Living Fully: Revisioning Thriving for Difficult Times
Fear breeds extremism and radicalization because fear itself is polarized: a fight-or-flight reaction. As our world trends towards greater chaos and crisis, fear increases. Polarization and extremes become more common, causing more fear, as the cycle repeats breeding more of the same.
More selfishness also emerges. As we fear suffering, we grab and hold onto what we can. Consciously or unconsciously, we realize that thriving on planet earth for humans is becoming more untenable. But there’s still this sense of trying to cling to the dream of living fully that we had even just a decade or two ago. That dream-life includes a whole lot of privilege. Yet, as more people, animals and ecosystems suffer, to tend to our earthly comrades we must donate some of our privilege. This is at odds with the American dream of personal thriving, of gaining more and more for ourselves. So we continue to hoard pleasure and fulfill (conscious or unconscious) bucket lists . . . at the expense of the greater good.
Sometimes I wonder if the climate crisis is secretly driving so much of the insanity. We know things are only going to get worse, as this is baked into the science for at least the next 10.1 years, per peer-reviewed study. And it will likely be much more than 10.1 years because we are nowhere near halting all emissions today, which is when the stopwatch for ticking down the 10.1 years for the maximal heating potential of a molecule of CO2 would begin (see linked article for context). In fact, greenhouse gases continued to rise in 2023. In sum, the warming of our planet we experience today, along with the consequences it brings, is largely due to what we exhaled years ago.
So, what’s the antidote? I propose consciously letting go of idealized dreams that no longer attune to the flourishing of life on Earth. I suggest letting go of what you have imagined a life fully lived looks like, because that life usually does not embrace enough service to ailing others. I recommend adjusting your sense of purpose. A primary focus on making more than enough money, traveling by plane to your dream spots, teaching yoga retreats in far-off lands, consuming and producing too much plastic at will, and driving for entertainment . . . these are all outdated, toxic habits.
This doesn’t mean that we abandon pleasure and selfishness altogether, but that we lower the bar. In the end, and that time will come for each of us, will you have wished that you dedicated more of your life to the conditions and call of others, of our times? If we seek fulfillment, a life fully lived, let it embrace a truly more inclusive definition, so that “I” overlaps significantly more with “we.” Surprisingly, paradoxically, we may rediscover fulfillment and thriving while more appropriately tending to the obvious, wailing call of our world today.
Our hearts know what is right and what isn’t, and they light up when we are on an aligned path for collective and personal good. They also know when our moral compass is off, which sabotages our experience of thriving and fulfillment.
