Photo Paul Ross via Smithsonian Magazine
A recent coaching client of mine quit his job, purchased an RV and moved to New Mexico. His reasons were many, but one of the big ones was this: as an environmentalist, he wanted to lessen his footprint (his ecologically sound, retrofitted RV becoming his new, permanent home), and be closer to people who recognize that global warming is happening now - not in the future - and that we need to learn new ways of being if we are to survive. He turned me on to Earthships, and the burgeoning movement to live differently in the Taos area.
Meg Wheatley would call my client’s choice “walking out to walk on” - or being willing to let go of outdated ways of thinking and working to make room and space for experimentation and new options to emerge. Her book of the same name, is full of stories to bolster bravery.
As Pema Chodron asks in her seminal book, When Things Fall Apart:
"The whole globe is shook up, so what are you going to do when things fall apart? You’re either going to become more fundamentalist and try to hold things together, or you’re going to forsake the old ambitions and goals and live life as an experiment, making it up as you go along."
What do you choose? I myself, more and more, see myself as walking out and walking on.