Look all over the news today. Or any day during the past many years. You
are likely to come away with a sense of dread, if not fear. Sure, there
will be some positive stories, but words like 'decline', 'collapse',
'fear', 'threat' and 'extinction' seem to be everywhere. I personally
spend a lot of my time in fight or flight mode: fight the devastation of
our civilization's demise, or bake cookies and tell myself (and my
kids) we're going to be just fine, while inside telling myself I'm a
liar. Maybe I'm not.
What if, instead of reminding myself at every turn that we are doomed, I
shift the tone towards something more positive? OK, some of you might
wonder why this never occurred to me before, and of course it has (hence
the cookie-baking), but changing our minds is a slow process, and maybe
this is another step on my journey.
I was just listening to
CBC's Unreserved,
where Candace Kaleimamoowahinekapu Galla, of the Department of Language
and Literacy Education at UBC, discussed the words we use to discuss
aboriginal languages, and how those words affect the way the language
thrives or declines. She mentions words like "dying", "extinction" and
"declining", which put negative expectations in our minds, and words
like "revival", "reclamation", and "revitalization", which are
empowering to speakers of the languages and to the languages' own
vitality. This made me think about my last blog post, which I
dramatically titled "Living Well in the Apocalypse". I did have second
thoughts about that title, thinking maybe that "Post-Consumerist Age"
would have been better than "Apocalypse", but I told myself it wasn't as
catchy. I think I'm too concerned with catching my readers' attention.
Sure, "Apocalypse" will get me lots of Google results, but will it help
me achieve my goal? My goal is to see a positive future, despite current
global threats.
A
threat creates fear, and fear can definitely lead us to take action,
but is it the action that we want? Or more specifically, is it the
action that will best serve us in the long term? Studies show us that conservatives are fearful, that we can make liberals more conservative by heightening their fear, and that we can make conservatives more liberal
by helping them to feel safe. This blows my mind. I suddenly see this
in play everywhere. I heard of a girl in our city who was sexually
assaulted after getting off her bus, and I immediately went to my
daughter's room to warn her and declare tighter restrictions on her
freedom. How does this keep her safe? I know in my rational mind that
what we need to do is educate, love, and support our children so that
they will become neither the victims nor the perpetrators of this sort
of crime, but in the face of sudden fear, I acted on the impulses of my
amygdala. By the way, the right amygdalas of conservatives are bigger and more active.
If
fear is what is keeping us from stopping climate change, from
developing a fair and egalitarian society, and generally from saving our
species from extinction, shouldn't we let it go? Obviously it's not
that easy, but I intend to try my best, and I'm beginning by looking at
my successes. Unschooling is one of them. I admit that I leaned towards
unschooling my children because my own school experience was so terrible
that I wanted to protect them from it. However, within a couple of
years, I saw such amazing positive results that I continued unschooling
(and blogging and teaching from an unschooling perspective) because I
loved it. And it's been wildly successful. My kids, husband and I spend
close to zero time bemoaning the school system, and a lot of time
looking joyfully at our many opportunities and engaging in them. The
result of this is that we have two engaged, confident learners, and have
also managed to bring some of this fabulous learning theory into a few
schools. And above all, we feel great about it!
If
education and child-rearing can be such a joyful innovative adventure,
so can the rest of the societal changes we need. Maybe we'll figure out
how to properly convert to solar energy. Maybe cutting back on plastics,
instead of meaning sacrifice, can mean growing, developing and
purchasing amazing new foods and products! Maybe living without big
corporations can mean a blossoming of new, locally-developed community
resources! This can be beautiful.
So
my personal challenge now is to do this for the seemingly
insurmountable problems facing our species' future. Wait. Not problems
-- opportunities! Language matters. Let's try that again.
I
hereby challenge myself to find positive, exciting opportunities for
growth! Evolution. I would like for human evolution to be progressive
rather than reactionary. I don't want to be cutting out the things I
love; to sacrifice joy and abundance out of fear. We have more than
enough resources to live very well without decimating our planet and
each other. I would like for those I love to feel safe in this societal
progress, and for all of us to evolve, finding wonderful new ways to
thrive, together. I want to run out into the sunshine of our new and
fabulous future.
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