Badges1
A reflection on compassion, consciousness, and the unseen impact of our choices.
Today is World Vegan Day. I am thinking about what this means - not our dietary choices, but the moral mathematics of our existence. Each morning we wake and move through a world of unseen connections, the invisible threads linking us to beings whose names we will never know.
I have been wrestling with this truth: that our choices cast long shadows. When I reach for food, that simple motion carries weight - not just the physical substance of what I lift to my mouth, but the weight of histories, of lives - systems that grind forward on the fuel of suffering.
To be vegan is to acknowledge these shadows, to see how our most mundane decisions endure beyond our awareness. It is to understand that consciousness - that precious, mysterious thing that lets us experience joy, pain, fear, love - does not belong to the ones we know alone. A child across the sea knows the pains of hunger. A mother cow calling for her child knows loss. A pig locked in a gestation crate knows despair. Their suffering is no less real for being expressed in words we don't understand.
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
-James Baldwin