My Priorities
I recently heard Tim say that if our struggles were going to be over in just a few years, it might make sense to pour all our energy into finding and implementing solutions. But since we don’t think that is the current situation, instead we need to be able to maintain our thinking and our efforts over a longer period of time. Part of our strategy has to be conserving and strengthening ourselves for the longer struggle.
I found myself thinking, “But what about the climate emergency? Should what Tim suggests be our strategy, when we know that we only have five to ten years to make major changes or face dangerous consequences we don’t know how to prevent?” I asked Tim about this, and he and I talked. I’ve discharged, thought more about it, and am sharing my thoughts here.
WE MUST SUSTAIN OURSELVES
My first re-evaluation is as follows: knowing that something must be done, even for our own good, isn’t always enough for us to be able to move against our distresses. Just because we are in a crisis and what we do in the next five to ten years could determine whether humans exist or not in the future, doesn’t give us any more ability to move against our distresses. Darn, I really hoped it would.
So, when we engage in an ongoing struggle against very big opposition, we do have to pace and sustain ourselves. We will be in a big battle for a long time.
Each person is important. Each of our lives matters. And we want to be building our capacity, not burning ourselves out [becoming exhausted and discouraged]. Practically speaking, it’s the only workable long-term strategy. We’ve got a global movement to build. We can’t be losing good people to burnout. And we need to attract lots of people to us and our movement. That won’t happen if we can’t show them that we care about their personal lives. We can’t just expect them to join us and work on our goals, no matter how important and universal the goals are.
For most of us, it is a big contradiction to distress when someone holds out [illustrates] that it matters what we do, that we can make a significant contribution to accomplishing a meaningful goal. Offering people the chance to be part of such a big project is important for their re-emergence and liberation, and we want to do that. But not at the expense of their thinking well about themselves, their families, and the RC Community.
BALANCING THREE THINGS
I think about balancing three things:
1) Myself, my family, my health, my life
2) The RC Community
3) Taking action in the world to set things right [to rectify things]
Each of us can discharge about our situation and figure out how much attention we have for each of the above areas.
Most of us have big hurts in the way of thinking well about these areas. But that’s the early material [distress] that we must discharge anyway. To live this balanced life, we need to work on the early struggles that confuse and limit us—isolation, fear, hopelessness, powerlessness, overwhelm, feelings of insignificance—and act against them in all three areas.
Our feelings of discouragement are not just about the climate emergency. They also attach to our personal lives, the RC Community, and all our long-term projects. I think we can decide not to neglect any of the above areas, but most of us will need to vary our pace or our priorities as we try things and discharge.
BUILDING THE RC COMMUNITY
I don’t think we can make changes as big as we intend without discharge. So we need to keep building the RC Community. We need the resources of the RC Community to keep our heads clear as things get harder. And we need the RC Community for teaching people about discharge, which is part of the solution to the climate emergency.
When we encourage our Community members to take action outside of RC, we have to consider our collective resources. We don’t want to ask so much of people that they get confused and pull back from Community building or from thinking well about their health and their family.
It is possible to discharge the distresses that make it difficult to have balance in our lives. We can and will discharge more of the early material that makes this all so difficult, and we can take our individual and Community limitations into account, even as we are discharging our way through them.
This work—to find my way to a sustainable and effective role in ending the climate emergency, and help others find their way—is my priority today.
Shoreline, Washington, USA
(Present Time 212, July 2023)