Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye.

I asked a 96-year-old lady the other day if after everything she has witnessed in her lifetime,

from social integration to women's rights,

gender fluidity, orientation flexibility, border protection,

diseases, cures, depressions, recessions, and so on.

Does she feel hopeful or woeful?

She told me that because social change tends to come in waves,

often swinging from one extreme to the next,

she doesn't worry about things like walls going up because she

has seen them come down later on.

Nor is she concerned about the inevitability of never-ending wars between nations or the

rich and the poor, or the endless turmoil between

religious extremists and the reformed.

Because those things, she said, go round and round in circles.

The one thing she is pessimistic about is the environment, which hasn't

gone from bad to good, back to bad, and good again. It just keeps getting worse in a downward

spiral. I asked her what she thinks of the young generation today wanting

to blame her generation for destroying the planet. She laughed and said, we didn't recycle newspapers

back then to make paper towels, that's true. But we used cloth napkins and

returned milk, soda, and beer bottles to be sterilized and refilled over and over again.

That's recycling, isn't it? We didn't have reusable grocery bags, but we reused the

brown paper bags from the market as trash bags at home or to cover our school books. This made me laugh because I totally remember doing that in class.

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