642:
What must it be like for a young man or woman, newly
independent, setting up on their own and perhaps coming to terms with their
compassionate selves? For them, the best thing to be doing is boycotting animal
stuff. Just by doing that is a huge statement of compassion. It’s such a
wonderful thing to see, that for this old vegan I want to break out the
champagne! It’s good to see others weighing the advantages and disadvantages,
and experimenting with new ideas that could affect the rest of their lives.
To weigh compassion in practical
food terms, a young person needs to know they’re going to be safe - safe in a
nutritional way. If they go ahead and take on a vegan-diet it’s, at first,
going to be seen as a risk.
They can only make that choice
based on information received from friends and books, etc. The decision
requires trust, just as bungy-jumpers have to trust the strength and length of
the rope. (I’d be far too cowardly. I wouldn’t have enough trust that elastic
bands would save me from plunging to my death).
Trusting a new idea might take a
whole lifetime, or it could happen in the blinking of an eye. It comes down to
where we’re at, regarding new ideas and taking them on board, especially where
so much is at stake, over one’s food choices. Once we’ve weighed pros and cons
and finally arrived at a clear picture, we have to trust. Then go with it.
Trust bases itself on foreseeing the next stage, then the next stage after
that, and instinctively feeling okay to proceed. It’s rather like climbing a
hill, each step feels like hard work. But once we intend to climb it we deal
with everything we meet on the way, and if we meet the unexpected or unwelcome
we try to cope with it. If we knew beforehand every obstacle we might never set
out in the first place.
When we ‘present our self’ to a
new idea and voluntarily take on all the hard work it calls for, we can find
it, strangely enough, to be NOT like slogging away up a never-ending hill but
quite the opposite. If you go vegan it’s probably the meaningfulness of it that
lessens the difficulty. I remember when I started, I couldn’t believe my luck
that I’d stumbled across the idea.
‘Work’ is usually associated with
the paid employment at which we spend inordinate numbers of hours. The drudgery
is relieved partially by dreaming of weekends and holidays. But work is quite
different when it’s something we do voluntarily and if it is meaningful. Going
vegan is hard work but it stimulates the imagination and forces us to redefine
the word ‘work’.
Promoting vegan principle and
living by it is a new type of work. It’s unpaid and it’s often frustrating,
because we’re breaking so much new ground. Everything takes longer. Everything
needs double-checking and background-ing. It means we have to learn new and not
necessarily attractive things (for instance, about modern animal husbandry
methods). Progress can be slow, and we’re often not helped by omnivores’
resistance or fellow vegans dragging their feet (by being less activist than
we’d like them to be). But all that is a right-of-passage for vegans. We have to
go through each stage of frustration to find out what sort of person we are and
what kind of people other vegans are.
On a personal level we early-on
need to find out whether we are ‘quiet’ or ‘noisy’ types. For noisy vegans who
want to talk, if we make any breakthroughs, it is just great. There’s nothing
quite like it. It’s like no other satisfaction - communicating the most
important subject in the world. Even for the failed communicator this is no
less an important subject, not merely because we’re attempting to save people
from obesity but because we’re helping to launch a panacea for our age. Yes,
it’s wonderful when we connect but often we don’t. Most often a wall of
resistance faces us, and we’re only seen as ‘the enemy’.
Animal Rights is a fascinating
subject and something we can get our teeth into, communication-wise! It’s an
up-hill task especially because it’s so urgent, but it’s never uninteresting.
And never, for one minute, have I ever thought it insignificant to the future
of both planet and our own species. And I’ve never ever let anyone think I am
the enemy!
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