You and I are but individuals from among billions of others in a long succession of travelers on this thing we call the treadmill of life.  How we got here is about as foreign to our state of knowledge as where we are going when we leave.  Still, we are likely to learn more about both the origin and the next destination that awaits us by careful and diligent use of our brains than by reliance on anything in our past, or on clerics, fortunetellers, or in the contents of crystal balls. We will leave both ends of that discussion open for another time and circumstance.  This essay concerns where we are now, and how our actions can better serve us today and in preparation for the future.

More likely than not, the best that most of us can expect to achieve in this life is to become the change we would like to see in others.  There is much wisdom in that observation.  Self improvement is difficult enough; changing the world is many orders of magnitude more tiring.  Whether our collective actions can alter the continuing formation of the universe in any significant way, however, is not yet discernable. If 95 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, mysterious stuff about which we know nothing except that logic tells us it is there, then we are still lost in an infinitesimally tiny region of the universe’s background noise.  Some forward thinkers nevertheless are busy searching for a unified theory of everything, while other diligent investigators have yet to understand consciousness, or how the heart beats, or why ice is slippery. 

This much we can know with reasonable certainty:  Our history here on Earth is marked by many mistakes and atrocious errors as well as by a few glorious achievements.  The forces of Nature and of men will bend to our will only if we study them, discover them, learn from them, and plan for them in the future.  We must learn not only from our own mistakes but from the lessons of history so that we do not repeat the same errors; we need to continually bank that knowledge and safeguard it until it is as fundamental to our survival as is breathing. Always curious, ever skeptical, we must plow onward in measured, timely steps.

In our societal pursuits it is a huge mistake to think that we can elect persons by popular vote to high positions and expect that they will outperform themselves, their motives, or their talents; yet we persist in doing exactly that at great cost to us all in life and treasure.  It is also a mistake to think that thugs and tyrants can force their way to the same high level positions but who will then miraculously become beneficent persons acting in and for the common good.  We are all in this life together, and we dare not relinquish too much control to narrow thinkers in spite of our need to take decisive actions from time to time to save ourselves from ourselves. 

We can and we must learn that waste, pollution, and greed are all undesirable. In commerce profits is not a dirty word except when it bumps into greed, a dastardly dirty human pursuit.  At some point we need to distinguish and separate the two into virtuous format and language so that everyone knows and understands the difference, and all will stop short of entering that dark zone of greed.  It is something that social scientists, theologians, and educators can expand on and bring some rules of behavior to the task of constraining one, and containing the other. 

Many of us know intuitively that most of what we see in architecture, in transportation, in medicine, in science, in law, and in government is vastly improved over the past.  Still, all are sub optimal in terms of resource use, in wasted efforts, and in outcomes not reached.  All can be improved by computer programming, by modeling, and by simulation such that all get on and stay on pathways to more efficiency, better predictability, and to general progress. 

There are still hundreds of ways in which we are guilty of degrading, despoiling, and holding others in poverty, in slavery, and in hopelessness.  We must hold ourselves to higher standards as individuals so that our purpose and our becoming reflect our best instincts.  Our resolve to become what we imagine can be articulated.  We need to set about that task.

On the cosmic scale we know that our planet traverses our sun in the most livable temperate zone for life; that a heavy moon keeps the Earth from wobbling, while it brings order to tides; it controls our rotational speed thus allowing for seasons and the replenishment of life. Our atmosphere is protected from deadly radiation by our magnetic core; otherwise life here would vanish in very short order.  Whether these factors all happened by chance or by design does not change our need to continue to investigate life, to learn more about our place in it, to thrive and to prevail.  Whether we accept our roles as accidental riders in a purposeless cosmos, or the recipients of the gift of life from something beyond our present abilities to comprehend, our rules for survival remain the same:  to live, to love, to respect, and to cherish each other.  This place we call home is the only one we know and in which we have some limited say about its future.  In spite of our differences, few doubt that we have free choice in those matters that are also most important to us and to our survival.  We give up on ourselves at our own peril.  Let us push on.