Deborah Frieze
I began hosting Learning Journeys in 2004, when I took my first group of fourteen participants to South Africa and Zimbabwe. Within six months of that trip, four participants had quit their jobs—the life they returned to just didn’t make sense anymore—and I became curious. What about our journey was creating this disturbance? What were we seeing now that hadn’t been visible to us before? I began paying attention to our Walk Out statistics. Sure enough, within six to twelve months of each journey, about 30 percent of the participants would walk out of their previous lives, declaring that something more must be possible.
These Learning Journeys have been working on me relentlessly ever since. I’ve discovered that the real work of the journey only begins once you have returned home and you see your familiar world through new eyes. Patterns and choices that once had been indistinguishable suddenly come into high relief. Until now, these patterns have been operating in the background, invisible and unintentional—Meg and I call this a system of influence, the dominant forces of our culture that have us unconsciously embracing the collective assumptions about how we should live. But a Learning Journey interrupts that unconsciousness and moves those patterns to the foreground, where we are confronted with choice. Let me give you some examples of where that has happened to me.
During one visit to Kufunda, I remember taking a bath at Marianne’s cottage. She instructed me when I was finished not to drain the tub, but rather to collect my bathwater in buckets to be poured over the water-starved plants in her small garden plot. I haven’t started collecting my bathwater here at home—in my downtown Boston apartment, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. But now each time I watch it swirl down the drain—uselessly, wastefully—I’m confronted with the question of how else it might have served. My daily complicity in a system of influence that invites us to mindlessly consume and waste as much as we can afford to is no longer invisible to me. My fellow Bostonians shared this experience briefly in May 2010 when a broken water pipe disrupted the region’s water system. For several days we boiled water and showered with our mouths closed—hardly a crisis, but one that knocked people off center (featuring shoving matches and price gouging for bottled water), revealing the fragility—the lack of resilience—in our system. And then the water main was repaired, and most of us Bostonians went back to our mindless consumption. But that experience of watering the plants with my bathwater has remained in the foreground, prompting me to continue asking, How do I choose to act on what I now see? What behaviors am I willing to walk out of? Which ones will make a difference?
When I was traveling in India, I became excited about the upcycled crafts the learners at Shikshantar were creating. It aroused the entrepreneur in me, and I dreamed up a business of importing upcycled jewelry, handbags, and sculptures, which I pitched to Manish. Not only would this bring additional income to Shikshantar, I proposed, but it would be an excellent way to share their story and the important work of upcycling, the practice of reimagining our waste, with a U.S. audience that needed to wake up to its own wastefulness. Manish was unimpressed. My proposition would merely reinforce a culture of consumption in the United States and of dependency in India: Upcyclers would be required to craft their creations for the tastes of a faraway and anonymous consumer rather than focus on their own learning and local community. For Manish, walking on to sustainable lives and livelihoods means local production for local consumption. It was astounding to me that he would walk away from a viable and socially responsible opportunity to generate income … at first. And then I began to see how my assumptions about growth, economic security, and international development were driving my entrepreneurship. Shikshantar’s upcyclers did not need access to a foreign market; they did not need U.S. dollars to improve their lives and livelihoods. There was no problem for me to solve—no matter how well intentioned I might have been.
Sergio of Unitierra took this lesson one step further when he handed me a speech to read entitled “To Hell with Good Intentions.” It was an address by Ivan Illich to American students who had come to Mexico in 1968 as volunteer service workers. Illich said:
I do have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy. …
Next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders. Ideally, these people define their role as service. Actually, they frequently wind up alleviating the damage done by money and weapons, or “seducing” the “underdeveloped” to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement. Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.105
Here, even the most basic tenets of our society—the desire to help, aid, assist, solve, fix—move from the shadows of our assumptions and into the light. The culture I was raised in taught me to solve problems, pursue success, maximize profit, gain influence, leverage power, and be compensated well for doing so. If I choose to walk out of that worldview, what then will guide my actions? For many Walk Outs, for me, there comes a stage of paralysis. How can I make a contribution when I know that the familiar ways don’t work—that success often comes at the cost of other people’s lives and livelihoods? Where then shall I put my attention? How shall I now act?
