 A
good friend told me it's time for me to stop procrastinating, stop
writing about 1000 different subjects, focus, and get off my ass and do something.
I left my employer of 27 years, five months ago, because I could no
longer stand the stupidity, the greed, the politics, the suffocating
hierarchy, the imaginative poverty, and being a part of the problem
instead of part of the solution.
But after the initial exhilaration, I've been caught in analysis paralysis. The things I would be best at doing, the Meeting of Minds
opportunities that immediately dropped into my lap, are not that
dissimilar from what I was already doing, and though they'd pay well,
they're not what I want to do. The things I'd really like to do, the
things on my How to Save the World Roadmap, the things that would make a difference,
are either way outside my competencies, or would (probably) be strictly
volunteer work, and I'm not independently wealthy enough, even though
we have reduced our footprint significantly in the past year, to work
for free. Or, perhaps more honestly, I'm not courageous enough to work for free, and just see what happens.
Another good friend, a pragmatist and a brilliant man, told me I should pick two things, one from the List 1 (yes, I have lists, you know me that well) of things I do well that pay well, the Meeting of Minds stuff, and one from the List 2
of things I really want to do, and spend half my time doing each. If I
could get past my bull-headedness and idealism, I would follow his
advice. But I keep hoping that something will come up that will be up
in the top right corner of the chart, the career, the calling I have
been waiting for all my life.
The first good friend said "What do you really
want to do?" and I replied that I'd like to write my novel, the idyllic
future state story of humans living in balance and harmony with the
rest of life on Earth, and then dedicate the rest of my life to making
it come true. He said "If you wrote the book, what's the very next
thing you'd want to do?" He brushed off my 'buts' and insisted I answer
the question -- "What's at the rightmost end of your chart?" I
blathered through some List 2 possibilities -- studying
and becoming an expert in interspecies communication, or human
fertility, or storytelling, making my novel into a film, working for
Greenpeace or some other environmental activist organization, working
in politics to get taxes shifted from income and employment to resource
consumption and waste, running a renewable energy co-op, inventing
animal-free foods that are nutritious and taste great -- and finally came up with two things that topped them all:
- Managing an environmental 'think-tank', a physical and
virtual 'space' that would welcome caring and creative and
knowledgeable minds to work together to come up with ideas on How to Save the World, and plans to implement them.
- Teaching children and young adults (ages 5-25) about Gaia
-- the worldview that Earth is a single, self-organizing and
self-regulating organism that knows better than any single species, and
shows us, how we should all live -- and then teach them Critical
Thinking skills, and finally how to make a meaningful, joyous,
self-sufficient living by creating New Collaborative Enterprises.
My friend's advice was simple. "Write the damn book. Now. Get it
finished, get it out there. Then decide if you can afford, on your own
terms, to do either or both of your two Next Things. If you can't, pick
the thing from List 1 that gives you the most money, and/or the most
spare time to keep working on the plan, and the skills development,
that you need to do the two Next Things, and do it, for as long as you
have to."
That is what I'm going to do, I think. Thank you for listening.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
