It has been a while since my last post but I am back in an inspiring place where it is a lot easier to focus and write something meaningful.
Today I am in San Pancho, Nayarit (Mexico) with my friend Pierre. We have been in the area for the past 4 days trying to unwind and get in tune with the beach life. Unfortunately, the first few days were not very relaxing. Last week was Semana Santa in Mexico and EVERYONE heads out to the beaches. We were in Sayulita the first few days and it was totally inundated with some conscious and many more not so conscious tourists generating tons of garbage, noise and other sorts of pollution daily. We did our best to try and escape and found a few empty beaches a few kms north of Sayulita. Less crowded and especially empty beaches at this time of year can only be empty for a couple reasons... They are either really hard to reach and/or the water conditions and currents make them very dangerous for the average tourist.
As some of you might know, I sometimes like to test the limits of things a bit but this time I crossed the line a bit too far... Observing the beautiful crashing waves with no one in the water I decided it would be a great experience to swim past the sets of 3m waves to reach the calm waters of the ocean. Thankfully, I enlisted a local, muscular surfer (Jose Carlos) to "show me the way" and off we went. Jose Carlos and I picked our timing right and swam through and then past the waves into a calm, very nice swimming spot. This perfect spot was about 100m away from the beach and by the time we decided to head back I was a bit tired... To avoid being hit by the set of waves coming back in, you need to pick the right moment between wave sets and start swimming back determinately and keep going until to reach the beach. That is all easily said and done until you start fighting a current and your muscles just do not want to cooperate anymore. There is a point where they simply seize creating any meaningful force. Long story short, I could not swim fast and consistently enough so a new set of large waves started pounding me hard... Jose Carlos was able to keep me calm even though I started swallowing lots of salt water and I did not feel like I was breathing in enough air. At one point, I just could not handle it anymore and Jose Carlos had to pull me for 5-10 meters until I regained a bit of strength to continue swimming to reach the damn beach. I do not think I have ever felt so weak and helpless in my life... Once on the beach, I literally fell on the sand and I could not get up for 10 min. Needless to say, this was a very frightening experience I would be happy not to ever repeat again in my life. But why is this story relevant for this blog? Well, because it was an extremely humbling experience and it made me realize how lucky we are to live in this planet and how important it is to live meaningful lives. We just do not know exactly when it is all going to end so why not make the most of it? We are part of an immensely larger organism that is millions of times more powerful than we are. The fact is this organism, though relatively kind to us, does not need us and will eventually destroy us unless we learn how to live in balance and start adding some real value. We are currently mere parasites in the grand scheme of things consuming our host.
I strongly believe it is in our best interest to urgently learn how we can add value to this larger organism. I think by creating enduring symbiotic processes with our planet, we will guarantee the long-term win-win relationship we require to survive.
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar', every 'supreme leader', every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
