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recent
I was skeptical at first. Mostly because I am a skeptic, and partly because it felt too much like a new religion. Think about it. Forty students gathered together with more enthusiasm than the collective enthusiasm of all the classes I had ever taken before then. Everyone hungry for hope, hungry for a sign that something can be done. In walks the sustainability guru/mastermind of the whole program, tall, strong, deep voice, charismatic. It scared me to look around at my fellow classmates as he spoke, their faces fixated on his every gesture, seemingly devoid of critical thinking. Although I too agreed with what he was saying, I did my best to disagree, to disbelieve, and I wanted them to do so also.
In the first weeks, the buy-in seemed to grow, a product of the shared goal, which brought us all here in the first place, the despair which many of us felt, the urgency, our feeding on each others hope. Living in a small Swedish town where everything is within walking distance, where the public policy is more forward thinking than many of us are used to. Being all but isolated from the real world "out there". The hope bubble had been born.
It wasn't until after a while that, I was happy to hear some voices of dissent. People weren't following as blindly as it had first seemed, but for the most part they seemed more convinced than I felt I was.
Now, after the year is almost up, and I have had time to digest much of what has been presented to us, I am ready to sign on. I may be a bit slower than the others, and probably didn't get as much out of the entire course, since, for most of the six months of study of various topics, where they spent their time thinking about how higher level tools and concepts fit in, I spent most of mine thinking about the foundation. I was still asking myself if what we were taught is based on reality or some eco-messiah's dream. I was asking myself how this new idea looked in my life, and if it made sense to me, before I even tried to apply it the rest of the world.
I think, however, that my slowness to adopt new ideas has been more beneficial than not. As I have written before, I don't believe that any of us can truly lead until we first lead ourselves. We spend so much time talking about how to make the world "wake-up", make people start to pay attention to their lives and how they are impacting the eco-system that supports their lives, yet, we rarely think hard enough about our own lives.
As you may know, my thesis is about providing people, the smallest, most basic unit, the driver of our unsustainable society, with a framework for re-inventing their lives in a way that can lead society toward a future where, instead of challenging the very real limitations the earth's natural system imposes on us, we challenge our own cultural limitations, the limitations that keep us from understanding how we can live well (better) by staying within the natural boundaries. It's about helping people to create an alternate ending to the story of us, one in which we do live sustainably into the future.
As I present to others the ideas which I have just now truly bought into, asking them to spend their time to analyze the story they live now, and to start the rewriting process, changing their unsustainable ending to a sustainable never-ending, I realize that I too must make the time for myself to do exactly what I am asking of them.
Part of what we ask, is that they spend the time to take a serious look at the world today, the problems facing us, and how they are directly effected by these problems. As such, I have been spending a great deal of my time these past few days looking into exactly that in terms of my own life, my own needs, and my own desire for a better ending.
I am uncomfortable with the negativity it generates in me, uncomfortable posting so many negative, hopeless posts in a row, but the first step in rewriting is to read what has already been written, the story I/we are currently following. Over the next two months, and for as long as it takes after, I plan to keep this site updated with my progress in the re-write process. I hope that along the way, the negativity will be replaced with a clear, realistic vision of a better future.
I will also be a bit more transparent about what process I am actually going through to re-write my story. The process itself is nothing new, nothing original, nothing revolutionary. What is revolutionary is that people, the people who have agreed to help with our thesis, have agreed to dedicate time to think about it. I hope that by going through it here, in public, a few of my few readers will feel compelled become revolutionaries, to stop and think about it, to take the time to re-write their story as well.
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