Here we are in the post-Holiday Season doldrums. And what to do with ourselves? There’s always football, but that doesn’t do much for the souls of humans. We could take a fishing or beaching walking vacation somewhere in the Caribbean. We could offer to care for grandchildren to give their parents a chance to rest up after the holidays. After all, changing batteries in toys is hard work. 

Or we could stay home and continue to be good neighbors. We intuitively know that that type of relationship can always use more players, but personal mobility, the rush-rush lifestyle, and the drive for individuality all work against the active cultivation of good-neighbor relationships. In this troubled, dangerous and crime-filled world, a world of rampant greed and of fear of others, we tend far too much to lock ourselves within our own worlds.  

And along came Sarah Duggan’s article in the Dec. 28, 2023, issue of The Messenger, in which she asks us to “choose a word for the year,” a practice she has followed for the past few annuals. In choosing a particular word, e.g., hers for 2022 was Patience, and for 2023 the phrase “Lean into joy,” her intent was to have a particular compass point to guide her through the months ahead. That is a great idea! 

Unbeknownst to her, as her actions were to me, some two weeks ago I had settled on the idea of discussing two particular pairs of words in this month’s OE article: “Do for” and “Do with.” The value of such human interactions has been drilled into us from a very early age, and we’ve all developed our own arrays of them. These relationships, hopefully, on balance, benefit both sides of the aisle, but we are woefully weak in developing such relationships with non-human organisms. Why can’t we do this also?

I think it a safe bet to say that not one of us is perfectly perfect. Thus, it follows that all of us have one or more areas within which we could work on ourselves. But, we must not get ourselves too close to perfection; I recall a line in a particular poem that says, and probably correctly, that, “A savior is hell to live with at home.”

But, positive interrelationships are one of the best medicines around, and they can take any one of many different forms and flavors. We also must work to establish two other particular types of relationships. First are those interactions within which we do something for or with one or more humans and do not expect to receive anything tangible in return. Of course, a sense of satisfaction, or joy, from having participated in such an interchange is perfectly admissible. Most of us feel good if we’ve been able to help in some way.

The other type of interaction is one in which we do something positive in a world-wide context even though we know that that action may work against our accustomed personal comfortable lifestyle. And we perform this action while knowing that any benefit may be hard to see at the local or personal level—perhaps not even until after we have died. But younger family members surely will benefit. 

This type of interaction will be viable only if we accept the idea of limits, something western society put on the shelf long ago. But life without limits has primed Mother Earth to rebel, and She is busy biting our backside while we are busy surging blindly ahead with no thought of heeding the voices of moderation. 

This particular new type of interaction must be shaped within a world of limits. We must rethink and reduce our habits that have poisoned our air, lands, and waters. We must accept the fact that over-population is a real threat, and that we, perhaps, have reached the point at which world population has become a moral issue. Certainly, population growth benefits those who have things to sell—if people can afford to buy them, which is becoming more and more problematic. Just consider the levels of hunger, untreated illness, homelessness, and aloneness all around us; the disparity between the haves and have-nots continues to grow. 

We must come to fully realize that our Earth requires a wide-spread biodiversity to remain a healthy environment for humans. This means we must preserve, enlarge, and maintain huge natural areas. We must develop the will to stop tearing up, paving over, and polluting the world outside our windows. We need personal behavioral changes, not hoped-for panaceas.

We must not take the tack of just idling along in our same-old-same-old lifestyle while waiting for some silver bullet panacea from wherever to save us. But, just for the sake of argument, let’s say that such a panacea arrives during 2024, and we take a deep breath of relief and continue as before. And even though, in our so-called new freedom, we continue to use up our natural resources and spew pollution at the same rate, the fact remains that our Earth can stand only so much degradation. And when we next hit the wall of ecological crisis, the stakes likely will be much higher, the number of options much less, and the time for corrective action even less than today—if any. The fact remains that our Earth can do quite well without us, but not us without our Earth. Thus, “Do For” takes on a whole different meaning and becomes a personal act of great importance. Someone once said “There ain’t no free lunch.”