image by //amy//

Over the weekend, I attended the Town Hall put on by the folks who run Evolver.net, a site dedicated to conscious collaboration to create the future. Colin Beaven spoke, as did folks from the Transition movement and many other various yogis, authors, and scientists. There was an expansive and kinetic feeling of potential in the room—a hundred people in a church talking about possibility, consciousness, and evolution as colored shards of sunlight filtered in through the stained glass windows.

Within all this energy was also a crackling of tension, a feeling that each of us was here not only to connect, but to evaluate. Was this for real? How much do we agree and disagree? And how much of the each others’ worldviews would we find unacceptable?

This tension is natural and good, I think. This was the first event of its kind, and we were all kind of reading each other, seeing how we and our ideas fit in. Allowing for this natural tension, though, I found myself at odds with the sentiments expressed by some of the speakers, which I perceived as anti-modern, angry, and sometimes even smug.

As I listened to speakers decry corporatism, describe Barack Obama as part of the problem rather than the solution, and speak about the coming transformation in 2012, I started to feel tense in my body. I wanted to stand up for all the good brought about by modernity, to interject some rigorous positivity into the proceedings, and—so much—to share a developmental perspective in which we might be able to lay down our anger at The Man and see the path that’s brought us here with equanimity. For how can we consciously forge a future if we are intent upon ripping down so much of our past?

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image by christin▲

Recently, I experienced a personal victory. I finished a semester of graduate school completely, and made the previously tight grip of perfectionism on my life a little weaker. While I haven’t found out my grades yet, I am happy, and amazed that I finished this while also working part-time, keeping up with a consistent exercise schedule (that I slightly modified) and writing occasionally for this site.

I know that there’s a lot of you out there that choose to be super busy and super psyched about life, and so this may not seem like such a big deal. But for me it was, in comparison to what I would usually do and the way I usually would respond to the pressure of completing projects within a time frame.

My need to be perfect and make anything I did perfect showed up very strong while I was in college.  It took me so long to complete my papers and I wound up taking several incompletes that took years to finish. In the past, I let laziness, fear, and wanting to make things perfect do me in. I would put off doing my work because I didn’t want to do it right away, and thought I could put it off, thinking I’ll have time later, and it won’t take too long.  But all my projects always did take longer than I planned for partly because I had waited so long to do them.

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