I am a beginner at this blogging lark so the writing below has yet to be fine-tuned and the style refined. But they say just write and the art will come. So here goes.
This week on vacation, with days free of “to do” lists and no place I had to be except on the porch at the beach house we have rented for the week, I quit making excuses about not having time/don’t know what to write/have no idea how to set up a website etc. and signed up for Scott Dinsmore’s 7 Day Start-A-Blog challenge.
Day One – set up my blog. Done!
Day Two – write my first blog about what makes me angry with the world. Why? Quote from the Live Your Legend website – “Dale Carnegie used to say that anyone could become a great public speaker if they were angry enough. And when it comes to helping people and living your legend, starting with your biggest frustrations can open up a lot of ideas as to the difference you want to make. Think of what consistently makes you mad about the world and what you wish was different.”
For those of you who do not know him, Scott Dinsmore created the Live Your Legend community. He was 33 years old and died last week in a freak accident on Mt. Kilimanjaro. I never met Scott but was looking for articles on authenticity and living your passion and discovered his name on the internet. Then I read about the accident. So in the same moment as Scott came into my life, he departed his.
This seemed to be one of those random coincidences in life that turn out to be not so random after all.
Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro has been on my bucket list ever since my husband and I visited Kenya for the first time in 2011. That will need to be the subject of a future blog! I had vowed to go back to Africa one day and also to work on becoming more physically fit – climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro seemed a good way to accomplish both goals.
Now the mountain has taken a vibrant and passionate and lovely young man in his prime. The outpouring of tributes on social media is evidence of the impact Scott has had on so many lives and his legacy will live on. But one still asks why? Imagine how much more he could have done to make this world a better place over the next 33 or 66 years of his life! There are hundreds of people with inspiring messages out there – however, what has struck me most about the tributes to Scott are the stories about his passion and childlike enthusiasm for life. That is what inspired others. Just a spark of that enthusiasm was enough to light a fire in someone else and give them the momentum to follow their dreams. And that connection was enough to get me to finally decide to take the leap of faith, quit listening to the reasons for not doing it and just go ahead and create my blog.
But I digress. The theme of the day is “what makes me angry about the world.” That is an easy one to answer – Cruelty. It doesn’t just make me angry though, It tears my soul apart.
Cruelty in all its forms – poachers hacking off the faces of elephants and rhinos to harvest their tusks and horns; irresponsible dog owners who beat or starve a defenseless animal; men who abuse children, robbing them of their innocence and destroying their lives for ever; caseworkers neglecting the elderly in their care because they no longer have anyone to stand up for them; not to mention soldiers in those areas of the world ravaged by war who rape the women and torture the men and sell off the children into slavery; the governments who show no mercy to the thousands of humans beings fleeing this violence who just want a better life for themselves and for their children.
What turns these people into such evil? What transforms an innocent child into a cold hearted, vicious adult? Is this a cycle that cannot be broken?
The Dalai Lama said that if we could take every single child on planet Earth and have them meditate on compassion for one hour a week, we could eliminate all of the world’s violence with one generation.
Wow! Can it really be that simple? It is such a cliche but can love and compassion and empathy really be the answer?
The other thing that makes me really angry are developers who destroy this world we live in.They have absolutely no clue about the natural environment they wipe off the earth for ever – the birds who nested in the trees; the turtles who lived beside the creeks; the countless insects and mosses and fungi and wild flowers that called those forests and meadows home before they moved in with their bulldozers. They leave behind such desolation – and then “create” sterile rows of houses in cookie cutter neighborhoods with ornamental trees approved by HOAs and lawns laced with chemicals and streetlights and concrete.
This is the disaster behind our house – what used to be 20 acres of forest has been reduced to an empty wasteland.
That is why the film Avatar moved me to such despair that I sobbed for hours after seeing it for the first time. How can we humans show such utter disregard for the world we live in?
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