Part 4 . Ecology: Reflection on the Good Life

Ecology: Reflection on the Good Life

Dr Abe V Rotor 

The Good Life, group painting by students of the author 

at St Paul University QC (C. 1999)

There are people who live happy and full lives while others do not. This leads us to look into the role of human faculties. When we talk of human faculties we refer to holistic intelligence. It is beyond IQ. It dwarfs the common concept of rationality. In fact, it defies definitions that scientists thought of plotting into various fields. All of us are endowed with a wide range of intelligence which is divided into eight realms, namely:

• Interpersonal (social intelligence)
• Intrapersonal (meditational, spirituality)
• Kinesthetic (athletics, dance, body language)
• Languages or linguistic
• Logic (dialectics, mathematics)
• Music (Auditory art)
• Spatial intelligence (drawing and painting, sculpture, architecture, photography)
• Naturalism (green thumb, relationship with the Natural World)

These realms reside in both left and right hemispheres of our brain, with the left doing more of the reasoning and the right of creativity. How we live a happy and fulfilled life largely rests on how balance we use our brain, making use of these eight God-given faculties. 

It is also with this premise that we find peace with ourselves and with our environment and ultimately with God. Thus it is not only how much we are endowed with this gift, but more importantly, it is how we make use of it fully and in the right way. Why don’t you make your own assessment? 

Rate yourself in each realm. Analyze your top three. Are you not proud of them? Look at the other realms. You may not have tapped them well. Do you realize that there is a big room of improvement, and that there are latecomers in this world? 

Lastly, let me emphasize another component of peace, that of sharing. I can not find a shorter way to explain it more clearly than to present this excerpt from “How to Live With Life,” published by Reader’s Digest. To wit: 

 “Every human being on this earth faces a constant problem: how to make the most of life. There is no simple solution; the art of living is the most difficult of all the arts. But fortunately for all of us, experience can be shared. Insights can be learned. Wisdom can be taught. Experiences, insights and wisdom of men and women – from teachers to clergymen, housewives to scientists, ordinary citizens to statesmen - who have lived deeply, thought profoundly and cared enormously about sharing with others what they learned have found some fragment of truth that cushions the harsh impact of reality or brightens the marvelous tapestry of living. From them we find some answers to the most fundamental of all questions: how to live with life.”

 Final Reflections.  Let us

• Reflect on re-creating Nature with the image of the lost Eden
• Reflect on bringing the dead tree back to life.
• Reflect that everything in this world is interconnected. Reflect on the lost lamb, the prodigal son.
• Reflect on the new concept of heroes, hope of a tired Planet Earth
• Reflect that our lives can not be ruled by the faceless side of
• science and technology
• Reflect on long life but one lived with noble cause
• Reflect on that sailboat riding on the wave and wind towards a destination.
• Reflect on the multiple intelligence which God endowed singularly to man and how we make use of it in gratitude to the Giver.

And if we think we are too little in this wide, wide world to make any difference, let this verse permeate in our thoughts and heart.

Cumulus 

Rise up from the sea and come as rain,

wake the ponds, make the rivers flow,

fill the lakes, make the fields green; 

the trees a curtain to hide the sun a moment 

of your ephemeral beauty 

of changing faces and a myriad figures; 

delight many a child to draw, to dream and grow; 

and if one day the water of the sea is not enough, 

drink, drink deep from my little cup. 

(AV Rotor, Sunshine on Raindrops, 2000); Light from the Old Arch, AVR-UST Manila