How do we find meaning when the world is on the verge of collapse from forces that seem to be beyond our control?
I’m writing this to begin to synthesize my own thoughts, feelings and study regarding the reality of climate change and the impact on our lives and choices, in service to supporting more collective sense-making around a topic that it seems we (or perhaps it’s just me) have mostly wanted to avoid.
First, a small bit of background …
In case you haven’t heard yet, the US Government released a report this holiday weekend that lets us all in on the reality of climate change, and its likely impacts over the next twenty years. It’s not pretty. You can read an accessible summary of the climate change impact report on CNN.com, or at the Guardian, or at the New York Times.
Some have said that the government chose to release this report mid-day on Black Friday, when most people in the United States are focused on shopping, not the news, so as to bury the results as much as possible. Thus, if you are reading this, please spread the word (and ideally outside of your regular bubbles and echo chambers and into communities and places that may not have yet gotten the data).
While I have been aware of and deeply considering this reality for some time, I have not yet written about my considerations or conclusions, mostly because I have been afraid of the implications of doing so and also because I have been unwilling to face the stark reality fully.
Today that changes because I do believe and have concluded that the greater call of this crisis is to turn directly towards our fears and face them, overcome our own insecurities, and come into a collective sense-making that could be the only path toward solution.
We no longer have time to waste on a desire for perfection. I will post this article with awareness of my own limitations, and also a desire to educate, inform and empower all those who read it into a next level of personal awareness and awakening that could actually result in collective change.
Even as I write those words, I am aware of the part of me that says I am crazy to think that anything I write could make any sort of a significant difference, and that I should just keep my head down, stay focused on earning a living and paying the bills, and make my own personal plans for weathering the proverbial and literal storm in as much comfort as possible.
And yet, it is exactly this thinking that we must overcome, both personally and collectively. I surface my own shadow thoughts around it all here in support of perhaps helping you see these thoughts in yourself, and perhaps become willing to make choices that may confront your own sense of meaning.
I am willing to go out on a limb and share my views and the choices I am making because, I believe, as many of us as possible must, if we have any hope for the future of humanity.
Over the past several years, I have had the immense honor to be learning directly from some of the great thinkers and sense-makers of our time:
- Barbara Marx Hubbard (Futurist and Author of MANY books on conscious evolution and the new species we are becoming),
- Daniel Schmachtenberger (find his writings on the blog, Civilization Emerging),
- Jordan Greenhall and Forrest Landry (along with Daniel Schmacthenberger), you can watch or read a transcript of their take on the period of Transition that we are in now here (this is really worth the watch/read!).
- Daniel Pinchbeck (author of How Soon is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation), and
- Charles Eisenstein (author of many books, including The Ascent of Humanity, Sacred Economics, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible and most recently, Climate — a New Story).
What I have learned in relationship with each of these people is that I must not give up hope. And I hope you don’t either.
Instead, we must first face the reality, then feel the despair fully and finally, on the other side, continue to dream and live into a new future.
After a long conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger a few years back about the reality of existential risk and the real possibility of the extinction of the human race, I was feeling pretty hopeless and I said:
“Daniel, maybe I should just give up and live a hedonistic lifestyle that sucks as much marrow out of this short time we have left here.”
Daniel paused for a moment, considered my comment, and then said something like:
“No, Ali, that is exactly the wrong way to think.”
He’s direct like that.
In that moment Daniel reminded me that it is up to me to not give up hope.
What I received from our conversation is that Life is beautiful, and I am here for a purpose, and that purpose is to impact the future of humanity, and not just to live a comfortable (or even beyond comfortable) life.
It is up to me to hold the vision of something greater for all of humanity.
In Daniel’s reflection, I got that if I give up, then there truly is no hope.
How can I possibly expect anyone else to create a new reality, if I am not willing to feel all the feelings, hold a vision of something greater, and then do the work necessary to grow up and show up?
I see this as an invitation for all of us. And I hope what you receive from investing your time, energy and attention in reading what I’ve written here is a transmission similar to what I received from Daniel.
We MUST move forward even though we do not know what to do, or how to do it, with love in our hearts and our best thinking in service to becoming a new humanity that can survive this race to extinction we are all part of right now.
This path is validated by many, many, many examples in nature, including the story of the caterpillar becoming the butterfly (watch the telling of the story of the imaginal cells by Alesha Carlander at Burning Man here), and the Great Flower Radiation.
We are at a moment in time that is just prior to every breakthrough (the moment before the caterpillar emerges from the goo and becomes a butterfly, the moment before the flowers took over the landscape, the moment before the baby emerges from the birth canal) that can feel quite hopeless.
And, yet, of course, as we can see from the butterfly and birth and the explosion of flowers on a prior landscape of only rocks and trees, it’s not hopeless at all.
It’s not the moment to give up.
It’s the moment of greatest possibility and what will emerge from this moment is beyond