What Have You Adapted To?

“He who controls the present controls the past
and he who controls the past controls the future.”
George Orwell

A couple of nights ago I woke from a deep sleep in the middle of the night to the sound of a car horn blaring. I lay there for a while waiting for the owner to turn it off and when that didn’t happen I decided I’d better get up and do something about it.

Opening the front door I was confronted by deep orange flames reaching high into the still night sky. My brain, still vague from sleep, struggled to understand what was going on so I cautiously edged down the driveway to take a closer look.

The image that confronted me was so far outside my frame of reference that I wondered if I was still dreaming because there before me was a car with flames coming out of its windows. As if on cue one of the windows exploded with a load bang, shattering glass at my feet, and to signal the car’s demise the horn slowly lost its tone and descended into silence.

Without a breath of wind, and now with no blaring horn, the only sound left was the roaring of the flames and the now, more frequent, explosions as various bits of the car decided to depart with a bang.

It took me a while to relate what I was seeing before me with something vaguely connected and sadly (fortunately?) the closest I could get was a movie scene.

“What happens next?” I wondered, scrolling back through my memories and then hitting play in my mind until I could see the scene where, yes, next frame the car explodes! Ooops time to head inside and call the fire brigade!

In due course they did arrive and put the car out but it left me deeply disturbed and wondering what had happened to my peaceful seaside village.

We humans have an amazing ability to adapt. I remember living in South Africa, a country which unfortunately has a recent history of violence. After being there for a while it was nothing to hear of car jackings and even home invasions – they were just common place. Even when one of the local farmers was hacked to death with a panga (bush knife) by his garden boy it was met with nods of acknowledgement and reluctant acceptance that this was the environment we were living in.

So, what have you adapted to that you might not accept if you looked upon it with fresh eyes? In the World for some bizarre reason we have accepted that we are destroying the environment. We have adapted to a way of living that is killing our planet and despite all of the evidence our leaders still find it all too hard to change.

Why?

“Never doubt the power of a simple revolutionary idea to create a better world”

We’ve just adapted that’s all.

If I lived in a war torn country I might wake up in the night, see a car on fire and simply dismiss it as ‘normal’. But would it be ok?

Here in my community we saw it as being totally unacceptable and immediately there was action to do something about it. This was not going to become the ‘norm’ for the future. Steps would be taken to rectify this abnormality.

Why is this not happening on a global scale?

What is our collective Vision for the future?

What is your Vision for the future?

What has become ‘normal’ in your World that is totally out of alignment with what you really want?

What are you going to do about it?