Human history is built on change. Our early ancestors may have depended on lightening generated fire that burned leaves and wood. The first cooked meat may have been the carcas of an animal cooked by wildfire. Now think of the various ways we now cook to appreciate how far we have come as a species.
Yet the humble beginnings of this enormous progress occurred when someone invented how to make fire with stone.
As with man's fire making invention so the mastery of the wheel, chariot, guns, farming methods, record keeping, writing, and the formulation of ideas from simple creation myths to complex theories of an ever expanding universe.
The history of human progress resembles hiking up an endless range of mountains. Each summit we attain opens us to increasingly expanding horizons. Every mountaintop we reach helps us to look below with humility at how much humanity did not know. But each ascension equally tells us that a summit we have attained already bears the flags of those who have already reached there just as the lunar astronauts planted an American flag on the moon.
The living will always have to deal with the question of change, of progress, of where any dominant civilization is taking the world.
And so in the following postings, I will be reflecting on change. How does it occur? Can we place value judgments on the results of change at any point in human evolution? What roles do individuals play to alter the course of events of the fast moving train they ride called life?
