The world will continue only if all of us survive and all of us win. It will destruct if we qualify life and determine that only some of us must survive and some of us must win. Life on earth hangs, balanced upon a knife-edge and the slightest error now shall cut the line and relegate our world and ourselves to doom. A doom that was the brainchild of our own fallacies, seeded by our selfishness and watered by our greed. Not one of us can be singled out as not having contributed to it in some form or other, in greater or lesser degree. We know that all of us are culpable. Massively so.
However, we also recognize in our lessening, in our self-destructive debilitation, an inherent and undeniable albeit frustrating and agonizing beauty to our kaleidoscopically colored and shaded world, its plants, its animals and its people. In that diversity, we know people are varied in their thoughts, words, actions and desires and each possesses a gamut of qualities ranging from the very good to the very bad but all of it is what makes up the reality of us and ours. In these dark times we live in, we truly know that when given the choice, we more often choose wrong than choose right. We, therefore, choose to be kind. First to ourselves and the possibility that we shall err and fail and then towards that very possibility inherent in every other sentient being. We will be moved by the sum total of suffering yet never allow mere emotion to color our thinking. We shall default rather, to sober assessments of the infinitely complex condition we call life and they ways in which it ebbs and flows, connecting and disconnecting from its constituent components, moved by forces that we cannot always control. We shall know, truly, that we will never be able to help harmonize life on earth if we are not in harmony with ourselves and those that we are trying to succor.
We shall know then, that in our world, we can never consider another being either a competitor or an opponent. We shall find, in ourselves, the strength to empathize with those who believe they contend with us, with those who believe they must oppose us. We shall recognize that by taking such a position, we are infinitely compounding and complexifying the things we believe are worth doing. We promise not to shirk our work and shall try, always, to do what we must not merely do what we can and therefore, resolve never to take the paths of personal advantage or those of least resistance. We promise to walk far, walk fast and walk with every other, upon the many paths that are cut by default by our own empathy and love of life. Above all, we promise, in all of the journeys we undertake, to walk ever so light upon the living body of our mother, earth.
THE GREEN MOVEMENT OF SRI LANKA