There are no easy answers, only a long string of unanswerable questions that slam into us once we return home from our journeys and discover that we’re no longer comfortable where we are. Questions like:
How do I hold what I now know?
How do I live in integrity with my beliefs?
How can I hold my own hypocrisy with compassion?
When do I engage and stay—and when do I walk out?
What am I willing to walk on to?
A Learning Journey has never given me answers to these questions. It gives me the practice of clear seeing, of bearing witness to my choices. That has meant noticing when I discard plastic rather than upcycle it, when I opt for the anonymity of transacting rather than gifting, when I bemoan imperfect efficiency, when I choose speed over inclusion, when I take the replication shortcut because it gives me more control.
It’s not about making myself wrong for what I choose; it’s about choosing consciously—and sometimes challenging myself to stand in the discomfort of abandoning the familiar. Here in the United States, the system we live in hasn’t collapsed. For most of us, there’s food on the table, water in the taps, teachers in the schools, medicine in the hospitals—unlike in Zimbabwe. And yet, our food is creating a pandemic of obesity and diabetes, our cities are rationing water, our schools are failing our children, and our pharmaceuticals are generating disease. We don’t have to wait for collapse to decide that it’s time to let go of our dying systems, to walk out and walk on to create the world we wish for.
Alas, the path forward is never clear or easy. I’m reminded of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones crosses the chasm on an invisible bridge. It isn’t that there is no bridge; it’s that the path forward reveals itself one step at a time—and only after we’ve committed ourselves to moving ahead. Sometimes we find ourselves moving ahead in ways that seem infinitely insignificant—we bring our bags to the store, we take public transportation, we buy local food. And sometimes we take terrifying plunges—we walk out of our jobs, we pull our kids out of conventional schools, we simplify our needs and give away most of our possessions. What matters is not what we choose, but that we choose. Whether we walk on to affirm our participation in what was already there or we find ourselves in the great unknown, either way we make a choice, we participate, we act—rather than be acted upon.
But we can’t act alone. One of the reasons I helped to create the Berkana Exchange is that I needed a community of fellow pioneers, people willing to experiment with groundbreaking work, people willing to fail over and over again and yet to persevere in their yearning to create a new future. People who would understand that Walk Ons feel perpetually on the edge of chaos, swinging back and forth between hope and hopelessness, possibility and resignation, triumph and frustration. Some days, everything we do feels insufficient—Nothing will change. I can’t make a difference. Why bother? Other days, we are graced with the clarity that we’re doing exactly what is ours to do—This is what’s in front of me. I trust my contribution. And it is enough. Not a single Walk On in this book got started by doing anything more than what was in front of them—not Edgard, not Dorah, not Mukesh. Not even Wangari Maathai or Muhammad Yunus. In the company of fellow Walk Ons, I am reminded that we never know what difference our contribution might make. Our work is to see what’s right in front of us and to step forward to claim it. And then to keep seeing, to keep paying attention, to stay with the hard places, the uncomfortable relationships, the unanswerable questions.
A story is told of a student who traveled a long distance to meet with a famous rabbi. The student humbly asks, “Rebbe, how do I become wise?” The rabbi looks carefully at the student and answers, “From making good choices.” “But rebbe, how will I know how to make good choices?” The rabbi responds, “From experience.” “But,” the student continues, “How do I get that experience?” The rabbi smiles and answers, “From bad choices.”
Our work is, over and over and over again, to choose to act.
Meg Wheatley
We never know who we are
(this is strange, isn’t it?)
or what vows we made
or who we knew
or what we hoped for
or where we were
when the world’s dreams
were seeded.
Until the day just one of us
sighs a gentle longing
and we all feel the change
one of us calls our name
and we all know to be there
one of us tells a dream
and we all breathe life into it
one of us asks “why?”
and we all know the answer.