Let’s face it; human beings are addicted to crisis. When there are no earthquakes shaking the foundations of our houses, no hurricanes whipping off our roofs, no imminent attack on our shores by evil monsters in human disguise, we just invent a crisis to keep the monkey fed. We seem to need the sort of stress that ends up clogging our hearts and clouding our minds.

           I think that this odd behavior has its roots in our not-so-distant past, when daily life was a bit more exciting. I believe that we are hard-wired to live i n difficult circumstances. My speculation is that this genetic coding has its origins in pre-neolithic times. We had an ice age to contend with, and no forced-draft furnaces. We had saber-tooth tigers and mammoths, and no Howitzers or hand grenades. We had tooth-and-nail physical combat with competing tribes for territory. Life was one big adventure; always exciting, often fatal.

         Things are a bit different now. We don’t have to worry about letting the fire go out. There’s no rabid, starving pack of wolves at the mouth of our cave. Our next meal is minutes or perhaps seconds away, ready to heat or awaiting us at the nearby drive-up window. Our sheets are probably pretty fresh on the cushy mattress, so there’s no need to go gathering leaves, moss, grass, animal hides…..

          So what’s all the fuss? The big panic is whether we’ve got the right colored shirt, or driving in traffic, or being at work at exactly eight o’clock. We see enemies behind every philosophy and religion, every skin color and tradition. It is absolutely imperative that our food is cooked in just the right way. We declare war on weeds, on bugs, on the very bacteria that we depend on in our symbiosis to keep us healthy and digest our pre-packaged food. We’ve even gone so far as to declare war on fear! Truly, we have a real love affair with crisis and stress.

          All the really dangerous things have disappeared from our daily lives. Interestingly, in our addiction to all these petty crises, we somehow manage to be so myopic as to miss the greater perils. In following our fears into defensive and selfish postures, we’ve been in mortal combat with our planet (which never had any intentions of being our enemy) and our brother and sister humans. We’ve been waging an unnecessary war of attrition on the very entities that sustain us. In our frenetic need for stress, we have most certainly generated a much more terrible crisis than we ever imagined.

          So how can we focus our irrational, outmoded need for daily crisis on this impending disaster? How can we be so silly as to have the capacity to see the stars and the atoms, and not see what is staring us right in the face; our own terrible stench?