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Last week I had dinner with one of my best friends, who holds a leadership position at a local organization which does amazing work. Like many workplaces, hers is also plagued by drama: mammoth egos battling for power, nonsensical rules for all but the top people, and hidden agendas lurking beneath every innocuous-seeming conversation.

So when I asked her how work was going, I was expecting to hear the usual entertaining yet horrifying tales of woe. Instead, she told me that she has a new policy where she doesn’t talk about work outside of work because, what is the point of getting worked up over it? Since making this decision, she told me, she’s noticed that not only does her mood stays sunny, but she’s also able to focus on the big picture and do her job—which she loves and whole-heartedly believes in—with more vision and focus and creativity.

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image courtesy of Smath.

Like most people, my mind meanders much of the time. I find myself starting a task with great aplomb but soon I lose focus and end up daydreaming, dicking around on the internet, and otherwise wasting time. This is especially pronounced in my job-free life, where it is up to me to structure my own time and pursue my own goals. I haven’t done terribly at this, but I also haven’t done as much as I know I’m capable of, or even as much as I want to do.

I successfully changed several of my bad habits a few years ago, but, over time, I found myself retreating back into those old patterns. I learned once again that inertia is powerful, the ruts in our brains are deep, and gains, if not protected, can soon be lost. In the last few months, even my physical well-being has suffered from the lazy choices I was making. I felt low-grade fatigue and nausea many days, and dragging myself through even the bare minimum tasks required took what seemed like an inordinate amount of effort. Was I depressed? No, I don’t think so. I was just feeling lost, lacking even a compelling reason or the energy to get found.

So I signed up for a spiritual retreat in the Rocky Mountains hoping to jump those entrenched tracks, get my head straight, and make some space for something new to emerge. The annual Being and Becoming Retreat takes place in two parts: being is all about practicing what it’s like to take a liberated position to life, and becoming is about operating from that position in conjunction with others. I decided that I needed to start at the beginning, and so signed up for the Being half.

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“We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game by taking sides .... No one who has read a page by a good critic or a speculative scientist can ever again think that this barren choice of yes or no is all that the mind offers.”

—Jacob Bronowski, host and author of The Ascent of Man, physicist/philosopher, and all around smart guy

I came across this quote in the book “Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food,” written by an organic farmer and a genetic engineer who are married to each other and who wonder how their disciplines might be married for the good of both humankind and nature.

Both the question they are asking in their book and the content of this quote are fascinating. How often do we settle for the barren choice of yes or no, even when reality itself teems with untold possibilities? And how often do we make that barren choice unconsciously?

The answer: Pretty much all the time. From politics to the economy to the environment, we generally turn the content of our discussions into a horse race in which the most important thing is whether or not “our” horse wins.

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As soon as I moved back to Pittsburgh in February, we got an enormous amount of snow that ground the city to a halt, and I was stuck at home for a few weeks. This was OK, cause I had a lot of painting and unpacking and rearranging to do. That was all done within a month, around the time the snow started to melt. Then I went to Colorado for a week to attend the (very awesome) Integral Incubator at Boulder Integral. I came back with my sails full of wind, ready to start my new blog and activist project, Bright Green Burgh, dedicated to creating a future for Pittsburgh that is both bright and green.

My first BGB act was to speak at a really fun event last weekend, put on by dear friend/professional bellydancer/community-builder extraordinaire Amethyst Azhar, where local artists created bellydance costumes out of recycled stuff. I was excited to talk to a bunch of environmentalist-leaning folks in such a merry atmosphere, hoping to connect with some and start to build a team. And I worked hard on what I would say—practiced it and clocked it and edited it and practiced some more.

By the time I got to the event, I felt ready. But I was in the middle of a conversation with a fellow speaker when heard my name being called, and I hurried to the mike. And then, as my demure friend Matt likes to say, I shit the bed.

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Most of the time, for most of us, life seems pretty consistent. Work, family, and home life may vary from day to day, but for the most part, things chug along remarkable steadiness. Then something happens—a job loss, an illness, a new opportunity—and we realize how tenuous our security really is. No one ever really knows what our lives will look like in a year, but we think we do.

Since I lost my job, I’ve seen how strong this self-delusion of security can be. In reality, there’s no less certainty in my life than there was a few months ago, but it feels like there is. The challenge is the same as it always has been—to be OK with uncertainty, to connect with the possibility inherent in it and not freak out.

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In this short talk, Derrick Jensen imagines what Star Wars would look like if written by environmentalists—would they file lawsuits against the Empire ... sell free-trade coffee to its citizens ... sign petitions against Darth Vader?

Now, it is a bit simplistic to characterize the messy real world of 2010 as the evil Galactic Empire. And of course I believe more in redemption/building on what is than revolution/blowing shit up. But he is right about one thing: most of us who want to change the world are thinking far too small.

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When you walk into a room, how do you position yourself?

I tend to evaluate who’s there and take one of two stances: superior or inferior. Either I’m better/smarter/cooler or I’m dumber/lamer/less experienced. And once I assume one of these positions, it’s damn near impossible to snap out of it.

If I perceive myself as better, then it becomes all about making sure everyone knows that I’m better—that my point of view is more comprehensive and impressive than theirs. If I put myself in a position of being less than, then I clam up like a shy little kid, barely even giving myself permission to speak for fear of looking like a nimrod.

I can see that this behavior is arrogant and immature, that it reflects an inaccurate understanding of reality. Is it true, or at all important, that I am smart or dumb, more than or less than? Isn’t it far more important that I show up in every situation ready to contribute something positive no matter who else is around?

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A few weeks ago, I found out that I’m being downsized from the company I work for. I haven’t written since then, because I haven’t been sure what to say.

