Rick Seaholm 
Halfway through now so let’s bring out the power questions: Why are you here? Why are we here? And if there’s time in this episode, “What is the meaning of life?
I’ve thought long and hard on these questions over the years and this is one instance where the distant one is easiest to answer and leads us, also unusually, to the question about ourselves.
First, let’s think of the Greek proverb that says “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” The ergo’s (keeping Greek here) are we need to keep the planet alive and we need to care about what it will be like even after we’re gone (the pack-in/pack-out state park philosophy). Notice it says nothing about caring for family members or who will actually sit in that shade. That all seems irrelevant to the point that we should leave things in better condition than we found them. That geezer wished there had been a shade tree for his bald head so he thought it would be nice to prepare one for someone not even born yet. There’s a folk song whose lyrics also expound, urging us to leave a bucket of water full at the top of the well so that the mechanism is able to be restarted later.
Now, just think of all the trees we’ve planted since ancient Greece. Motivations may vary but we have been successful so far at ensuring that there is an inhabitable earth waiting for those who will live on after we are gone.
And all those generations have worked on one project continually since then; that of removing friction to reduce distance. First it was proximal distance: how can we reduce the distance village home to home. Turns out there was another option, to reduce the temporal distance by allowing us to get there quicker through improved transportation. And then, we invented a proxy which became acceptable. With telegraph, telephone, email, texting, and videochat, we have created a throughline of improved communication that has eliminated friction altogether by letting us accept the visage of one we hold dear in favor of the delays of travel.
That is the goal of our society: to make continual improvements in communication. Then what is our purpose as individuals? If we’re not improving those modes of communication directly then we need to look closer to home at our nearby relationships and try to improve them. Should that feel too daunting, the very least we can do is reduce friction of interacting with others.
How is that achieved? Simply by being open, real, authentic, truthful, accurate, honest. The list goes on but here’s a hint, they’re all synonyms.
So we have to love one another but because we need to walk before we can run, we’ve got to deal with the plank in our own eye. We must learn about ourselves. That is the germinal stimulus that will keep society moving and better all the time.