Chris Abraham

Saving the whales or not saving the whales is not the issue — or even important. What is important is deciding if you are whale-saving with all your heart (about the whales) or just using the cause as a drug (about you).

Is it a cause or a cause celebre?

Is it a foil, a distraction, from scarier, more important causes, such as the happiness and mental health of the children you made and the intimacy and stability of the marriage that you made and the trust and stability of the community that you made?

Saving the whales is a noble cause worthy of full support. And I have met a couple humpbacks, a pilot or two, and a whole pod of commons for whom I am quite fond. But they are distant and much less real in terms of the causes over which I have real power and real responsibility: myself and my friends and family.

I have a friend who has been reading the Don’t Save the Whales comments and his response to me was spot on:

“Look the problem with tree-huggers and pagan-baby-savers and the like is that the majority of them are doing it as a form of drug-taking, doing one thing so they don’t have to deal with another. That is the intolerable bit.”

“You don’t get the right to go affecting others until you have yourself in order, otherwise you’re just poisoning the world with your disease. Once you’ve invested the work to get yourself to balance, then you can take the next step and go out into the world to try to get it into balance - but recognize that keeping your own balance requires constant maintenance and if you neglect your own state to fix others’ you will just slide back into poisoning the world with your imperfection and be more of a burden than a help.”

“This process requires an ever-increasing amount of energy output from you, so you have to keep increasing your strength so you can give it. At points in time, your energy will fail, and your strength won’t be enough to get you through. That is when you fall back into the arms of the friends, family, community, you’ve been keeping so healthy, and they bring your energy back.”

“The deal is, you don’t really have the energy reserves to fix the planet, you have to feed off your loved ones to have that kind of energy - and the only way they will have something to feed you is if you have kept them well-fed and nurtured.”

“Alone we are human, together we can be godly. If you wish to play at being godly - healing the sick, calming the storms, saving the whales - then you have to bring your posse with you. If you have created a strong body - yours personally and that of your community surrounding you - that has god-like strength, perhaps you’ll have a chance to effect some actual good. If you have created a strong healthy being - yourself and the greater being of your surrounding family and community - that has god-like strength and goodness, pehaps you’ll have a chance to create something and see that it was good.”

Essentially, he is saying the same thing I have intended to say all along, although he says it in a much different way and with different words. His words might be more clear.

Finally, since I now fancy myself a sailor, I would like to share the following sailor wisdom:

“One hand for the sailor, one hand for the boat.”