Everybody shouting and nobody listening
I am rereading Margaret J Wheatley’s book “So Far From Home.” The sentence that particularly caught my attention was: “it is the Tower of Babel, everybody shouting and nobody listening.” That sentence particularly caught my attention, perhaps because of the rising level of angst being expressed in the community and social media. There seems to be a lot of shouting and nobody really listening. How disconcerting! Yes, people are hurting and feeling the impact of uncertainty at this time of lockdown. This lockdown is difficult. It is impacting the lives of everyone in so many ways: economically, physically, and emotionally. But where does shouting and blame gaming get us?
The following Monty Python song speaks into this moment:
Galaxy Song
“Whenever life gets you down, Mrs Brown,
And things seem hard or tough,
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you’ve had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,
Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.
It’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of a galaxy, we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It’s a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it’s just three thousand light-years wide.
We’re thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go ’round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!”