It’s been 15 years since I graduated from college, and for most of those years I’ve been working in a narrow niche of software development for the printing and publishing industries. What I’ve learned in that time is immense. From a childhood of chaos and poverty, this career enabled me to create a stable financial life. I’ve learned how to complete complicated projects, hang tough in challenging situations, and work with a wide variety of people.

At the same time, coming out of a meeting last week, I realized that I had just spent an hour going into minute details about things that mean absolutely nothing in the big picture. I’m not one to linger on regrets ... but I do feel some sadness that I’ve devoted so much of my life to work that I don’t particularly care about.

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Have you ever had an epiphany, decided to make a change, and then forgot about it within a matter of days? We’ve all gone through this process, and it makes sense because it’s largely how development happens. You make a breakthrough, and suddenly you’re in a new world. Or, more accurately, you have developed the ability to see things anew.

But the old way of seeing is still what you are used to, and gradually or suddenly your eyes lose their newfangled focus, and the world is old again, and you wonder whether your epiphany meant anything at all.

What happened is this: something new did emerge in you, but it wasn’t stable. This is how development occurs—in fits and starts, a messy progression of two steps forward and one step back. We go through 4 major stages in the learning process:

• Unconscious incompetence, where we don’t even know what we don’t know.
• Conscious incompetence, where we are starting to see the extent of what we don’t know. This part can be very painful!
• Conscious competence, where we’re starting to get it but it requires a lot of effort.
• Unconscious competence, where we’re so good at our new skill that we can sink into performing it, without having to think about it.

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If you’re reading this site, it’s probably because you care about the state of the world. You also recognize that the problems we have to solve are fairly intractable from the level we are at right now, and so you want to push yourself to be smarter, more comprehensive in your thinking, and more powerful in your actions.

If you’re anything like me, though, sometimes this cognitive recognition that we need to keep developing slips away a bit. After a long tiring day at work, the couch sings its siren song, and the laziness to which our culture says we are entitled takes over more hours than we’d like to admit. In the midst of everything most of us have to get done in a day, how can we stay motivated to make choices that keep us growing?

Put another way, if we are basically wired to do what we feel like doing, how can we make ourselves feel like doing the right thing?

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On his blog about American philosophy and evolution, Jeff Carreira recently wrote about humanity’s evolutionary crisis—our inability to adapt to the rate of change we have created—and the two primary shifts we have to make to adjust our ideas about reality to reality.

The first shift concerns unity, so that we go from seeing the universe as a bunch of different things interacting with each other to understanding it as a single whole comprised of many parts. The second involves recognizing the ever-changing nature of reality. Things are not as stable and static as we think they are. In fact, every part of this whole is constantly moving around, bumping up against other parts, and both changing and being changed by the friction generated.

Understanding these ideas cognitively is one thing—and it is a big thing. And yet there is much more to it than that. What does it mean to live as part of one comprehensive, ever-evolving process?

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Holding a bright green perspective in a largely cynical world is difficult for me. I’m not used to thinking positively about the future or seeing my own decisions as an integral part of what is being created. It’s not what I was raised or trained to do.

Rather, I tend to see myself as separate from everything else, and I’m used to feeling bad about where “the world” is heading. Sometimes I feel like a kook when I try to reach for a more positive and participatory of view. Sometimes it even feels fraudulent. How can I talk about becoming new people and bearing new gifts when so much what I do and feel is old and dingy and dark?

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image courtesy of John Althouse Cohen

I’ve been battling a cold the last several days, and have been spending some time catching up on my newsreader. I came across some wonderful things—some inspiring, some thought-provoking, and some pure policy wonk stuff—that I wanted to share with you.

First off—a place where inspiration and policy-wonkness meet! The Center for American Progress and the United Nations Foundation have released a new study that shows that, in addition to being the smart and right thing to do, cutting carbon emissions makes great economic sense. If we put our efforts on the lowest-hanging fruit—energy efficiency, reforestation, and renewable energy technology—we stand to save $14 billion over the next 10 years. That’s a lot of ducats to put into further changes.

Next up is an essay reminding us of an important distinction in our conversations about climate change. The systems that support our societies are far more vulnerable and less resilient than is nature itself. So when we talk about environmental devastation, we should be clear that what’s on the line are the achievements of human culture—the levels of health, wealth, material security, education, morality, and understanding that we’ve achieved through coming together in ever-larger groups. Do you want to leave your kids a Mad Max world or a bright green one? That’s really the question we are answering.

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Happiness is a hot topic right now. From Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project to No Impact Man’s quest to link voluntary simplicity with increased happiness to the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, the world seems full of people with advice on how to be happier.

Now, I’m generally a happy gal, and it makes me happy to think about other people becoming happier. I’m all for it! Especially when the happiness of the citizenry is used to make policy decisions on a big scale, as Enrique Peñalosa did in Bogota in the 90s.

But I wonder, as individuals, when we focus on happiness as a goal, aren’t we somehow missing the point? Put another way, is personal happiness itself best treated as a destination, or as a lovely side effect of living a meaningful life?

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image courtesy of jurek d.

A few weeks ago, Seth Godin blogged about enormity:

If you’ve got a small, fixable problem, people will rush to help, because people like to be on the winning side, take credit and do something that worked. If you’ve got a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won’t pan out, we’re going to move on in search of something smaller.

Now, Seth is a smart guy, and I don’t doubt that he is right about this. But at the same time, we actually are facing a generational problem that is going to take herculean effort. The jury is out on whether or not it will pan out. So if Seth is right, and people simply don’t have the capacity to respond to enormity at this level, even if that enormity is Reality, then what’s our next move?

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