What is our capacity for enormity? For depth? For change?
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
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?
I see the wisdom in breaking things down into smaller pieces—to divide and conquer and eat the elephant one bite at a time. But most of the piecemeal approaches out there strike me as shallow. Carrying a reusable shopping bag is great, but it is not enough. Nor are any of the other lifestyle changes people are making—not by a long shot.
For this reason, even the concept of trying to break it down strikes me as somewhat dishonest. We are neck-deep in a massive problem whose solution is going to take unprecedented effort on the part of millions of people. It requires reinventing the systems that support our lives, the organizations we use to relate to each other, even the way we think about our place in the grander scheme of things. A few wind turbines and solar panels and meatless Mondays won’t cut it.
So how do we break this generational problem down in a way that both tells the truth and allows humans to wrap our brains around it? I think it’s about depth, a commodity that many of us have left behind as connections between us grow in number and get easier to make and break. Depth of being, depth of inquiry, and depth of integrity. How many people discount Al Gore’s message because they perceive him as a person to be a hypocrite (for the record, I’m not one of these people—I’m just sayin’.)? How many of us relax into the idea that we can shop our way to a better future even as our deeper wisdom tells us that’s a lie? How many of us hide out in personal dramas and distractions even though we know these big changes need us to make them?
If we want to make a difference in the people around us and in the broader world, we can’t be scared of or deny or even softpedal the enormity of reality. Yes, we need to break down our enormous problems into doable pieces, but we need to do that from a context of truth as deep as our problems are broad. We can’t just put a happy green veneer on our inherently wasteful form of consumerism, break it down to a few small steps, and call it a day. If we keep looking at our situation from that level, we may as well just give up the ghost now.
Instead, we need to deepen our relationship to the real. Educate ourselves. Broaden our perspective. Challenge ourselves to become more comprehensive, empathetic, and wise. So that when we speak, it’s obvious that we want to make this work for everyone, and that we are telling the truth.
Because the truth is that it’s possible we can make this leap, person by person, bite by bite. No one can do it alone, and none of us can do all of it, but as we break it down and delegate and craft our message, we need to be clear that we are taking on enormity.
(I don’t know about you, but this fact fills me with more fire than dread ...)
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Dear Megan,
Do I dare to say this in public? Yes, I do.
I like the direction of this post but think it could go much, much further; given your own bigger perspective of “grand scheme of Life.” In a way, I think this post exactly mimics the problem it’s trying to lay out: it makes things smaller than they are (it makes you smaller than you are).
So, the question is this. How do we not do that? How do we not default into making Life smaller than it actually is?
In my own experience, we have to dare to come out of the closet. We have to dare to stand up for the deepest understanding we have of Life by expressing that depth as much as possible. And then we have to make effort not to shrink back from it, the next time we open our mouths.
For me that means I have to dare to say, publicly, that I am a student of Andrew Cohen (a controversial visionary leader in the world of 21st Century spirituality). And that I am interested in evolutionary enlightenment. Why is this important? Do we post moderns care what religion or spiritual bent another has? (Answer: No).
But, for a post post modern, to whom your blog and this post in particular calls out, this is important. Because it tells the world not only what my own highest values are; but also that I am learning them from someone who is (God forbid!) more highly developed than I am. (I hear the disapproval of my post modern sensibilities clicking away in my mind, even as my fingers type a response that’s counter-intuitive to my internalized cultural structures.)
So, two things.
1. We have to dare to express our highest values at all times, in all places, under all circumstances.
2. We have to start living life from our highest values (which I think will happen increasingly by unconditionally expressing them); so that the “solutions” we’re looking for (or at the very least yearn for) can be revealed.
The application that much quoted (seldom heeded) observation by Einstein—that the problem cannot be solved at the level at which it was created—would go a long way to answering many of the points you touch upon in this post.
Hi Megan,
I like this post. As I read, I started thinking not so much in terms of enormity, but totality. We need a Total shift of our perspective and we need to stop compartmentalizing our “earth-saving”. To this end, I thought about a quote I saw here. That if you want to inspire people to build a ship, you don’t start by teaching them the ins and outs of ship-building, you teach them to long for the sea. We need to start focusing on a unified vision of Sustainable World that so thrills people, they WILL figure out how to start building it.
Sarah,
I like what you’re saying; very much. It points to aligning and rooting ourselves in our highest values, first, for the biggest possible reasons. That is a Total Shift from the current post modern culture of self-sense to something much bigger than ourselves. And that shift will only have lasting value if our longing is for the emergence of something higher, bigger, deeper; not because we fear for our own personal survival. That fear is what’s keeping us from finding the solutions we so desperately need. Step away from the fear (trying to learn the ins and outs of building a ship), and put our attention on the bigger picture (your example being the sea), and a whole new worldview that cannot be imagined beforehand will begin to open up.
Shelley and Sarah, thanks as always for your heartfelt and insightful comments. I truly appreciate them. In fact I’ve been thinking about this conversation all afternoon. I love the quote from The Little Prince that you brought up, Sarah, and I also see the wisdom in what you are saying, Shelley. Your words have deepened my understanding today.
What I have been thinking about is the idea that, yes, we need to long for the sea. We also need to build ships—lots of them, fast! And on a fundamental level, there is no difference between the longing and the building—they are two sides of the same coin, two expressions of our deep care, internal values and external manifestations. As we build ships, our longing grows, and the reverse is true, too. They are the same process of unfolding. One does not and can not come before the other. They co-arise, together.
I think where I’m coming to is that we need to do both—talking about values without acting on them may be a bit more useful than acting without a bigger perspective, but not by much. We need to hold the enormity of our position even as we dive into all the big and small ideas of how we intend to move past it into a new way of living.
As far as my spiritual values, Shelley, I am and will probably always be in the process of determining how important they should be to other people. The perspective of evolutionary enlightenment is implicit in my work here because it’s a driving force in my life. At the same time, I think it’s possible, valuable, and even necessary to have conversations like this that aren’t centered explicitly on a single spiritual path.
Megan,
I agree with you that that not all conversations can or should be centered on an explicit spiritual teaching or path. At the same time, if we believe that Spirit is the source of our conviction that Life is fundamentally positive; or that spirituality provides a bigger perspective than the post modern psychological world view does (or can); and if we are inspired to make a difference in the world in a way that is nothing less than transformational; then we want to find a way—for ourselves—to express our own deepest understanding. That’s all.
It’s subtle and it’s challenging. How do we interact with the world at large in a way that doesn’t cause us to default to the old structures that still make up a good deal of what we are?
How do we keep pushing the edge of consciousness, now that we are beginning to realize that consciousness actually has an edge—which is the edge of evolution itself?
Love,
Shelley
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