Mid-life Crisis Part 2: The Resolution

Four years after Nolan was born, Natalie was born. I was surprised by the pure happiness I felt when I learned we were going to have another baby. Ed was out of the country on that day, so I went and woke up three year old Nolan and told him there was something interesting going on inside my belly.

The tensions and concerns were still in my head, but life just kept going on.

When my midlife crisis came, it wasn’t a moment, it was a period of time. In the months after that day on the couch with pneumonia, when I had finally, seriously, and clearly looked into the face of my question about why I wasn’t doing more, I started to formulate answers. These ideas and this post are what came from that period and are where I have really been wanting to get to with this blog: another set of organizing principles I want to share. In them I am hoping some of you will hear echoes of your own questions, and a framework that you also find useful.

I am really, deeply, concerned about Climate Change. But I just keep going on with my day-to-day life, as if it is a news story in the background. As if it is not about my own life? Why?

Why haven’t I engaged more?:

• I am overwhelmed by the scope of the problems surrounding Climate Change.

• I don’t see a very direct personal role; I am a ………( in my case an evolutionary biologist), not a politician or a business woman or anything directly related to Climate Change.

• I am skeptical of my ability to influence anything; the political system is too broken, my acts too small to have any effect that matters.

• Even if all these were not true, I am too busy. I don’t even have time to think of a solution, let alone carry it out. I am lucky if I can get out the door in the morning, or get dinner on the table before I collapsed in the evening. Either way I am chronically behind and trying to catch up the whole day through.

In essence, when I asked myself why I wasn’t engaging more, my answer was I didn’t know what anyone could do, let alone what I could do, and I believed I had no power to do anything anyway.

Still, armed with the clarity of my calling to my children, a lifetime of love of the natural world, I was clear about one thing: I needed to do more. To honor who I was and what I loved. I needed to do something proportionally significant to my concern, and proportionally significant to the gravity of the problem.

I came to the conclusion that all I could do was the best that I could do.

It was during this period that I designed what I felt was a more honest and complete answer to the question “What can I do about Climate Change?” It is the question I had struggled with for years, and here’s what I came up with.

What Can I Do About Climate Change?

1. Get Clear:

First, as I detailed in my previous post, I got really clear about what I cared about in this world, and what I felt responsible to and for. My family, to start. The natural world was another. What about the details of the rest of my life? Stability? Security? These were the most important things. Really, the only important things. I could not take them for granted anymore, and if my time wasn’t spent securing these things for myself and others, I was wasting my time in my life.

2. Embrace Climate Change:

I was also really clear that Climate Change was real, and posed a threat to…no, wait, it doesn’t “pose a threat” —it is a hurricane on the horizon of our lives growing stronger every day that threatens to destroy—all the people and places and ways of life I know and love. Rather than try to ignore, or hide from this truth—or worse, watch from the sidelines and boo when things aren’t happening (!)—I decided I needed to embrace the issue of Climate Change as my own. It had to become part of my day to day life, and a central part of my equation about what I chose to do and why.

3. Recognize the Path and the Journey:

What I was going through leading up to and following my “crisis” was an emotional process and a personal journey. A journey of internal tensions being acknowledged. A journey of ruminating to discover what mattered most to me and why. A journey of coming to understand the ways in which those things were threatened, and a series of reactions to that understanding: disbelief, denial, fear, guilt, depression, sorrow, anger…Wait, that all sounds like a thing, right? The “Stages of Grief?”

Choosing to fully embrace the reality of Climate Change should inject anyone into some stage in the process of grieving. That is natural, probably even healthy, and we will explore these ideas further later. But, to cut directly to the point, I would say yes, I had to grieve, and to feel many of the above emotions. As uncomfortable as these emotions are, however, I don’t want to just sit with them forever, or bury them under the debris of my busy life. It doesn’t make sense to just get stuck in some stage of grief. The fight for the things I love? It is not over yet. It never will be, as long as I am alive I have more to give, and more to lose. I want to take those uncomfortable feelings that surround my fears of loss due to Climate Change, and find the only real way there is to relieve them: convert them to courage and determination to act. I want to take this bull by the horns.

Thus, dealing with Climate Change is not a series of "to do" items. Instead, that effort, in and of itself, is yet another life journey, right?

4. Find Your Place of Power:

For me, I was there. I knew what mattered to me, and what was at stake. I had found meaning in all this, and I was ready to act. But, what could I do? What in the world could I actually do??? I couldn’t find an answer. In some ways it was the lack of an obvious answer that had stymied me for so long, and led me to my crisis.

At some point, in acknowledging the reality that all I could do was the best I could do, I found my question rephrased. It wasn’t, “what can I *do* to solve Climate Change?” it was, “What can *I * do?” What is the biggest impact I personally can have? That's when I came up with my concept of one's Place of Power.

I am an individual. I occupy a unique space in the universe, and I interact with other unique individuals. We all are located in some place on this planet, and we all interface with a unique subset of other people: our various communities. Therefore, we all have the potential for unique regional, local, community, and personal influence, just by our collective unique locations.

Further, we all have different skill sets, interests, and passions. Each of us can be a different model for different kinds of people. I know science, I love nature, I love birds. I am a thinker. I like public speaking. But I am also private, I like my alone time. I live in a rural area. There are people who will find themselves relating in some way to me (and there are people who won't). By engaging another human being, I can double my impact. The more people I can engage, the greater my sphere of influence can be. Part of “the best I can do” is to help other people find what the best they could do is. If that was a place from which I could do more, I was going to explore it.

5. Change Your Life

I realized I was actually in the midst of some endless, iterative process of rearranging my life to make responding to Climate Change—including protecting the future of the things that mattered most to me—up front and center in my priorities. Climate Change created a foundational principle around which to explore and organize my life choices.

Further, I realized that perhaps the most honest answer to the question of “What can I do about Climate Change?” is “Change your life.” With help, I thought, this also had the potential to be a useful and empowering answer for others.

For me, “changing my life,” didn’t necessarily mean cold showers from this day forward, nor I was going to quit my job (!) and start knocking on doors, but rather I was going to scrutinize the infrastructure that underpins my life. I would look for the investments I was making that made sense, and those that didn’t. I would enact an upheaval throughout all the various systems I used to shape and manage and sustain myself and my family—shelter, food, water, consumption (both material and intellectual), waste, transport, future planning, communication, community involvement. Each would be examined to decide what needed to stay, what needed to go, what simply needed to be modified, and how. With time, as I became ready and able, I was going to build changes into the fabric of my life that brought me more in line with my beliefs, and values, and my need to be part of the solution to minimize Climate Change.

There’s a whole lifetime of blog post or podcasts figuring out how to do this, and that’s where I hope to arrive in a couple of weeks.

On to the Story of Us

Okay, enough about me. What about “us?” What about you? Where is everyone else in my life, and in my world, about this? In case you didn’t know, this is about you too ; ) Maybe you’ve been struggling the same way I have. Maybe you also have a nagging voice in the back of your head. Maybe you too have been overwhelmed, and/or depressed, and/or forced into living with this reality by just watching it all from the sidelines and hoping it would take care of itself.

What is everyone else thinking? What are they doing? Let’s examine this more closely…