This commentary is by Tim Stevenson of Athens, Vermont, a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions. His latest book is “Transformative Activism: A Values Revolution in Everyday Life in a Time of Social Collapse.”
“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn.
“The worse things get, the less we seem to talk about it,” observed Jia Tolentino in her July 10 New Yorker essay, “What to Do with Climate Emotions.”
In the face of our unprecedented, climate-unraveling crisis, it is understandable why many of us would opt for this updated version of climate denial. Because “we know more and more about the world, (but are) less and less able to do anything about it” (James Bridle, “The New Dark Age”), we are consumed with terror and powerlessness like one of those heroines in an early silent movie who has been tied to railroad tracks by a despicable villain as a fast-moving train bears down on her.
By remaining silent, however, we do ourselves a terrible disservice. For we deprive ourselves of essential connection with our fellow humans, mutual casualties of our civilization’s glorification of radical individualism about a matter that is unquestionably not only the most important event in our lives, but one that begs for us to act upon our inherent interconnection and interdependence with one another.
In refusing to do what is otherwise a natural act, we deny our greatest potential strength: the solidarity and power we realize when we come together and are real with another fellow being, sharing our heartfelt feelings about life as it is.
While risk-taking, for sure, and initially off-putting because of our acculturation to society’s contrary norms, this transparency and vulnerability nevertheless has the potential of awakening us to our common humanity, and the fact we’re all together in this business of living life.
It is when we recognize what Thich Nhat Nanh called our state of interbeing that our intrinsic goodness and its many life-enhancing values become increasingly available to us, allowing for the actualization in our individual behaviors what we want the world to be. With a consciousness that sees the other, not as a foreign, threatening “other,” but as one of us, we cannot help but incorporate such values as compassion and generosity, kindness and forgiveness, moral courage and personal integrity, selflessness and doing the right thing, modesty and humility into our everyday behavioral repertoire that together express the inclusive love that accepts life for what it is. This allows for the skillful, wholesome interpersonal behaviors required for Ganhdi’s “transformation of relationships.”
Our associations and interactions with one another are the heart of the matter, determined by the behaviors we shape them with. Which is another way of observing that the existential crisis that is enveloping us today is a spiritual matter, above all else.
Relationships are always a question of the values we bring to them. Based as they presently are upon the one-up/one-down power hierarchies of patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism that dominate our civilization, our everyday lives are too often absent the life-cherishing values of a truly democratic society that accepts all living beings.
In terms of our current climate crisis, this deadly failure is particularly apparent in our power relationship with Mother and the rest of nature, operating as it does from a paradigm of dominion and exploitation.
By giving expression to our inherent values, accepting ourselves and each other for the precious moments of life that we are, also provides us with unspoken-for space, opening to a practice that allows for a resilient, transformative way of life. This isn’t possible when we remain attached to our more limiting black-and-white patterns and their restrictive habits.
Only when we liberate ourselves from these through a practice of acceptance can we entertain possibilities that weren’t present before. Only then are we increasingly imaginative and creative, flexible and adaptive, someone who is quick on our feet, rolls with the punches, and acts outside the box, living as best we can without civilization’s ersatz “certainty” and “security.”
To consider, in short, another way of being. This is best done in collaborative relationships that avail the collective wisdom of the whole.
While none of this guarantees that we will save ourselves from the collapse of our civilization, which is threatening to pass the point of no return (if it hasn’t done so already), acting on our heart values nevertheless makes an enormous difference in the quality of the lives we are living right now. Standing up for the well-being of life and its infinite manifestations naturally flows into a rewarding existence of service to others, and living a values-directed everyday life is no small consideration when you consider the passing moment is the only life we actually are living.
But in addition to providing meaning and value in our daily lives today, it is also important to understand that, as Thich Nhat Hanh again stated, “The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment.”
This doesn’t mean the present should be lived for the sake of the future, a mistake we make all too often when we live lives we don’t want while wanting lives we don’t live. The present must be lived for its own sake, unconditionally, without the purpose of realizing a future reward, if we are to realize its singular value of being worthwhile, in and of itself.
But consistently acting on our heart values from one moment to the next allows for transformative possibilities that are the consequence of choices we make and actions we take here and now, in the domain of the one agency we have.
They are the only acts on our part that ever will.
