ain't it true....

extract from e-mail:

But people like u and I zara. We were born to stay mobile, to keep movin on, even when it's bloody hard up the ass.

Does my life so far mean that my life to come will always involve not staying in one place for any vast amount of time? After a time getting bored and feeling that urge to go somewhere else, experience something new? One of my mother's friends, also a life traveller, wrote her an e-mail saying she'd gotten bored and since her husband's job isn't taking her anywhere new anytime soon she moved the furniture around in her place so it was at least a bit different!

It's kind of fun to think of the future and wonder where on earth I could possibly end up... if 'end up' is even the right thing to say! Will I ever settle down in my house by the beach, with chickens in the yard and a vegetable patch? Or after a few years of that will I get tired and end up in Antarctica desperately trying to turn back global warming? Will I end up in a good career, climbing up the ladder, hamster on the wheel, or end up doing something I can't even imagine? Will I be a political activist living on some Greenpeace ship near an oilrig (my parents would be mortified) or even directly involved in an NGO like Oxfam or WWF, in fact what would the political landscape be like in 20 years from now? Will we still have leaders too blind to see the large devastating effect humans are having on the environment, countries blowing each other up every now and then, political leaders still running their country by the rules of their religion? Will some large natural disaster total us all and leave us with no future whatsoever? Or a large unnatural disaster? Will a disaster on a worldwide scale finally open the eyes of everyone and make them realise that we have to work together, to stop climate change, to make life fair for the world's poor, to make sure babies don't die just because they were born in the wrong country, to stop people killing each other over religion... religions whose fundemental underlying themes are love and respect for everyone?

I wasn't planning another large spiel of frustration when I started writing this. I was just wanting to think about my future, but whenever I do think of my future, it always worries me when I think of all the things that could go wrong between now and then. I hate how I'm planning a self defence class for girls, because I feel that it should be necessary, but I don't like that it is. I hate how in most countries it is really such a bad idea for a woman to take a walk at night by herself. I start wondering about human cruelty, and what drives people to do 'bad' things. I wonder if that's built into me as well, just suppressed by a good upbringing. If I had amnesia, forgot everything, would I be able to kill an innocent person? I kill flies and mosquitoes, don't I? Are their lives just not as valuable as a homo sapien's? Is the answer to most of the world's problems to make it impossible for people to have children unless they've proved they can be good parents?

What is evolution proving by all this? We're a pretty smart race. We've got opposable thumbs and large brains, and can walk upright. The obvious physical traits, that's what we've got. But what about personality? How much does that play a part in evolution? There're more and more articles from the science world showing that personality is built into us by our genes, so are personalities passed on or are they instilled by our upbringing? The psychologists like to call this 'nature or nature'. But say it is nature. Do the violent ones win out, or do the gentle ones? The kind or the cruel? Do the violent ones win because they survive through violence, or do the gentle ones win because they survive through co-dependence? At least since the days of the austropithecines humans have moved around in clans. We couldn't have done it as individuals! Is it survival of the fittest individual, or the fittest species? James Lovelock believes we'll destroy ourselves as a species, relieving the world of it's terrible burden.

I really need to stop prattling on I think. :/ But it was a good blogging session, I guess I haven't done this in a while!