sharing

Participation

The world is full of actors and analysts.

I am an analyst.

I like to understand things. I think I really need to understand things. Which requires observation. Which I do best when I’m a little detached from what’s going on. So I sit on the sidelines, away from the action. By choice. It’s where I can observe and analyze. And understand.

Actors are in the middle of everything. They make decisions quickly, they relish the interactions, they’re always in motion. They make life fun, and make it frustrating, depending on which actions they take. But they take action.

Analysts are important. We help our communities understand what’s happening and why. Our work informs actions. We are the experts. We study, we learn, we apply our knowledge, and we explain how things work, why things happen, what we can and can’t do about things we want to change. Not everyone listens, of course, but we’re still important.

Actors are also important. We need people who will commit themselves – and ourselves – to action. They move the ball forward. They create the changes we see in our communities. They are the people in the ring. They strive, usually to make things better for us all. We don’t always agree with what they do, but we still need people to do things.

We have another group in our communities as well, however. These people aren’t particularly productive. They don’t add much of anything at all.

Spectators.

They don’t extend themselves to understand. They don’t take action to change their communities. Or themselves. They take what they earn, but they don’t give back to the broader world around them.

We have far too many spectators. People who do their work, come home to watch television, eat with their family, then do the same thing again the next day. They aren’t thinking about why the world is the way it is and how it might be better. And they aren’t committing themselves to action on behalf of others either. They aren’t extending themselves for others beyond their circle of friends and family, and that lack of effort isn’t helping – and when we have a community that is hostile to some of its members, it might actually be hurting – other people.

I’m not saying they are bad people. I do believe that the sum of each of our individual failings is the same. Our individual lots are not the issue here.

I am saying that if they engaged, it would help lighten the load that many of the other members of our community have to carry. Our collective lot is the issue. I believe that if a fellow person is diminished, then we are not optimizing our collective well-being. Is it up to that individual to make the effort to not be diminished? Yes. And it is also up to each of us in our community to make the effort so that no one in our community is diminished.

I believe we are, in part, our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper. We may not have the largest part to play in his or her individual success, but we still have a part in it.

So let’s play that part. Analyst or actor, it doesn’t matter. Just don’t be a spectator.

Sacrifice

I believe in choice. In fact, I insist on choice.

Free will is the essence of our humanity. We decide for ourselves our actions and our inactions. We choose what to say and what not to say, when to say it, and to whom. We choose what we believe and what we do with the time we have. And our legacies are the sum of those decisions. Blaming circumstances or crediting others for outcomes of our decisions dodges the accountability we have to accept in order to realize our possibilities and responsibilities.

And choice necessarily requires sacrifice.

No matter what we do or say or think, in choosing we close the door on anything else we could have done or said or pondered with that same time and energy. And the more extensive the decision is, the more time and energy we must exert to make that choice, the greater the sacrifice required.

In our day and age, sacrifice has a negative connotation. It comes with a sense of deprivation or discomfort. What do you mean I have to give up something? I’m not wired to give things up happily. Just keeping the option open is enticing – it means I could still choose that path. Don’t take anything from me!

Instead of resenting it, we should celebrate sacrifice. Giving something up in order to achieve something else is not just an acknowledgment of reality. There is reason in the conscious sacrifice. There is maturity too, recognizing that some things have more value than others and that striving for something greater means foregoing things that matter less. You can add nobility too, if the sacrifice is personal enough – it is noble to put some things above your own comfort and security. Other people’s critical needs. Principles like freedom. Confronting evil and cruelty.

Recognizing sacrifice should inspire us to prioritize how we spend our time and energy. We would waste less of both if we were clear on what we are trying to achieve with our choices. We could weigh the opportunity cost of each choice confronting us against how we benefit. Like reasonable people do.

We could have such a different world if we looked to make sacrifices to achieve better things instead of looking for more of lesser things to hoard for ourselves. A deeper, more meaningful world. Can we try it?

Sharing feels good. Really good.

So why do we resist it so much? Especially when we have so much.

I get that conserving energy is a biological motivation deeply enbedded in our DNA. Our ancestors didn’t know when they would eat next, or find water, or need shelter, so hoarding resources was critical to their survival.

And yet they were also social animals. They lived in family groups and in communities. Working with other people was critical to their survival.

We are still social animals. We still live in communities, and I know not only that I derive most of my own satisfaction and pleasure from interacting with other people but also that I could not survive without a community to support me. I am a hobbyist potter who knows zero about acquiring food on my own, zero about building even modestly effective shelter, zero about machines or carpentry or any other necessary skill for truly independent off-the-grid living.

But do we still need to hoard resources?

Because we seem to believe we do. People in my broader family, good friends and neighbors, other people I know and respect seem to want to acquire and retain more than what it appears to me that they need. I don’t judge them for their decisions – I don’t know the details of their circumstances, and I believe strongly in self-determination – but I wonder if they’re not making decisions based on fear rather than a realistic reading of their circumstances.

I retired last year from my corporate career. I was very worried about whether or not I had enough money to transition to my new career, which is still undetermined 15 months later. I did. It seems we prepare for the worst – how else to ensure that we’ll make it through. But the worst only happens to a small fraction of us, so the rest of us have over-prepared. And there’s a cost to each of us for that and to our community at large. Because in acquiring and keeping something we don’t really need, we deprive someone else of its use, someone who might need it more than we do.

My experience is that our community helps those who draw the short straws, who see disaster upend their lives. If we trusted that we wouldn’t be left out in the cold, that our families would have something to eat, that our basic needs would be met while we rebuilt our lives, then I wonder if we could curtail some of the selfishness we see around us, the selfishness that inhibits us, that undermines community and wastes resources that could be better used by someone who needs them more.