Reply To: Exercise 1: Personal Essay
Evelyn Wallace: It’s Go Time
If you’ve ever read Michael Singer’s <The Surrender Experiment>, you might recall that the end of his early-days, isolationist, anti-corporal meditation practice was marked by a dream about walking into a cave and not being able to breathe. He understood the message: this ain’t the way. In mid 2021, I got a similar memo from life. I’d staged a nonviolent protest, was arrested, was released, was interviewed for a front page story in the local paper, and still felt as lonely and helpless as before. I didn’t feel as if I’d mis-stepped, but I did feel like I’d walked into my own cave as far as I could only to find I couldn’t breathe in there.
Since 2016, when the death of a friend woke me right up, my aim in life was to live in truth as best I could with every breath I was blessed to have left. I stayed connected to that mission for the first few years nand I experienced some profound shifts and lessons as I went. (I wrote a book about that era and in an effort to make it as accessible as possible I recorded the audio and released it as a podcast. I only just found out I should attach an ISBN to the project to make it official, an action item I’ve already put in my in-tray.)
Still, by the late Covid years, I felt like I’d strayed from my purpose. I knew I wasn’t reaching my own potential. I felt like an electrical wire with no proper outlet, which felt like such a silly problem to have, because who wouldn’t want a ready supply of free power?
Perhaps this is in defensiveness, but I feel compelled to add that it’s not that I didn’t know things back then. I knew lots of things.
I knew the nature of the universe and infinity (as shown to me through my dying friend)… but I didn’t know how to be the kind of teammate people wanted on their teams. I knew how to break out of cultural norms and ignore a deafening chorus of consensus-thinking worriers… but I didn’t know how to get people to take my calls. I knew how to stage a nonviolent revolution… but I didn’t know how to invite others to join. If I’m being fully honest, there was a pattern in my life of storming out of groups, with some variation of this thought: if only those guys could see what amazing ideas I’m bringing to the table! But they can’t, so their loss. Bye, forever! (And then later: Boo hoo, what’s wrong with me, why can’t I just make people love me?)
Enter: graduate school and specifically, social work. As soon as I found out social work as a professional sector employed the term “social justice” in their mission, that was enough of a green light for me. If there’s any place that can’t kick me out, I thought, it’s a classroom of a school that said yes. I didn’t expect social work to teach me all the content I wanted to know (I did, after all, have some memory of the foolishness of academia, even in the two decades that had passed since earning my bachelor’s), but at least school would put me in rooms with other people. On a spiritual level, I had tapped back into my faith that every place we are is the right place at the right time. My studies would connect me with the people I needed to be connected to, I was sure of it. Plus, I wasn’t averse to having some letters after my name.
It turns out that graduate school did connect me to the people I needed to be connected to, and especially (but not exclusively) Josh Spodek. When Josh and sustainability crashed into my life, I recognized the Sustainability Simplified approach to be the mechanism I had been looking for all along: the proper outlet for my amperage. It was go time.
So, I went! I went with it and I let life lead. Now I’m here, eeking out the final weeks of my final term in graduate school, feeling such an impending sense of relief to be free of this elaborate academic charade so I can give myself fully to the real work: stewardship leadership. Steadership! (Not that I’m rushing things. This is the last moment I’ll have this moment and I relish it. I relish it.) For context, this week marks the penultimate session of the first Sustainability Simplified (SUSI) 101 Workshop I led without Mr. Spodek himself in the room. I had another Joshua on hand, though, and I got better as a leader because of him. I feel like this work—my true calling—is showing me how big I really am and how big I can be, all of which squares with my deathbed experience of infinity. It feels like the sky’s the limit, and even then… why stop?
And now, as of this very moment, I am right back at the door where I first came knocking when I reached out to Josh in the first place: straight leadership. This is what I’m talking about when I talk about divine timing.
What do I want from this experience? Pre-Marshall’s death, I would have wanted everyone to think I was the cleverest person in the room. But now I want people to leave interactions with me feeling like they are the cleverest. I want to connect to universal places of shared humanity in every person I interact with, enabling me to work with people who appear to believe in things I vehemently disagree with, and I want for these people to feel heard, seen, acknowledged, respected. I want to bring people together from (essentially) warring factions in mutual recognition of unifying commonalities. I want to be invited into rooms with heads of state, captains of industry, and culture makers and I want to help them see the very optimistic and very possible future where they rise to their own potential and lead the way in the next phase of human evolution. I want to do what I was born to do and I want this class to teach me how. Is that too much to ask?
Like I said, it’s go time.