Yet, humans have come to see ourselves as the dominant species.
As Thomas Berry reminds us,
“We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”
The Opportunity we have is that life has been evolving for 4 billion years. There is infinite wisdom to be had. We just need to have humility and courage to learn how to listen.
My long-time friend and colleague Chip Conley has done a great deal in his life.
In a recent newsletter he says,
“In the era of AI, wisdom is making a comeback as AI doesn’t have the most important raw material for making sense of one’s life and the world: lived experience.”
He goes on to say, “I’ve spent two dozen years leading a hotel company, more than seven years being the in-house mentor to the Airbnb founders, and now eight years creating the world’s first midlife wisdom school, so I have some raw material. My definition of wisdom is ‘metabolized experience mindfully shared for the common good.’ It’s something real and maybe more important than ever.”
Here are a few things I will share from my own lived experience acquired over the last 82 years. From the time I was five years old I loved to climb the trees in our yard. My mother would come out to call me in for lunch and she soon learned that if I wasn’t playing in the yard I would be up in one of the trees. Once I got into the trees, I would keep climbing until I was high enough that I could feel the wind gently blowing and the limb I was on would sway back and forth.
I would call down with delight to my mother on the ground. I could tell by her voice that it scared her to have her only child high up in a tree afraid he might fall to his death. But for me, I felt safe in the trees. It was the human world that seemed confusing and conflicted. In the tree I felt held and at home.
I never wanted to swing in the trees like I saw in the Tarzan movies I later watched on television. I just wanted to feel connected to the sky, listen to the birds, the wind, and the natural rhythms of life. I believe trees have a lot to teach us. In their book, The Universe Story, Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry say the first trees evolved 370 million years ago.
David Attenborough, the world’s best-known natural history filmmaker, describes the loss of biodiversity in his book, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and Vision for the Future. He says,
“The spiraling decline of our planet’s biodiversity is the true tragedy of our time. Only when billions of different individual organisms make the most of every resource and opportunity they encounter, and millions of species lead lives that interlock so that they sustain each other, can the planet run efficiently.”
Since humans have arrived, we have come to dominate the planet, and we are in danger of destroying our life-support system during the three epochs in human history:
The Pleistocene is the geological epoch (Approximately 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) during which humans and other large mammals including bears, wolves, and wooly mammoths, evolved.
The Holocene (11,700 to the present) is the epoch which facilitated the development of agriculture and permanent settlements. It is marked by a warmer climate following the last Ice Age, leading to the development of agriculture and permanent settlements.
Although not officially designated as a geological epoch, the Anthropocene is seen as being dominated by the spread of humans throughout the world. It is proposed to have begun in the mid-20th century, though its exact start is debated.
Throughout my life, I have been passionately interested in how humans can best fit in with the other species in the community of life and have observed the tremendous loss of diversity that David Attenborough addresses.
My hope is that the adults of our present world will think of the lives of our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren and change our ways before it is too late.
“The Anthropocene could yet mark the beginning of a new and sustainable relationship between ourselves and our planet,” says David Attenborough. “It could be a time in which we learn to work with nature rather than against it.”
I look forward to your own experiences, thoughts and feelings. Come visit me at MenAlive and subscribe to my free weekly newsletter.
Disclaimer: This story is auto-aggregated by a computer program and has not been created or edited by healthlydays.
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