Climate crisis is here. How can we navigate grief and anxiety while holding on to hope?
Q&A with Zen teacher and movement strategist, Norma Wong.
Q. There’s something about the news about the climate crisis lately that just hits different — and I realize it’s forcing me into an encounter with my own hopelessness. Record temperatures, unprecedented flooding, fires, pollution, and mass extinctions…knowing the grim reality of climate collapse, how can we navigate the trauma and uncertainty of our collective future while holding hope for what’s possible?
A. By slowing down, not sweating the small stuff, and by stepping up.
We have come to expect and relish even the rush and busy-ness of everyday life. Coming out of the most restrictive rules of the pandemic, the increase in noise from the increase of human activity is certainly noticeable. We call this “return to normalcy”. Whenever there is a transition, we have a few weeks to interrupt the boomerang (or elastic band) effect of returning to our habit patterns.
The news about the climate crisis hits different because our pause allowed for the penetration of the information — out of the blur of many things and into focus. The truth is that the flooding, fires, pollution, mass instinctions, human violence in the fight for resources and the desperation of climate migration… all have been upon us for many years if not decades. Our noticing may finally galvanize the possibility of policy support and more innovative collective actions; large and small, all consequential. (I was drawn to recent scientific articles about carbon capture, and how the technology is advancing while costs remain high. What will the commons spend their money on? That is a governance question.)
And here is the familiar paradox — it will take all of us, and each of us are needed.
Conscious living — one by one, community-by-community, nation-by-nation — requires a slowing down to consider, move deliberately, to pause often to reconsider and reset.
As environmental conditions worsen, how may human conditions improve? The gardens that are planted but do not require and are not over-watered. The soil that is replenished rather than over-tilled and chemically enhanced. The windows strategically placed even if new ones must be cut and others boarded. Light brought from the outside to the inside, but not overly so. A revamping of clothing, eating, daily routines to take advantage of the best parts of each day and to have enough in enjoyment rather than too much and wasted.
Some may need to move from where you are… let it be planned, and not forced in a rush away from. Seeking joy in smaller and simpler units of people and activity, with a few or many as your intro-, extro-, ambi- self is nourished (with masks, please, for some time to come). If it is a mask, let it be a glorious one — loved and washed.
Conscious living — one by one, community-by-community, nation-by-nation — requires a slowing down to consider, move deliberately, to pause often to reconsider and reset. Ultimately, conscious living is more efficient and thus puts less strain on human infrastructure and earthly structure. But it can be a l-o-n-g road from the over-filled (in activity and stuff) kind of living to a stripped-down living that has enough-ness and its own beauty and joy, freed from a pursuit of consumer adrenaline.
Worth it, though… don’t you think?
