SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

By Sean Weaver

About 30 of us gathered for an Ekodo workshop one sunny Sunday afternoon. Sunlight dappled on the polished floor and through folding doors the cottage garden swayed in a summer breeze, making me feel fine.

I asked the group how long they each intended to spend on a paid and unpaid career as agents of positive change. It was a relatively youthful group and so the average career that lay ahead was about 35 years. I then asked what it would be like if our chosen career involved following our bliss. Imagine if we each did exactly what our hearts wanted – rather than listen to the usual insipid rationalisations that paint dreams grey and edit the text of our lives into a dull sensible tome that reads more like a dictionary than an adventure novel.

After all, when we do exactly what we want to do with our lives we tend to love what we do and as a result become very practiced, skilful, and effective. Not knowing outcomes does not matter because the process is blessed by our honesty. If 30 of us did this then we would get an average of 30 times 35 ‘people years’ = a thousand years of bliss: a millennium of authentic lives capable of unfolding right here in this sunlit room.

When we aggregate small incremental problems we get a global crisis. When we collect the sum of individual solutions we get a global solution. We just need to have the confidence that our contribution will make a difference. And it will – because it always does. But what is the quality of our contribution?

The global challenges we face require more than business-as-usual solutions. We need to pull something different out of the hat. Something different includes an approach that is free from the limited thinking that has tied our cultural shoelaces together and caused us to stumble as a global society. One thing that is free from limited thinking is our own joyful, unedited, creativity – as a way of life.

But to follow our bliss we first need to find it. In the chaos of constantly meeting insane deadlines and juggling a life filled with senseless distractions, there is so much emotional noise that we cannot hear our heart song. To hear it we need to clear a space, and from that stillness things have a habit of clarifying, and from this clarity we can choose how to step forward in a purposeful life. Then our lives can become enriched, not by more stuff, a fatter CV, or more activity, but from the immeasurable riches of living authentically at a time when authenticity has become an endangered species.

Our truth is always right here: our wise one within. And our loyalty to our own wisdom is integral to healing that part of the Earth wrapped up in our skin. From that calm and blissful truthfulness arises authentic action capable of keeping its head while all about they are losing theirs…

Sean Weaver and his wife Jo Campbell founded and host Ekodo (pronounced “ecodaw”) – a life-skills programme for compassionate agents of change. They live now in Golden Bay, New Zealand.

Sean works for himself as a climate change solutions consultant through his business Carbon Partnership. Jo is an artist and environmental educator.

Tags: follow your bliss