It would be nice to say: “there are no easy answers to these questions about consumption and travel and the general burning of carbon.” But that, I think, would be dishonest. No, at least some of the answers are actually pretty easy:
- Stay where you are.
- Love what you have.
- Share what you own.
- Make what you need.
- Grow what you eat.
It's ACCEPTING the answers that's hard. Especially if, in the word “accepting,” you include the notion of following through. Acting upon the truth. Changing your life.
Yes the changes can be painful. Especially at the start. The extraordinary thing though, is that the more you change your life, the more the changes surround and bless you with their own frame of reference. Your expectations reset themselves. Your tastes change. Some wishes positively disappear.
But, how could traveling less give me a happier life, if traveling makes me happy?
Or, how could not owning and consuming make me happier, if I just like to own and consume?
Well, there is really only one way to accomplish any of this. And it's NOT to say “travel is stupid.” Or “possessions are bad.” Or “consumption is selfish.” No the thing to do instead, is to take the life you adopt without travel, and make it into a life that does for you what traveling does. It's to take the life you adopt with fewer possessions and make it into a life that does for you what possessions do. It's to take the life you adopt with less consumption, and make it into a life that does for you what consumption does.
I'm not talking here just about taking a bad thing and making it into something that passes for good. This is not the proverbial “taking a lemon and making lemonade.”
Nor is this just about making do with less of something you really like. It's not giving a big sigh and going panning for gold flakes after you fail to break into Ft. Knox for an ingot.
It's something deeper. TS Eliot, in a different, though not SO different context, speaks of it this way:
...To arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
The point is that once you've committed to a certain kind of life and faithfully entered it, that life itself will transform you to fit the new pattern. You're changed by changing your life, and so you naturally feel at one with the change. It's something like getting into the water bravely with an “Aughh this is cold!” but then as time goes on and you've been swimming and immersed, you'd stay in the water if you could, because now it's getting back out in the open air that would make you cold.
Does this all sound silly? Impractical? Unnecessary? Maybe too abstract? Well, the evaluation is up to you. I think the beauty of life on earth is very great. I also think that it's in grave danger. The way that we relate to the earth has got to fundamentally change. Deeply, quickly, and exactly now we have to start living in such a way as to reverence the earth and the life upon it, human and non-human. I myself think that such reverence means moving toward the elemental and the basic, and in general stepping back from complexity and artifice. So, dirt and hands, not glass and robots; bikes and legs, not electric cars.
But most important, I think that this path of reverence and simplicity is in fact a path to fundamental meaning, and not a step away from meaning. I'm saying that, as time goes on, and the ice caps melt, learning to do with less for the sake of the ALL is in fact, exactly where meaning will most profitably be found.
HB
The longer I live, the less zeal I find I can scrounge up for the project of improving myself. Maybe I've tried too many times and fallen short of the goal (who likes to fail?). Maybe self-improvement is for the young, a club in which I no longer qualify as a member. Maybe too though, there are good reasons not to pursue that will-o'-wisp.
Now, one thing I can promise: I'm not claiming to be beyond improvement! Here, in fact, is a brief list of my faults, as I view them. I'll leave it as a bullet list, since numbers in this context would depress me.
- cynicism
- dilettante-ism
- a habit of dangling my participles
- a tendency, when in the midst of a project, to forget, even with my wife, how to converse or even note that others are present in the home.
- a general lack of willpower to follow through on my ambitions.
- a habit of failing to thank people adequately.
- et cetera....
Sigh.
So, again, I don't deny room for improvement. I'm not even claiming improvement is impossible. I'm not even claiming I haven't, at least in some areas of my life, improved. No, I'm saying this:
To improve the self is not enough. As a goal it's too shallow. It ends at the mere edges of the skin. Why not choose instead just do the right thing for the world? Wouldn't that be better? Isn't that hard enough?
I'm not saying, "trade in your desire to perfect yourself for a desire to perfect the world." I'm not really talking about end-goals at all, and I'm certainly not talking about perfection. I'm talking about doing the right thing in the moment, and day by day, to answer to the needs of those around you and of the place around you. I'm saying maybe this is the best any of us can do, and maybe more than enough to expect of ourselves, given the not-so-terrific state of the world and our relative powerlessness as normalizers.
You can get started right away. There are no prerequisites to doing the right thing. Oddly enough, too, once we've placed ourselves in the forum of useful action, many of the goals that improvers of the self seem to fixate on, prove to be beside the point.
To do the right thing, you don't have to have traveled widely.
To do the right thing, you don't have to be organized.
To do the right thing, you don't need to be the perfect body weight.
To do the right thing, you don't have to be learned and informed.
To do the right thing, you don't even have to be a pleasant person to be around.
Conversely:
You might be a cultured person, accomplished and graceful in society, and still be leading an extremely selfish life.
You might have trained your memory and mind to do all sorts of amazing feats, and still on balance be giving very little to the world.
You may have developed a willpower so muscular as to accomplish almost anything; you may have choreographed your daily schedule like a gold-medal-winning synchronized swim; you may have authored six and a half self-help books, and still be doing the wrong thing for the world. Still be a burden to the present and a curse to the future.
Skills are not the same thing as virtuous action, nor are smooth habits of social interaction going to guarantee it. Knowledge of self does not necessarily lead to virtue either; sometimes the two don't even seem correlated.
There was a time--a time so vivid in the memory that many still believe we haven't left it behind--when energy was cheap, and progress seemed limitless, and it was at least excusable to think that human beings could do whatever they wanted, and spend whatever resources they wanted to spend, in improving themselves according to their own definitions, and the world would prosper anyway. After all there would still be enough to go around, right? After all, whatever got wasted in the process could just be buried or burned, or simply forgotten, right?
But clearly the world in the past ten to twenty years has become a much more thorny, crowded, and limited place. Just listen to the news, and it becomes clear that every move we make nowadays as individuals and as communities has consequences for others. Therefore our choices have to be made with others in mind. With the living systems of the planet in mind. With the poor in mind. With the future in mind. With relationship in mind. With action in the improvement of all of these in mind.
Given the situation then--given our predicament of surreal complexity--what's the right thing to do?
My guess is that this is usually a ruse-question. A feint. A pretense. A pose. At least when it comes to doing the right thing by the earth, the answers are all right there before us. It's only a matter of following through. Of translating perception into action. We have to make do with less. We have to do more with our own hands at every level, and stop expecting machines and poor people in other places on the globe to do the work of sustaining us--as though we were babies too weak to do anything but recline in place and be spoon-fed. We have to stop trying to improve ourselves in all sorts of largely fictional ways, and instead get down to work improving the real situation of our homes and our communities: by means of zealous protection of what remains of our natural heritage. By means of actively loving where we live, and what we already have. By means of the strengthening of family and community relationships. By means of the local resurrection of once-universally practiced skills--gardening, food preservation, carpentry, baking, sewing, playing the piano to entertain the family...
Heck, maybe raising our ability to do the right thing whatever the cost, ought to be the very definition of self-improvement, and nothing else. If so--if the increase of virtuous action ever becomes our definition of self-improvement--then I'm all for it. Until that happens though, count me out of the camp that pursues it. I consider it a distraction.
HB
