Tag: charities

I was listening to a feature on the BBC World Service about the Afghan women’s football team, who have recently been reunited in New Zealand. My eyes flooded with tears. Now, I have no particular reason to feel this way about refugee Afghan sportswomen, but the tears came up anyway, from somewhere deep down. Not for the first time: this is happening quite often, prompted by the smallest of triggers.

Yesterday it was a little bat: it comes out at dusk, swooping around in our farmyard, catching insects attracted by the lights in my cabin. Up came the tears, set off by an upwelling feeling for the lonely struggle of the bat to find food, thanks to a serious decline in insect populations in Britain. Yes, that bat and its fellows could be doomed by the unthought-through ecological malpractices of the British people, blithely getting on with our lives, worrying about the prices of school uniforms, avocados and tankfuls of petrol.

Another was a story about computer programmers in Gaza, trying to find work internationally, on laptops retrieved and refurbished from the rubble – they just want to feed their families. Another was a story about seamen stuck on boats in the Persian Gulf – they just want to go home. Their kids haven’t seen them for ages. They’re victims of a geriatrically whimsical president in a faraway country who labours under the belief that his priorities are bigger and more important than everyone else’s.

These aren’t just narrowband tears restricted to feelings of pain and sadness. Sometimes I emerge from these soggy interludes with a smile and a feeling of relief – not because relief is imminent for these poor souls, but because of the tender humanity and emotional solidarity that lies within these feelings. This human vulnerability, so easy to bomb, mow down and bulldoze, is where the future of humanity lies.

Our desensitised world is so caught up in its dramas that we forget what we’re here for. Though we have a wide spectrum of feelings about the state of the world, collectively we have lost our emotional anchorage, our moral compass. We’re burdened with enough of our own problems, and distant people are another matter. It’s a sad dilemma, this.

Occasionally bursts of empathy come along when we see lines of refugees in a futile trek over the mountains, heading for refugee camps far from home, or a baby lying dead on a beach on the edge of the rich world. That child had lost its chance for a better life – a life of cars, refrigerators and the juggling of timetables and monthly bills.

But mostly, while we get empathic twinges as the media trot out yet another disaster in someone else’s backyard, we don’t have time. We have to get on with stuff. This is the way in which, on this planetary world, we’re unwittingly destroying ourselves, as well as all the other critters and species who nowadays find themselves dependent on our decisions and behaviour. I’d love things to be otherwise but, well, sorry, I’m too busy right now.

Nevertheless, we are all empaths underneath, true humans at heart, and herein lies a big solution. Not in arguments about net zero or GDP, but in a feeling of human togetherness and shared vulnerability. We’re all in this together, sharing as we do a rather small world. Yes, even billionaires are lonely and afraid.

Our current global trajectory pushes us in a direction where, to our horror and surprise, we might rediscover a big truth – that it is in our own best interests to prioritise everyone’s interest. To make sacrifices in our own lives, just as the world’s victims and underdogs today are doing for us.

It’s in our best interest to let those tears come up. To feel the pain of the world. And its tender joy, sprouting like springtime flowers in the nightmarish wastelands of today. To forgive ourselves for screwing up. To see things with another optic. To set the past behind us, entering the future facing forwards.

Whatever unfolds in the coming decades, our descendants shall one day live in a new world, whatever form that takes – we are creating it now. We’re getting closer to a showdown, a catharsis of global choice, and we’re all here for that. If you wish to escape it, that’s fine, but you’ll be missing something – missing the redemption of a planetary world. It’s the biggest game in town. And it’s happening in our own hearts.

That’s what came up for me this morning.

With love, Palden.