How can each of us contribute to a better world? What can we do and what can we avoid doing to lead to betterment? How do we define betterment?
I believe that betterment lies in lessening suffering amongst people. I believe that we can work as a people to lessen suffering by making quality education, a clean environment, quality health care, nutritious food, positive recreation, arts, and safe, peaceful communities available to all. When people are healthy, well fed, educated, and able to recreate with happiness, there is less suffering.
Suffering rages when people are unhealthy, oppressed, and living with the fear of violence or abuse. Suffering exists when people do not have access to clean water, healthy food, clean air, or beautiful natural spaces.
Each of us has limitless opportunity to work towards less suffering and greater opportunity in our homes, communities, nation, and world. What can we do?
Live an Earth-Friendly Life
We can all change our habits so that our daily living is Earth-friendly. Using a water bottle instead of buying water in plastic containers, bringing bags to the grocery store, growing our own food, not flushing the toilet as often or investing in toilets that use less or no water, composting, eating a diet that includes more local, fresh vegetables and fruits, and more. There is much that I can do right now to do better in this area. I can do the actions names and learn more about how to live in Earth-friendly ways.
Elevate Opportunity for Others
Look for ways in the work place, the community, and home to elevate opportunity for others. Working for a fair wage for all is one way to elevate opportunity. If an individual works for forty hours a week, that person should be able to live a good life on that wage. In schools, we have to identify the children distanced from equitable opportunities to learn well, and mitigate that distance in order to provide greater opportunity to all. There are so many ways that we can create greater opportunity for students in schools including working for fair funding for all schools, and then assessing what we do at schools to see who is left out when it comes to optimal opportunity and access to good learning and development. Reading the news and understanding a community's challenges, also helps you to know what to do to work for greater opportunity. In Massachusetts right now there is a crisis when it comes to foster care--we can work to lessen or eliminate that challenge. In our homes, there are probably ways we can change our actions to give our loved ones greater, positive opportunity too.
Match Your Actions to Your Words
We all need to assess our actions to make sure that those actions match our words and beliefs. The better we can match hour living to our beliefs, the better we will be for ourselves and our world.
Live Small
Think carefully about how you spend your money and time--find ways to minimize your needs and expenses so you have more to give to others in order to better their lives and opportunities.
Aline With Positive People, Events, and Opportunities
Be aware of events, people, and actions that are negative, but aline yourself to the positive people, actions, and opportunities in your midst. Think about what you read, what you watch, who you spend time with, and the events you support--make sure that what you're investing in is positive for you and for your world. What we do is what we become, so we have to be mindful of what we do.
We can all work to make a better world, and a better world elevates the experience of life for all. There is great satisfaction in living well and doing for others. This is a direction I'm invested in, and one that I'll work for in the days ahead.
