The Challenge

The Challenge: How do we make a better world? How do we create the type of infrastructure for a growing population and changing demands, changing needs, and desire and pleasure in creativity, innovation, and research progress? How do we situate this in a world context with real and serious consequences of many kinds? How do we value the challenge and blessing of problems and work towards diverse, multifacted, interconnected solutions to them? How do we negotiate life in existence?

Let's appreciate contradiction, complexity, diversity, difference and the unknown in the world. Let's work towards solutions and many scales that take on the challenge of the worlds problems in many contexts. Let's celebrate play, pleasure, comedy, human vices, chaos and our human nature. Let's celebrate order, constraints, civil society and rules, limitations. Let's seek to globalize information access, technological access, educational access, human rights, civil liberties, freedom, peace, and opportunities for finding wealth.

Let's globalize the value of the localized, and remember that maybe some people would rather not globalize that, too. Let's develop our personal and community wishes for manifested development, monuments, and identity. Let's develop our personal and community wishes for preserving that which is not manifested development. Let's teach and honor the future the way history is taught to be valued. Let's each try to wrap our minds around the idea of extended intergenerational families -- if you're twenty years old, imagine what would it be like to be a great-great-great grandparent!

Let's do the math and science of art and spirituality, and let's do the art and spirituality of math and science. Let us each live a life full of decisions, of love, of pleasure, of celebration, of community, of place, of relationship to our eternal context, this planet Earth. Let us savor the density of a single time-less moment, and savor the blistering swiftness of time. Let us know great places are made by our relationship to it, but that great places can and do exist without our knowledge or relation to them. Let us love our imminent death and permenant existence made by our birth -- both the definition of truth and fact.

Let us look change straight in the eye and see it in the mirror, from day to day, year to year, decade to decade. Let us imagine fantasies, wish for the unattainable, and work in all our abilities to create it and make it real. Let us make things beautiful and look long to seek beauty in that which is ugly, and let us recognize that not all is beautiful and that there is a purpose and place for the profane. Let us save ourselves from decay, war, and destruction, and let us save ourselves from the vanity of eternal preservation of everything and a disdane for destruction, regeneration, and that which will replace what is before it.

Let us speak many languages, teach many languages, communicate to each other, and write many rosetta stones, and let us keep talking in many ways. And let us see in as many ways as there are languages. And let us understand, deeply, that there is a different perspective upon the world through everyones' eyes and that each is valid and can have a vision. Let us know that it is not about being right and it is not about being wrong.

Such a challenge is bestowed upon the world. Such a challenge is the world.

(c) M. Waxman 2007