- 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
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