We have spent most of this month talking about compassion for ourselves and for others as we explore Onward’s Chapter 8: Cultivate Compassion. Hopefully you have been practicing compassion and you are feeling it being cultivated more within.
Today, I want to share the need for extending compassion to our planet as well, and making sure that cultivating compassion in our youth. Our planet is suffering and and we need to extend it some compassion. By definition compassion means to notice suffering and notice and then act in a way to relieve that suffering.
Max Guinn, 16 year old founder of Kids Eco Club, shares his thoughts in the article, Teaching Kindness and Compassion Key to Saving Planet. His message is a call to action. For those of you in education or those of you who are parents his message is loud and clear: “We, as a global community, are destroying the planet that is meant to sustain us. We are polluting our air. We are depleting our oceans of fish and life. We are clear-cutting our forests. We are poisoning our land and water. We are driving 50,000 species a year to extinction. We are killing each other.
Yet we are all born with kindness in our hearts and compassion for others. On behalf of my generation and the generations to follow, I ask you to nurture the hearts of children as much as our minds. In return, we will become good caretakers of our planet and each other. Children are capable of great things.”
So when we get caught up in test scores and rankings and lose sight of our true purpose, remember this wise request from a teenage: nurture the hearts of children as much as our minds!