I have pretty strong ideas of what I'd like the world to be like, and philosophies I'd like to live by, and I'd like to get them down for anyone interested. I think most people won't be, and that's ok too.

I'm not a religious person. I don't believe in any supernatural beings, but I do believe some things are sacred. Specifically life is sacred. I don't mean that in the sense that our individual lives are sacred and we should live it to the fullest. Yeah, I think that's true as well, but I mean life as in all living things.

Everything alive today holds the legacy of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The struggles of surviving multiple mass extictions that almost lead our planet to be as dead as every other planet we've seen so far. Go back far enough, and our ancestors saw fields of lava the size of modern-day Russia. Birds are the last to hold the legacy of the dinosaurs. Bugs, as annoying, and even dangerous as they may sometimes be, were the first animal pioneers onto land, long before our vertebrate, fishy ancestors would even try. They came up to see an alien world with forests made of mushrooms instead of trees.

Maybe you've seen those clips floating around online that attempt to make you feel small by showing you how vast and empty space is. It really is hard to comprehend, but time is just as vast. In all that time, our world has been through so many wild changes, and you, your cat or dog, the birds outside, the raccoons in the trash, the spiders in your attic, all have ancestors that lived though it all, just to be here, where we are today. If that legacy isn't sacred, then I don't know what is.

Even if we only look at the relatively short time our species has been around. No matter who you are, or where your ancestry is from, the vast majority of your ancestors, were hunter-gatherers. They saw, and in some cases fought what would seem to be legendary creatures that we will never get to meet. They went through a global ice age, living simply off what they could find in their environment. They went through famine, plagues, wars, and environmental catastrophies that are still the stuff of legend thousands of years after happening. They met, and even made families with entirely different species of humans. Just for us to be here today. We carry their legacy, as imperfect as it may be, I think that fits my idea of a sacred legacy.

Thinking of things in that context can feel a bit heavy, and to be entirely honest, gets me a bit emotional. It's usually best to not take life so seriously, but reflecting on it all motivates me. I don't believe in an afterlife, or in the idea that any of our ancestors are watching us from some other world, but even so, I want to live in a way that would make them proud. I don't expect to be anything grand, most of our ancestors weren't particularly grand for their day. In fact, many of them lived pretty humbly. All I want to do is live up to that legacy. To carry it thoughtfully, and to respect the fact that, that legacy that is carried by the other critters we share a planet with. If you haven't caught on by now, I am vegan, but I think it goes beyond that.

As best as we can tell, we as humans are the first species to have any idea of the context that brought us into existence. We are a species, which by our very nature, changes the environment around us. From our first experiments with agriculture, to the rise of industrial cities, the planet is deeply shaped by us being here. My idea of a perfect world, would be one we shape for the well being of all the creatures we share this legacy with, not just ourselves.