Pass or Fail?

Before the week of the No Impact Experiment, I stopped focusing on the game. Basically: I got sucked into the vortex for attending to my sick children, who ended up with ear infections over the weekend. Upon reflection of the week, I am left with several inquiries and insights.

• It’s difficult – for me, impossible – to take on new practices that are not uber-convenient when there is a fussy baby in the house, or any other in-my-face distraction. I have a friend of two young children who laughed about sometimes not making the extra couple steps to recycle because the trash was closer. I’d like to say I don’t understand this, but I do.
• How do we as a culture, support new families who are exhausted and already feel overwhelmed and burdened to make healthy choices when the least healthy are often the most convenient?

• Having infrastructure to support healthy habits – for our families and future generations – is key. The experiment is telling: I do not have those structures in place right now. During times of my life when I have, cutting down on trash, petroleum-driven transportation, water, etc. has been easy. Living in an urban environment helped too. Living in the ‘burbs, not so much.
• No Impact Man did his experiment in NYC. What are concrete ways for an average family living outside of urban centers to reduce impact? What would life look like if properties were designed for healthy and convenient no/low impact living? What if retro-fitting homes in this way were a public service? 

• Doing it alone is lonely and frustrating. The trailer for the movie shows the wife saying something like: “He’s the No Impact Man, except he can’t do the experiment unless we do it as a family. It’s really the No Impact Family.” Well, I think it’s more like No Impact Community. I know it starts with one person, one family, one neighborhood at a time, but, shoot – the above two concerns would be best served if whole communities shifted together – created co-housing villages, local markets, etc.
• Is it possible to make a difference without making a huge disruptive shift in our lives? What small actions can we all take towards connecting with others in our efforts to reduce? What would happen if this was “cool” and convenient?

• Moving towards love and leaving shame out of it allowed me to stay engaged even when I could not participate at a high level. This is my biggest breakthrough. That I continued to practice sufficiency above all else. The conversation for no impact is still alive because I am not holding the week as a failure of some kind. The movement towards a life of simple living, eating, transporting, etc. is a logical step, for all of us. There is only friction because of the scarcity produced by guilt and shame, internalized by a right/wrong-thinking culture. Shame is not motivating, it is paralyzing and polarizing.
• What would be possible if all environmentally minded efforts were sourced inside of our enoughness? How would we feel? How would we speak? What would our lives look like?

Sufficiency is beyond passing/failing, triumph and mistakes. It is a whole different context in which to play, so that in the end, a week-long experiment like this does not end on the following Saturday with a sad ride to the doctor for antibiotics that you wish you didn’t have to give your kids. We can keep living into the questions for how to live most responsibility, with love and grace in our hearts, supported by the truth of our enoughness, no matter what.