Lindsay Richard describes herself on her website as "many things, but to the formal art world [she is] a photographic artist."
In a sea of overwhelming threats to human life, I find myself equally as bewildered as the next person by the dilemma of "What can I do? I'm only one person."
But what if we as individuals do hold far more power to change the world than we've been led to believe?
We do.
What makes us incredibly powerful is our sentience. We are not machines; we are living beings.
Sentience is defined as having the ability to feel, as having the capacity to experience positive and negative feelings - such as pleasure, joy, pain, and distress - which matter to the individual. What we have in common is our desire to live richly and our desire to love.
Artificial intelligence is a tool designed to sell things - great for capitalism, but bad for the heart.
A computer can follow a program and improve, so to speak, by recording popular inputs. It succeeds through catering to those collective desires, but it is not driven by the most influential life force: the will to create earnestly.
To do this honestly, our motivation can't be to take advantage of others through destructive development disguised as progress. At our core, we naturally want others to succeed.
How do we do this? Support one another in pursuing whatever makes our individual hearts sing, so far as it doesn't harm others.
What has been lost in the face of increased danger and hate is that love and forgiveness is still one of the reactive choices available to us. This direction is quiet and soft; it is the path less traveled that we choose at the fork in the road we come upon when we think we are lost.
What if we are not as lost as we believe? What if this time, instead of grabbing the sword, we put it down?
* * *
Our adverse experiences, though we often wish to deny them, have taught us valuable lessons.
If we open our eyes to the fact that our darkest days often connect us to one another more than our brightest ones, we might actually stand a chance of getting through the collective grief we are suffering.
We make mistakes. At our best, we want to learn from them. Please allow for this within yourself and regard one another with more gentle hands. Remember that this life is all practice - we are all spirits searching, and we are all growing through that process.
My suggestion is to get curious about your own grief and suffering and to sit with the fear that puts on your many masks as you learn to make acquaintances with the real you in the mirror.
You could begin by waving at yourself from a distance, and maybe someday you may even get close enough to look yourself in the eye.
Ask yourself: How can I live now so that someday I will be proud of the reflection I see?
When we like ourselves, we cannot be bought.
When we face hard things, we cannot be owned.
When we come together, we cannot be stopped.
This Voices Essay was submitted to The Commons.