Thinking Small

This was previously published on the Doomer Optimism Substack which you can read here.

Since I was a child I was thinking big. I felt keenly the distress of the world and couldn’t stand for it. With childish urgency I felt I needed to solve every problem, right every wrong in the world. When I was 8 I became a vegetarian and was quite taken by the plight of factory farm animals. At 10 I discovered fair trade chocolate and the alternative that implied, and became convinced I must only consume fair trade products. 

I cycled through causes, becoming overwhelmed by which to care the most about, which to dedicate my time and attention to enough to make a difference. The question of how to save the world rested heavily on my shoulders, and in many ways it still does. 

Now I sit, rocking my newborn baby with one foot in my country home while I type. I expect my 16 year old self would see my current life as a failure. Getting old too soon. Becoming settled and giving up on my global ambitions was one of my greatest fears as a teenager. Where did things change?

Well I followed the world saving path for quite a few years. Yet, as I wound my way through it, I was followed by a nagging sense of placelessness, which was the root of my indecision about where to focus my efforts. The world needed care, but who was I to care about it? Where did I start? Who was I in relation to the world, and what was my proper place in it? 

In attempting to think big, I was thinking impersonally. I was attempting to think about everything, but found myself unable to think about anything I could act on. What’s more, I realized that the world was a personal place. I could not love it without loving my place in it. The world I wanted to save was made up of networks of people who needed each other. I neglected to consider that I too was needed in this network. The fabric of life from which the energy and goodness in the world springs was becoming threadbare. Everything was becoming less personal and more generalized. 

As the ‘save the world’ fatigue rose another time within me, I began to realize that before I tried to save the world, I had to be in it. If I was ever going to think big, I first needed to think small. For what is worth saving in the world if we refuse to be in it? To get our hands dirty and be present for our families and neighbors? And I realized that I wanted to be in it. I wanted to be needed by people I knew, and help people who I might know for the rest of my life. I wanted not just to save the world, but to have a stake in it. I could have picked a cause. I could have dedicated myself to solving some problem that I might never really see the impact of. But what of my family? What of the children I might someday have? What of my home town? The lands where I grew up? What would become of them? 

So I chose to think small, to start. To pick someone to spend my life with, to pick a place to spend it in, and to begin to build my small part of the world. Because the more I looked around, the more I realized that the world doesn’t need to be saved. I needs to be built.