What if you loved the world?
Years ago, at a particularly difficult time in my life when someone close to me was critically ill, and I was in a deep liminal in-between period having moved cities & countries, still searching for my career path and community, worried about the world as a whole, I had a revelation of sorts.
A revelation for me, anyway.
I was sitting in a yoga class, legs up the wall, my mind trying to make sense of how I ended up here and what to do about it, and it occurred to me… it’s not my job to fix the world (or save it, or improve it, or even, technically, leave it a ‘better place’) – but it is my job to love it.
You see, I was spending a lot of energy at that stage of my life in fix-it mode – whether that was my loved ones fears and losses, my career, my activism.
I’m an Enneagram One if that means anything to you, and I’m particularly gifted at seeing what could be better. This can be a gift – vision for what could be! But our greatest strength can also be our greatest weakness, and with the wrong lens, this can easily become cynicism and despair, criticism and judgement, or people and places to save.
But in that moment, I asked: what if my job wasn’t to fix or save anything? What if I wasn’t even the determinant of right or wrong, or what needed fixing or saving? What if the world, my family, my life - as much as I saw and felt its pain – wasn’t in need of saving?
What would it look like to love the world instead? What actions would that ask of me?
This was a simple question, but one that helped me find what’s mine to do in these times.
It changed the way I understood my role in activism and social change, the way I looked at my career and impact, and the way I related to others in a time of profound difficulty.
Because a good question offers us an opening. It often contains more wisdom and possibility than the answers we think we’re looking for. A good question opens us up, expands our horizons.
And it’s questions like this, along with many others, that we explore in Rise: Finding What’s Yours To Do In This Time.
If you’re looking for your most meaningful response to the crises we face, for the next steps that support you both as an individual and the collective we’re a part of, you can learn more about the six week program here.
And I offer this same question to you today: what if your job was not to fix or save the world, but to love it? What might be different in your life and actions with this thought?
