We will remember within what walls we live, and understand that this level life has its summit…. and we have only to stand on the summit of our one hour to command an uninterrupted horizon.

H.D. “Thorough” (as I now properly pronounce it), “A Walk to Wachusett”

Last year, in April, we held a Transition Training guided by an experienced, trained facilitator. She worked with us for two days, from 9 to 5, with unbounded energy! At the end of the second day she and I were the last ones left, packing up, when suddenly she confessed that she was horribly thirsty.

That day she had forgotten to bring her reusable water bottle, and though she had drunk at lunch from the reusable cups I had provided, she hadn’t drunk anything since then. The reusable cups and my own water bottle had already been removed.

Worried that she would faint, I came with her to the desk to ask for a water fountain and from there on to where they directed us. It was one of those tap fountains. Next to it stood a stack of tiny paper cups. You know, the ones with the pastel flowers and the inside layer of plastic which makes them virtually non-recyclable.

She looked at it and said, “I’ll drink when I get home.”

Home was over an hour’s drive away.

I said, “But Tina, you have to drink!”

She smiled and shook her head. “I’ll be alright!”

And she was.

I didn’t understand back then, but now I do. Now I couldn’t drink from that cup either.

I think activism has done that for/to me. Going public, face to face, with one’s principles, sticking one’s neck out, has made some of these  issues (like the throwaway cup) clearer, simpler, and so easier to deal with.

Other principles (like vegetarianism, hunting), it has thrown into question and confusion. Those I was  never really clear on, of course, but I may have thought I was. Now that I am more conscious of their praxis and because I practice them out there now, I have started the thought process and until I am clear on them, I will not so easily proclaim them anymore.

Standing up for one’s principles in public – training, speaking, meeting, etc. – throws up those summits Thoreau wrote about, from which we can get an overview of the landscape of our level lives. Only I would add that the landscape changes constantly, that we need to climb those summits more than once, to keep us honest and aware.

I liked Bill McKibben’s essay, “Armed with Naivety”,  for TomDispatch a couple of weeks ago. In it he proclaimed his New Year’s resolution:

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve — dangerously naïve.

I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet.

Cynicism makes us say, “that’s how it is.”  This stops us from questioning the right or wrong of it and precludes the possibility of doing something about it. It is the ultimate powerlessness, and it is a powerlessness that we choose.

Naivety allows us to be surprised about things that aren’t right. Then it allows us to be rightfully angry. Then it allows us to know that it shouldn’t be that way. Then it pushes us to start believing that it could be different. Finally, it allows us to know that we can make it different.

That’s what McKibben calls hopeful – as against hopeless - naïvety.

If something is wrong, then we have the right to be upset about it,  the responsibility of hope that we can do something about it, and the duty to do so.

As Bill writes,

The big boys are, of course, counting on us simmering down; they’re counting on us being cynical, on figuring there’s no hope or benefit in fighting city hall. But if we’re naïve enough to demand a country more like the one we were promised in high school civics class, then we have a shot.