Building The Future
“Get Your Motor Rolling, Never Stop For No One”
– Xiong Jialin (2005)
The Chinese company 比亚迪 writes their English name as BYD and then uses these letters in their slogan “Build Your Dreams“.
It’s an inspiring call for you to make a move and use their vehicles to get where you wish to go.
Finding your way to the place you want to be not only requires tangible transportation to carry you to a physical space; you also need to prepare your physical body’s main engine drivers, your mind and spirit, so that they fire on all cylinders and propel you with the greatest efficiency and power.
The purpose of study is usually self serving. You learn to read and write so you can go to school and learn more. You need those skills to live in society in any case. Language is taught in earnest by parents and caretakers from day one of a child’s life on Earth. Teachers continue to help youngsters build upon the earliest childhood blocks, constantly telling their pupils, “you will need this for your life, it’s very important, pay attention!”
It seems cruel to force kids to learn a bunch of stuff that they don’t care about, but people justify this and believe that it’s in the child’s best interest, i.e. “you’ll thank me later”.
When we teach our young ones how to survive, it is indeed vital knowledge. Life skills must be trained; otherwise we would end up following our basest desires and biological needs, and perhaps consider it enough.
Instead, humans have developed “culture”, a way to act and think and talk that allows us to expand our lives’ meanings and develop a more significant set of behaviors that guides us to health and happiness.
As we plant, so we harvest. Our word for planting and harvesting is agriculture. Notice the culture. We cultivate. In the exact same way, we can cultivate our minds and spirits.
An important point to recognize is that we can cultivate for reasons other than direct self-benefit. This is the importance of compassion, empathy, and generosity.
Learning to give back to the group is a precious skill for individuals. Some of us learn this from our parents – some never do, while for some blessed souls, the act of giving and sharing is a natural inclination that needs no request.
A person’s success is a gift in itself. By becoming a healthy member of society, you fulfil your potential, thereby providing a range of benefits to others, from being a role model, to being well adjusted and providing a net positive to our shared physical space and intellectual existence, to being a a builder of concrete structures and abstract constructs that supply places for others to grow.
Being a builder means creating a symbiotic paradigm for all life around us, whether animated or vegetative. Our very presence within the lattice work of living things can be foundational and supportive of others’ existence. In this way, it is of utmost importance that we succeed.
We do so not only for self serving ends (which must be met in order to provide benefits to others anyway); we build ourselves so that others may be inspired, become a part of our growth, and continue the forward progress of life on this planet in this dimension.
We have choices to make. You should choose to build.
