Dear friend,
I'm spending increasing amounts of time thinking about a purpose driven life. To fully and wholeheartedly devote a life and career to working for a purposeful cause. The past week I spent time in reflection after confronting what has since felt like years of meandering from start ups and agency life, to now working for a small social enterprise.
I've often caught myself thinking this meandering is somewhat akin to being stuck in a maze. The longer you're in the maze, the more you feel trapped. For me, the way out of this maze is to 'do that which gives you life'. In other words, to have meaningful career doing things that matter. "Does working on climate issues have to be a part of your career?", my girlfriend asked. I thought about this for a minute before responding: "If I could serve God and His Kingdom in this capacity — of being a steward of good change — why wouldn't I dedicate my career for that cause?"
Of course that would be the idealist in me talking, but all this to say that I'm incredibly motivated by the idea of working towards something meaningful. To make it a part of my career. And to be frank, it's not so much for the innovations or the money, but for the safeguarding of the most vulnerable. My main motivation — the motivation of my youth; what made me cry, what made me weep — was the poverty.
It was the poverty, it was the poverty, was the poverty.
Anyone who wants to see the effects of poverty at its very worst should visit the dreadful slums that permeate the streets of any developing nation. Myself? I've only been to a handful. Thailand, Cambodia, Mexico, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. Yet each country's unique state of poverty has been etched into my memory. Each has given me both nuance and similarity. Poverty in the remote Ethiopian mountains are different to that of crowded Cambodian squalors. The gloom of these places is such that you cannot well imagine it unless you have seen it with your own eyes and smelt it with your nose. It's enough to make a grown man cry.
But beyond the visceral senses, I felt a genuine sense compassion on those trips, when I was younger and more impressionable. Perhaps my gift was seeing there was something beautiful about the human condition. Something worth serving. Something worth fighting for.
So when I think about the ramifications of climate change, I think about the way it will impact the most vulnerable. I think of the flooding of coastal regions — the slums that will muddle into whirl pools of metal, wood, and plastic debris — makeshift homes once dreadfully crowded, now filled with skull-like faces and forlorn eyes gazing at that which has become uninhabitable. I think of the food shortage that will come with depleting levels of rainfall and changing temperatures from the scorching sun and harsh winds. I think of the anguish that will come with the lack of food and imagine the sacrifice parents will have to make to prevent their children from going hungry. I wonder if it'll be enough. As if the tragedy of poverty was not enough a life-sentence, the aftermath of the climate crisis will be harrowing for the people least responsible.
Let me paint this motivation another way. When confronted with the great evil that is slavery, Roberts, the protagonist of international best seller Shantaram, wrestles with the idea of putting an end to the evil before him. In this particular scene, he watches as young children are auctioned off to hooded men deep in the belly of Bombay. The children had been sold off by their poverty stricken parents in the hopes that the money earned could be used to feed their other children. As a fugitive, Roberts is unable to go to the authorities— even if he did, it wouldn’t amount to much. The police are corrupt: safeguarding the entrance to the tiny auction square is an active duty officer. In his helplessness, Roberts arrives at the following conclusion:
"And I'd learn, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better. If I came back with a gun and stopped the slave market there, in that crooked concrete maze, it would start up again somewhere else. Stranger that I was, I knew that much. And maybe the new slave market, in a different place, would be worse. I was helpless to stop it, and I knew it."
In some parts, I think this slave analogy is analogous to the climate debate. Could we make things worse in our attempts to fight for change? Possibly. Do I consider there a moral imperative to fight for the most vulnerable? Absolutely. So in the same way Roberts longed to put an end to vile the practice of slavery, so too my heart is tuned to the cause of the poor and vulnerable. And do you see how this impulse towards justice and peace then leads to the need for a system overhaul? To borrow the words of Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, authors of Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in Without Going Crazy: "Culture has to shift from one that observes a transition from an industrial society committed to economic growth to a life-sustaining society committed to the healing and recovery of our world."
With the climate crisis, we're not looking at one single evil, but the culmination of several that has compounded into the reality we face now — prospects of economic decline and resource depletion. Social division and war. The mass extinction of species. Floods and droughts. I suppose a younger, more ignorant version of me would have arrived at the same conclusion as Roberts. Fortunately I've had the privilege of engaging with a community of change seekers looking at the crisis with a set of hopeful eyes. And like them, I think I am driven by the same desire to rectify a global system gone wrong.
I've long thought what I can offer. In my late teens, armed with a digital camera and a microphone, I filmed children playing in the slums of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I was convinced of the inherent persuasiveness of a child eating scraps off the floor: "If the right people come to learn of this, change will come", I whispered to myself amidst the lump in my throat. Later, in the comfort and privacy of my hotel room, I wept.
Years later, in Tekax, Mexico, I featured acts of police brutality in my first feature documentary. I interviewed people who withstood sweltering heat, dry desserts, and cramped trucks just to make it across the American border. I ate with a pastor determined to lead his congregation away from the grip of drugs ruining the lives of the youth in his town. Looking back, that has always been my starting point. It has always been a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice, and a desire to galvanize someone, anyone, to look at this horror and be moved enough to act.
When my time comes, when the dust settles, I want to honestly look God in His eyes and say I chose a life of upholding truth and justice and peace. It is not easy. I have come to learn that the road forward is laced with potholes of disinformation; with men armed with forked tongues and insatiable greed. The internet has raised problems of alarmism and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness in an age of untruth. Ultimately, I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And it is to that end I will journey towards.
Thanks for reading, til the next one!
Forever grateful,
Daniel