SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

By Sean Weaver

We can burn a hole in a piece of paper with a piece of glass. But to do so we have to focus. This century we need to burn a hole in the unsustainable growth economy to let the pressure off the Earth. It is a kind of acupuncture. And like acupuncture, to do this we need to focus on precise pressure points. The body is big. A needle is small.

In mythology we have similar situations to contemplate. A well-placed slingshot stone shifted the course of what looked like a very uneven contest between David and Goliath. An arrow through the heel toppled the unrivaled warrior Archilles in the Trojan War.

There is a saying that if you chase two rabbits you will miss both. Focusing is not the same as being narrow minded. To focus is to choose something and then stick to it. By persevering with something we become intimate with it and can understand it from many different angles. This is broad minded, but focused.

But what is worth persevering with? Our dreams. That is a rabbit worth chasing.

We often think that we cannot follow or realise our dreams, because we think up excuses to living passionately. Too often we settle for a mish-mash of mediocrity. I first read the book ‘Walden’ when I was 17 and one particular sentence has resonated with me ever since: “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die Discover that I had not lived.”– Henry David Thoreau.

So how to choose our rabbit? Well, one way is to consider what the world needs right now, and decide to help fill that need. I made a decision over 20 years ago to focus on protecting rainforests. There was no money in it – quite the opposite. In fact I first tried to pursue this passion as a biologist, but soon discovered that biologists don’t save forests. Forest conservation campaigners do. So instead of sentencing myself to a frustrated life making excuses for not following my dreams (“I am a scientist and this is my career,” and “I will not be able to get a real job if I get involved in controversy,” etc, etc.) I just decided to do what the forests needed and see what happened.

Pursuing this rabbit on occasion did not look like a particularly good career move – sacrificing well-paid work, getting called colourful things in the media, and lots of uncertainty. But without pursuing this rabbit I would have missed the incredible opportunities to engage in such tremendous adventures, and see wonderful outcomes as a consequence. Believe me, it is incredibly satisfying to help build solutions to what countless small-minded, nay-sayers call ‘impossible’ challenges. We can choose to delete the ‘im’ and be left with ‘possible’ – indeed transform it to ‘inevitable.’ This is an attitude thing, and it takes a combination of wild abandon and focused perseverance.

By stepping purposefully into our dreams we discover ways to make them work, even if we have no idea how it will work when we begin. These discoveries help to prove that we are not alone in our adventures, but we will never encounter these helpers until and unless we take the plunge into pursuing that rabbit. And no adventure is possible unless we are willing to grapple with uncertainty and mystery. That’s the deal.

For me the helpers did their work, the landscape since shifted and now there are quite a lot of work opportunities for experienced forest conservationists – particularly in the field of protecting forests for the sake of the climate system. This is where I now get paid from time to time to run around helping forest owners to make a living from protecting their indigenous forest ecosystems. But if I honoured those excuses back then I would probably now be a very experienced, bitter, and frustrated fool.

Instead: Wahooo! This is great! A fantastic ride with head thrown back, shrieking with laughter, winds in your hair, uncertainty, and suffering and joy. But most of all: meaning. Such an existence is far more meaningful than the well-trodden path of a pedestrian way of life that focuses only on financial security and worrying what the critics think about me. Who cares what the critics think? Fuck ‘em.

Sean Weaver is the founder and host of Ekodo – a professional development life-skills programme for compassionate agents of change. He lives in Wellington. See the Ekodo Facebook group here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47683391767

Sean is also a climate change solutions consultant through his business Carbon Partnership.

Tags: ekodo, forest