Lest We Forget

When men lack a sense of awe, there will be disaster.
~ Tao Te Ching, a portion of Seventy-Two ~

For me, this sentence cuts to the heart of humankind's willful arrogance. We too often get so full of ourselves that we begin to think we are each masters of our own universe. Nothing can stop us.

When we lose our sense of awe and reverence for the world around us, we're in trouble! This is a lesson that we each -- as individuals and as a society -- seem to need to learn over and over again.

There are so many examples of this. Just to cite one, we have created a society that gives a short shrift to basic environmental principles. The word of the day is short-term profits over long-term viability. We have been treading this unsustainable path for generations and now we're coming to the day when we will reap the unfortunate consequences.

Life as we know it is changing right underneath our feet and overhead. The seasons are not as routine as they used to be and weather across the globe is growing more extreme. Diseases, that we pompously once thought we had eradicated, are making a comeback with deadly results. Fresh water, a substance we cannot live without, is growing more scarce. Everywhere we look, changes are going to have major impacts on current and future generations.

We stand at this precipice simply because we lost our sense of awe. The question now is: Can we get it back before it's too late?