A leak of faith

I was chatting with pals yesterday about our global failure to achieve sustainability.  And how it feels like, in so many ways, we cannot get past the individual aspirations and goals to have and accumulate and “prosper.”  We talked about what it would take to move from this apparent suicide path we are on globally.

“It’s a leap of faith,” said one pal.  “We have to trust that if we individually make a commitment to sustainability, we won’t be disadvantaged.”  Which reminded me that one of the challenges to sustainability is our sense of ourselves as individuals (with entitlements). 

We know, intellectually, that in fact we aren’t individuals isolated from the natural environment, from other species, from other communities.  We know that we don’t start and end as physical vessels isolated from the rest of the planet.  We do understand that life cycles, and energy transfers, and that every minute we each breathe in cells from other creatures (and aspirate and shed our own for others to share), and we understand how the butterfly effect explains how a small change somewhere in the system can result in a tremendous chain of events.

But, day-to-day, we act as isolated individuals.  And we get scared about what might happen as we move to a sustainable society: what might happen when we leap from this way of existing to that new way of being.  Are we holding ourselves back by thinking we cannot move until we have been shown that sustainability will work?  Will we then leap?

Let us remind ourselves that we don’t start and end at our fingertips and our toes.  We are connected to everything else.  We don’t need to leap: we need to remind ourselves how we leak into the world around us and it leaks into us.  Let us start each with changes as we can identify them and change the way we leak in and out of our world.  Let’s plan on a better tomorrow as we take this leak of faith.