I had a very brief chat the other day with a bloke delivering the gas. This was our conversation:

“How’s it going – all good”? I say referring to the gas bottles and hook up.
“The worlds not, but we are—hopefully”, the gas guy grunts out (He obviously thought my enquiry was of an existential nature and not about his expertise in gas delivery).
“This area is doing pretty well though,” I say.
“But for how long? It’s crazy out there”, he replies.

The very next day I was chatting to a friend on the blower. In his younger days he was a born again Christian but he left that dimension of religious fervour for much of his adult life, only to find himself drifting back to the comfort of the old paradigm (at least that is how I see it). He thinks the world is coming to some kind of “end of days” as stated in the bible. He says it with upmost confidence—it’s bleeding obvious.

My Old Chinese teacher says the coming cataclysm is to be by fire and most of humanity will be wiped out giving the survivors a fresh start. He originally said that in the 1970’s and he could be right if the planet keeps heating up with humanity sitting like the proverbial frog in the pan of slowly heating water.

Old Chinese had a lot of cool things to say, but his rattling on about the cataclysm these days seems a bit silly. Around the time I discovered his teachings, as well as studying metaphysics and spirituality, I was honing in on quantum and chaos theory and emergent systems. The only conclusion I could come to was that trying to predict complex dynamic systems such as the future of humanity truly is a nonsense.

It very well could be that humanity in the coming decades will come out with a rosy shine to its cheeks and the four horsemen of the apocalypse will turn out to be a fluffle of bunny rabbits.

Catastrophe sells. Apocalyptic advocacy will get more clicks than the hope for a fluffle.

Could it be a self fulfilling prophecy? The hyping of the the narrative of an approaching cataclysm suggests strife of a personal nature which an individual is wrestling with. They externalise the anguish and pain as a way to distance themselves from the discord. If one wakes up every day with the apocalypse hovering over them it accentuates a lot of agro and general bad vibes. Kind of a cop out really—the world is coming to an end so why bother?

Anyway, even if America and China are heading for a huge punch up, or the polar ice caps are melting and we will be in wading in water in a cafe eating our smashed avocado on toast…so what?

Instead of worrying or proselytising about the coming end of days, it would be wholesomely better to have a mindset that says: “This day I will be of service to those that are drawn to me”.

So forget the cataclysm and celebrate life while we have it. Each moment is precious.