image courtesy of mikebaird

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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image courtesy of sektordua

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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image courtesy of Mi Gi

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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image courtesy of Cara_VSAngel

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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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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One Monday morning in early August, I was walking down 23rd street in Manhattan when a voice in my head yelled, “I want to get out of here.” Impressed by its sureness (I am a champion of ambivalence), I jumped online as soon as I got to work. I googled Cape Cod Community College and looked up their Language and Literature Dept. After a couple minutes of sleuthing, I found the name and email of the department chair. Ten minutes later, I had sent a carefully-tailored introduction of myself and job query to Ms. Polito. I told the voice in my head, “There.”

Over the past month, I’d been visiting my boyfriend on the Cape on the weekends and though he’d urged me to move, I’d always said, “What about work?” as though I would never be able to get a job there that wasn’t miserable. The truth was that I could do what I did in Manhattan on the Cape – if CCCC was hiring.

The work day rolled on in its familiar pattern. I chatted with my coworker Christine about our ESL Immersion kids and how we thought each would do on his or her upcoming ACT test. The dim lighting lulled me into a sense of being outside of time, outside of anything ever changing. But when I went to check my email around noon, I had received a reply from Sally Polito. She said that indeed, there were classes in need of instructors for the Fall semester. After a couple more emails, an interview was scheduled. 

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I grew up right at the beginning of “self-esteem culture.” We got ribbons for participating in Field Day, even if we didn’t win anything, and though our teachers didn’t hold back with criticism, they did take care with our feelings. This seemed to work pretty well; as I recall, I had a fairly good understanding of my strengths and weaknesses, and conceited kids were brought back down to size by the pack rather quickly.

It’s been almost 20 years since I was in school, though, and things have changed. Parents and teachers are more mindful of the self-esteem of children, and often praise them for, as Chris Rock famously put it, “shit they are supposed to do.” The result? Ever-more-entitled people who see themselves as special and above average for no particular reason.

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Last night I took part in a great conference call with my homies from EnlightenNext. We talked about our experiences over the last month or so, and most of us reported that this summer was a time of rapid change. Some of us started demanding educational programs, others got new jobs, I moved house—and we all also described the same feelings of terror and elation as we took on new challenges and watched our old lives fade away in the distance.

I know for me that when things get scary, I have a tendency to retreat into old habits. I eat too much, I sit on my arse too much, I hibernate and spend too much time alone. The funny thing is that, before I do these things, they sound like a lot of fun. “Don’t I deserve a break?” I ask myself, and the answer is resoundingly yes. But after a day or so of indulgence, I invariably feel shitty. The “treat” I so “deserved” isn’t even fun.

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Saturday I attended a workshop led by Pamela Slim (author of Escape from Cubicle Nation) and Jonathan Fields (author of Career Renegade) designed to help budding entrepreneurs step through the process of turning our passions into viable business models.

As Pam and Jonathan shared their hard-won expertise and helped us evaluate our ideas, I started think how new this was. Ten years ago, or even five, how many big selling authors would take an entire day to educate fledgling entrepreneurs and possible competitors? It’s not like they did this for free, of course—each of us paid a fee to be there—but still, the monetary rewards seemed modest for a whole day out of both of their lives.

Moreover, these two writers have a wide overlap in the audiences they serve. They are each others’ competition. And yet they chose to work together.

From a traditional business standpoint, this looks kind of crazy. But from the strange brew of internet accessibility, the critical-condition economy, and the gnawing questions many of us have about the value of a life dedicated to corporate service, a new way of doing business is emerging.

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