Be a Straw.

Okay, yesterday got away from me a little, and I didn’t do an Earth Day Post.  I feel like I should be drummed out of the Green Blogger Brigade for that. Sigh…

But this morning over breakfast I was reading the copy of Mindful Metropolis my husband brought home from Whole Foods yesterday (I don’t know what it is with him–no matter how much I try to get us to generate less garbage, he can’t go anyplace without bringing  home any “free” piece of paper he sees in a stack or kiosk, almost regardless of what it is. He says he’s getting better about it.  Maybe that’s true.  But he still brings back a whole lot of somewhat irrelevant paper print materials.) and discovered an article about Colin Beavan, the No Impact Man.  The last two paragraphs totally struck me and made a big light bulb (a CFE one, of course) go off in my head.

Colin is asked, “if there’s one thing that you could tell people who want to make a difference, what would that be?”

He answers:

“Trust your capacity to make change.  Trust your capacity to make a difference.  We often talk about the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but we never talk about the thousands of straws that are already there.  what we have to remember is that the reason why a straw breaks the camel’s back is that there’s already thousands upon thousands of other straws already there and it’s that last straw that’s just one too much.

“So every time one of us decides that we’re going to live differently, that we’re going to engage with our politicians differently, that we’re going to talk to our neighbors about our problems differently–we may not get to see the impact of what we’re doing but we have to trust that it’s working and that we’re another straw on the camel’s back.  We may not have the privilege of being that last straw that breaks the camel’s back, but that last straw can’t do the trick without the rest of us already being there.” (From p. 21, Mindful Metropolis Magazine)