Jennifer P. Tanabe

When our daughter was a student at the University of Maine we traveled north to visit her on several occasions. Maine’s state slogan is “The Way Life Should Be.” When you cross the state line the “Welcome to Maine” sign says “The Way Life Should Be.” I always liked the sign, but unfortunately never took a photo!

That sign always made me think, yes, the way life should be, I like that. I’m not entirely sure that Maine lives up to it, but it’s still a good thought!

Have you ever wondered about how life should be? I mean, realize that something’s wrong with the way things are in the world and think about what would be right?

Of course! Surely everyone has.

We get bitten by mosquitoes, or the dreaded midges in Scotland, or a dose of poison ivy, and are itching like crazy, or your child goes into anaphylactic shock after being stung by a bee. Surely that’s not the way life should be.

We look around and people are suffering, starving in poverty, dying in wars, hating each other. That’s not how life should be.

All cultures have some kind of creation story, a myth, or symbolic account of how the world came into being. These commonly feature a deity (or sometimes deities) creating the world and all the creatures in it. Usually all is good at first.

In the Genesis account, which I am most familiar with having been raised in a Christian culture (although I wasn’t a very good Christian, at a young age being told not to come back to Sunday school for asking a question), God creates everything in six “days.” And everything is “good. “At the end of the sixth “day,” human beings have been created and God says it is “very good.”

learly, we don’t live in a world that can be called “very good.” So, what went wrong?

In most of these myths, things go wrong pretty quickly. Various things happen, like people or other creatures have sex with the wrong people or other creatures, tricking each other and lying to the Creator, killing each other, and so forth. Bad things happen all around, being exiled or just leaving their original homeland, suffering a great flood, and various other problems.

Back to Genesis, the first humans, Adam and Eve, were deceived by the talking serpent and evicted from the Garden of Eden, which we can assume was a “very good” place to live. Then their sons didn’t get on and Cain killed Abel. In Noah’s time there was a Great Flood. Languages were confused so people couldn’t work together in harmony. Sound familiar?

Is the Garden of Eden how life should be? Surely we weren’t supposed to stay in some “Garden” forever? But maybe we were supposed to learn to live well there and then spread out, bringing that good life with us, populating the earth and then all the planets.

How was it in the Garden of Eden? Well, Adam was busy naming the animals. He wasn’t afraid of them. They weren’t trying to kill or injure him. It was a safe place for human beings. It seems like all the animals and plants were doing pretty well too (except for that pesky snake!).

God had told Adam and Eve they were to have dominion over every living thing. That means human beings are to take care of them, be good stewards, keep the balance of nature without destruction or overuse, or any kind of pollution. That way, plants and animals, and fish and insects, can all live in their optimal habitats, flourishing without growing to excess or going extinct. And we can live in harmony with them all. Sounds like a wonderful world!

Interestingly, Adam and Eve were able to converse with spiritual beings, the angels, and with God. Even when they weren’t dead! They were fully alive in their physical bodies, but they had spiritual senses that functioned too.

Today, there are mediums who can communicate with the dead and other spiritual beings. There are people who see or hear ghosts, usually not planned and not an entirely enjoyable experience! But what if we could see and hear our deceased loved ones, all our ancestors, whenever we wanted? What if we could converse with all the genius scientists, composers, artists, etc. who ever lived? That would be amazing! What if that’s how our life was supposed to be?

Maybe even more importantly, what if we human beings could all get along in our physical lifetime? That might be the most difficult of all. Think about it. In the creation stories, it all starts with a couple of human beings, who become a family, but they fight and separate into clans and tribes, later nations.

What if those first humans had all stayed together like one giant family, recognizing every other person as part of their extended family? Sure, they might disagree, argue over stuff, like siblings do. But their parents would have been responsible to bring peace, a “ceasefire” we could say, before things got out of hand. Of course, that would require the parents to be a harmonious couple, loving each other, and working to raise their children together.

One important point is that women should have equal value to the men in those harmonious couples. It’s hard for daughters to grow up seeing their mother treated as a second-class person, or even less. That doesn’t give them a whole lot of hope for their future.

Young people need to have hope, hope that they will be able to live a good life, where they can be who they want to be, fulfill their potential, be prosperous, and most of all be happy. They probably want a better life than their parents, which is kind of natural as parents always want their children to be and do more than themselves. Although in the ideal, the way life should be, the parents should be pretty satisfied with their own lives!

Another thing to think about is the development of science and technology. Surely, we can develop technology that keeps a balance with the natural world and still makes our lives more comfortable and efficient. Enough of all those weapons of mass destruction! How about technology that makes life better for everyone?

With developments in artificial intelligence all kinds of possibilities have opened up. I would be happy to have a humanoid AI-powered robot to help with the housework! It could wash dishes, clean the bathroom, do the laundry, do the weeding, and trim the bushes, all kinds of chores. That would give more time for me and my husband to do the creative things, like art (my husband) and writing (that’s for me).

On a larger scale, artificial intelligence means it is possible to send autonomous robots into space. They can go to other planets, and prepare an environment fit for human beings. Why should we go to the Moon or Mars and more distant planets and have to spend all our time in a space suit, or at least wait till a bunch of people in space suits build some kind of structure where people can breathe and live? Seriously, most planets don’t have the perfect environment for human beings (unlike some science fiction movies where people just seem to be able to breathe the atmosphere and it’s only the alien lifeforms that are dangerous!). Intelligent robots could survive there though, and prepare everything for when the people arrive.

We talk about world peace, but how would that work? I don’t think we all have to be the same, like clones, to achieve this world of peace. The very nature of human beings is individual creativity. We all have different abilities, passions, and interests. No-one can do everything, or enjoy everything that has been and will be invented. But we don’t need to. Some will climb Mount Everest, some will compose amazing music, some will build starships to travel to other worlds, some will educate and inspire the next generation, some will prepare delicious food, and many will supporters and appreciators of all this creativity (especially the food!).

It would be like one giant human family, including those who already left this earthly plane, all able to communicate, learn from each other, help each other, experience joy together. That could be a peaceful world, a world of harmony among diverse species and all types of people.

An important part of that involves including our Creator, God, in the process. If God is good (and who wants a bad God!) then the created world was intended to be good too. God planned a good world, a world where we would all experience joy. In all those creation stories, it wasn’t God who made a mistake, messed everything up, it was human beings. That means we have responsibility to fix it.

We can’t turn back the clock and start again, and do a better job. All we can do is fix the world we live in. Knowing that there was an original plan, and we messed up, that this mess we live in wasn’t inevitable, is surely helpful. It gives us hope that there is a way to live life the way it should be, the way it was originally intended to be.

Our world is amazing, beautiful, filled with so many different creatures. Human beings are pretty amazing too! Our differences make life better, more interesting, more exciting. When we appreciate each other’s differences and work together, we can create a beautiful world, the way life should be.