Ramadan Mubarak

One of the things that I have learned about Ramadan the past few years has been that I am a complainer. Today, my wife pointed out to me that I complain every hour about being hungry, like a child. She's used to the fasting and I am not, but I think it's very telling that I cannot forgo the comforts of eating for even a short while. It appears that I have been trained to require immediate gratification; I simply don't have the required patience necessary for fasting.

Fasting is a tradition that is shared by nearly every single religion on the planet. It serves as a potent spiritual reminder that hunger is a sacrifice, given in order to show discipline and observance. As a practical matter, I would imagine that in ancient societies it served as a method to conserve food stores and ration foods. What we should draw from this today is that every morsel we ingest is not solely the fruit of our labors. Even if you are a farmer or a hunter gatherer who prepares his own meals from start to finish, the processes by which that food came to be prepared and in your belly were largely beyond your control. Not a single man on Earth controls the sun, or the rain, or the fertility of the soil. Obviously, ancient peoples took to worshiping these elemental factors for the benefit of their agriculture or herding. Modern monotheists simply vest all of that authority into one deity. Even atheists can give pause to consider that they are not an island unto themselves.

That's an important revelation for any human to make. We are completely interdependent with one another, now more so than ever. We are able to support our massive population only through the benefit of fossil fuels. Without the ability to plant, harvest, and distribute based on these fuels we would suffer famine the likes of which mankind has never before seen. It is a fragile system on which our whole society rests, food and water insecurity are becoming a much greater threat with each decade. If that system were to crumble, how many among us could support ourselves through our own produce? Literally, billions would die.

So, let us take the time to fast or to at least contemplate the nature of our meals. We should learn to accept that we are not solely capable of providing for ourselves, nor were most of our ancestors. At all times, mankind has had his greatest success working in small groups for a shared benefit. Cooperation as a supreme rule rather than sociopathic intraspecies predation. It is in this that we will find the same lessons shared by our ancestors: patience for your meals and cooperative sharing as a means to benefit the species.