Does Solving Problems Save the World?
This world doesn’t need my saving. Or yours.
Admittedly, this belief drove my earliest years in community activism and public service. Urgency hung in the air like thick smoke. In those days, I was driven to solve every complex problem I could. I liked being indispensable, as I attempted to fix all-the-shit.
The idea of me saving “the world” comes with an adherence to a binary, a separation. A human “me” that is above and beyond the trouble. It teases the possibility that if we’re just strong, smart and influential enough we can create a change. It sees the world mostly as a victim; humans as the technological savior. While coming with good intentions, this view reproduces paternalism (cultivated in the coals of modernity) and bypasses our essential interconnectedness (aren’t we actually responsible for causing the problem?).
The view that the world needs saving maintains the object/subject split. It keeps me not only separate from the world but you from me. Me from the more-than-human world. It creates a hierarchy of kings rather than a community of kin.
Early Days of Idealism
I look back and remember my efforts as a sixteen-year-old idealist. Spending my time off the basketball court to hang out and read community activist newspapers at the Earth’s General Store in Edmonton. My growing worries about the state of the world, prompted awareness raising and action. I invited the Chief of the Lubicon Cree to our high school assembly to talk about the link between colonization and deforestation. I started the first Environmental Club and encouraged all my friends to buy “save the earth” t-shirts. Given the deforestation talk, I convinced my principal to put in hand dryers, instead of paper towels. Save the trees!
Those were my early days. Small acts to “save the planet” as my privileged teenage consciousness exploded. Fast forward to my twenties, environmentalism morphed into gender equality. “Saving” took on a more personal, electrical charge. I accessed a new river of rage as I navigated a world with acute misogyny and institutionalized oppression (eh-hem Catholic Church). As a young feisty academic, I became a powerhouse of critique. Deconstruction became my new religion of saving. This time it was saving the world from essentializing identities and grand meta-narratives in the hip, postmodern academy.
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This orientation towards “saving” evolved over time. The content changed. The intensity shifted. There were even mini-wins. But it took time for me to understand that there’s irony to this “saving effort”. Instead of making things better it often created more trouble.
More mind-body-heart split, more unconscious colonization, more us/them, more silencing, more essentializing into what’s right/wrong.
Saving Myself
Then a shift happened. I was in Lytton- that little BC town that burned down in 2021 because it reached 50 degrees. I was on a grad school field trip with a bunch of cool academics. We were staying in a cabin on a farm, higher up in the mountains. Just getting there relaxed my nervous system. The green fields, swaths of pine and biting air drew me to the soil. But we weren’t there to relax. We were there to geek out on symbols and abstraction. To demonstrate our knowledge and push our sharp thinking. There was a moment when my elegant prof was professorializing and all the students chimed in. But couldn’t join in nor muster the energy to fake my interest. All I wanted to do was join with the more-than-human world. Lay in the grass and snuggle a border collie. Feel the rough dry ground and stroke the guard hairs of the creatures. Re-membering myself home through the savoring. In doing so, I was saving myself.
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Lytton- burned by the spark of climate warming- was my place of no-return. An ordinary moment that set in motion a series of decisions that shifted my orientation from “saving” to “savoring”. It was that precise moment when I realized that academia wasn’t for me. As I look back, it revealed that I craved more from myself as I met a troubled world. I needed more body and mind. More heart and critical thinking. More social activism and spirituality.
I longed for a generous weaving: a wider me with a wider us.
Stay with the Trouble
This shift is still working me. I’ve relaxed my grip on a future that’s “saved”. I’m trying to “stay with the trouble”, as Bayo Akomolafe encourages. My attention (and efforts) have shifted to savoring. In other words, savoring the risk to be fully present. To authentically create, build and contribute every day.
I’m just one node, among millions. You are too. I believe we’re called to care and act in ways that savor our gifts right here, right now within the larger trouble. This cultural moment demands stamina, courage and wisdom. To see ourselves not as savers but as resilient and present in the polycrisis.
I can’t save the world. I can’t save us. But I’m called to create containers of community that generate more presence, play and possibility (t-shirts to come?). In other words, to help us stay with what’s most real, most alive.
I’m hosting an online event next week (October 19th). Want to join me? We’re exploring happens when we relax a serious orientation to our work. We’re letting go of the saving and inviting the savoring. Less perfect future and more grit, trust and creativity.
That’s what we do on farms, right? Get dirty and make do with what we have, appreciating the mess in the process.
