Save Our Species - S.O.S.

There have been a few core values that have dictated every choice in my life. 

1. Self honesty
2. A belief that I can do what ever I choose to do
3. To do the best I can at what ever I choose to do
4. Respect for others
5. To reject outside authority unless it meets all the above criteria

As far back as I can remember, I have walked into the wind. I have questioned everything I have ever been told I must do or accept. If it hasn’t met the standards I set myself, I have refused to accept it even if it has meant personal loss. I’ve had more than my fair share of sandy ice-cream and so have the poor souls who have chosen to stand by me. At times, I know this has made me a difficult person to live with and I can only wonder at my wife’s enduring patience and faithfulness. Especially in view of the fact that I have also refused to be constrained by convention with regards to relationships.

There seemed to be plenty of costs and rarely any benefits and I found myself questioning many times if I wasn’t just an egocentric buffoon who insisted on having  things my own way.

Something inside has always held me firm on my path though. It started from a conversation I had with my parents when I was about 15. My sense of the universe had started to mature a few years earlier, after a defining moment of realisation that not I, my family, my country nor even our planet were at the centre of the universe. This new point of view profoundly changed the nature of my relationship to everything. I attempted to comprehend my place in relation an infinite universe but could only shrink back dwarfed by the unimaginable vastness of it. Troubled by the countless questions I didn’t know the answer to, I found that every question lead to more questions. Eventually I realised that my unanswered questions were insignificant in comparison to the infinite number of answers I hadn’t even imagined the questions to yet.

Uncertainty didn’t seem to trouble any one else though, everyone around me seemed self assured and confident. My friends, my parents, my teachers, politicians and everyone in authority seemed calm and untroubled by the pinprick of knowledge that we have available to us to base all our decisions on. No one even seemed troubled by the contradictions and incongruencies in much of what we are taught. The only thing I could conclude was that there was something I didn’t know yet that everyone else did.

After years of struggling to discover what it was, I eventually had to admit defeat, and I fell into despair. My parents asked me what was troubling me so I admitted everything to them. Then I waited eagerly for them to tell me the elusive secret of certainty. How to be a grown up so I too could know how to make all the right decisions. Of course they couldn’t and that conversation taught me something that set the course of my life from that day to this. I realised that no one knows the answer to anything nor can we ever know. The sense of certainty I saw in people around me was an illusion. They simply weren’t aware of the fact that they didn’t know. Not even my parents. Once I realised this I felt compelled to find my own answers to life’s questions and never accept someone else’s again.

At the time of writing the Zen of Lego, I didn’t realise I was explaining why I have lived the way that I have all my life. Each refusal to accept conventional wisdom at face value has allowed me to investigate one of the building blocks on which societies pre-conceptions are founded. As a result, I have taken foundation concepts back to their simplest possible form to understand them and question is this way of seeing things helping us or hindering us? If hindering, how can it be restructured to support us.