Editorial-March

Editor(EN), The Seed

Novanita Sharma

‘The flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.”

                                                                                                                           –Zen Shin

It seems that the most sophisticated creation of Nature has forgotten this very essence of ‘just blooming’. Man is a social animal. We often get to hear this adage; it hurts our superfluous human ego to accept the fact that we do get labelled as ‘animals’ sometimes. Well, the point is our environment matters to us but our self-conceited conquests impede us from recognising the significance of other life forms which surrounds us and makes our life possible on this planet. Our environment has a profound influence on us and we too contribute to the construct of our environment in return. Human beings have influenced the environment of earth like no other species in the past 7 million years since the emergence of our first pre-historic ancestors in the planet. The human history marred with violent conflicts and tales of undefeatable human spirit commemorates our journey so far which stimulated an unavoidable change in all aspects of our environment, viz; social, economic and ecological. When a fragrant flower blooms in our garden, every other humble plant in the garden basks in the beauty of the blooming fragrance, in a similar way the reign of humanity has left its mark in its environment. The impact of human civilizations is been felt in every part of this planet; from the unseen depths of the oceans to the snowclad mountain tops, there’s hardly any corner spared by us. Now, the problem is this that we failed to benefit our environment and the fellow living beings through our interactions and actions so far. On the contrary, we are the biggest cause of irreparable damage to our environment. There’s no need of any sermon here to elucidate the cause of this mayhem, we exhausted our intelligence mostly on our short-sighted pursuits of progress and glory. We name it career goals, living standards, sovereignty, GDP so on and so forth, we have enhanced our skills in pursuing these races through subsequent generations which describe the collective mindscape of humanity in the contemporary world. We allowed competition to supersede our capacity to act with compassion. This tenure of humanity failed in contributing to the well-being of our surroundings. Our visions often blurred with pseudo divisive factors couldn’t benefit mankind and the planet as a whole. Our minds mostly cluttered with materialistic goals down sided the universality of our world. All living beings has a common goal, we all are in the common pursuit of happiness and we all are caught up in the plight of our sufferings. Even the tiniest living being wants to be happy, the tiniest form of life also wants to escape pain. Our victories are partly failures too, because it encompasses the defeat of our opponents to a large extent, there’s no escape from the interconnectedness of our world. The prolific human civilizations around the world encompass the unaccounted loss and sacrifices of countless species which sustained our glory at the cost of their lives, at times at the cost of their extermination from the face of the planet. The modern humanity especially failed to understand this web of life; propelled with science and technological advances, we seem to have lost our direction in our feat to glory. Mankind rose above all species because of its intelligence, it is of utmost importance to direct our intelligence for benefit of mankind, for the benefit of all living beings. This direction comes from the pure motivation for compassion instead of competition. While we pursue our goals and aspirations, we ought to have compassion for all. There is an urgent need to replace our cold-minded competitiveness with warm-hearted actions towards the well-being and peace of all.  This is high time for human world to overhaul our thinking process, let it be a world where the success of a person is judged by his/her individual altruistic capacity; let the peace-makers, the change makers lead our ways. Let us bring this change in our environment by bringing effective changes in our inner worlds. Human intelligence has immense capacity, what we have lost can be restored maybe not completely but to a great extent with our ingenuity. We still have hope to reinstate our world if only we make our minds.  Our forests, rivers, oceans, mountains are an integral part of our civilizations, these natural expanses are inseparable from our consciousness. Scientific researches and policies alone cannot rescue these wild spaces from its crisis until we set out with a sincere motivation of compassion for all. It’s time we relearn to ‘just bloom’ with a heart of full of love and a mind at peace. We too are capable of ‘just blooming’, we just need to discover our true selves and we must do it without further delay.   

 

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