We fill Facebook with sayings we like, attribute them to other people (whether they ever said them or not). We all do it and I’m guilty as well. It’s like if I said it, not someone famous, it loses importance. Well, ok. I’m not famous. But I’ll give you a quote that has long stuck with me. “The problem with life isn’t that it’s too short, but that we wait too long to start living.” Short, sweet, powerful. (I don’t know who said it.)

By living, I don’t understand the egocentric extraction of pleasure from your environment at the expense of other life. I understand giving yourself to find yourself, making your neighbor more secure so that you can live more securely with your neighbor.

Changing the world starts with you giving so that we can all live better.
Remember, humans are superfluous in this world. Nothing depends on us, yet we depend on everything.

And your neighbor isn’t just the person living next door, but the birds living in the trees around you, the worms in the soil beneath your feet, the moss and ferns in the fields nearby.

You can hug a tree. No one will think any the worse of you. You can dedicate your free time to saving the whales. You will be applauded. You can drive an electric car or ride a bicycle. No one will call you radical (and if they do, it means they saw what you did).

You don’t have to do any of that. You don’t have to love your neighbor. You don’t have to care about the environment.

You don’t have to do anything.

But you can.

There are 7 billion people on this planet. Who you are makes no difference. But what you do means everything.

Start living. Start loving. Start meaning something.

Salve Tapuio