28th April 2022 - The Middle Way
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Listening to Pratchat, a podcast about Terry Pratchett.

Buddhism is often described as the middle way. Siddhartha Gautama, 
 a Buddha was born a prince and so lived a life of comfort. That 
is until he realised there is more to life than pleasure. The Buddha 
then lived with a group of ascetics and found these practices to not 
be satisfying. Instead, he practised a middle way which avoids 
extremes of self indulgence and self mortification. This lead to his 
enlightenment and is shared as the Noble Eightfold path. 

I can be an extremely irritating person as people will ask a question, 
seeking a definite position and yet I offer a 'yes but no' sort of 
answer. Some of this is thanks to being an engineer. Have you ever 
tried getting an engineer to commit to something being good enough? 
You may get an affirmative answer eventually but there will be lots of 
conditional statements surrounding it. This is often the source of 
great frustration between programme managers who want a yes or a no 
and an engineer who does not feel they can commit to a yes or a no as 
there are factors not under their control. I do not understand the 
need for people to see the world in black and white when grey fits all 
situations. Ambiguity is a rather wonderful tool if used correctly. 
People try to test the waters with ethical conundrums. The answer is 
always 'it depends on the situation.' Murder should always be avoided 
unless it is the only way to prevent greater suffering. Think of an 
abused person who can only escape if they kill their abuser. I think 
most people would agree that this is ok. Yet if you asked people 
whether murder is bad, they would say absolutely. With the climate 
crisis, we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels and one such way is 
the use of electric vehicles. Yet electric vehicles require precious 
metals such as cobalt. Cobalt iron is vital for highly efficient and 
lightweight electrical motors. The magnets used in the rotor are 
likely to use samarium cobalt. Both of these help meet the thermal and 
weight challenges of electric propulsion but cobalt is ecologically 
devastating to acquire. It is mined out of the ground and over 50% of 
the world's supply comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. This 
means it is very likely to involve child labour, funding conflicts and 
many other ethically undesirable activities. By using materials which 
are hard to source ethically, are electric vehicles the right choice? 
The answer is often no, but... 

I feel we should all embrace the middle. Nothing is absolute. 
Polarised politics is causing chaos and leading to contemptible 
muppets having undeserved power. A middle way tempers these extremes 
and keeps us finding the least worst way. We can all be kinder to 
ourselves, kinder to those we love, kinder to strangers and kinder to 
those we do not get along with. Try applying the middle way to your 
life and see what happens. Just be able to make a decision when 
someone asks where you want to eat!