What I Can't Ignore When I Walk: Diversity

I have one of those "head in the clouds" dreamer personalities that would by nature blissfully ignore the practical realities of life to whatever degree possible. So it has become my choice of a pedestrian lifestyle in a city like Santa Monica that quite literally keeps me grounded in some of the harsher aspects of our present reality. Lately there have been three things in particular that I have recognized as impossible for me to ignore in my walking world. My next three blog entries will focus on each of those: 1) the Messiness and Beauty of Diversity, 2) the as-yet-unsolved problem in our society of Abuse of Power in our families, schools, churches and businesses and 3) the ongoing challenge of Change and Progress as people and planet collide.

The Messiness and Beauty of Diversity is one of those things I find it increasingly difficult to ignore in my walking. I could have chosen to conduct my social experiment of a pedestrian lifestyle anywhere--including in the homogenous town of 300 in rural Michigan where I grew up. In that area the people all have the same color of skin and most even hail from the same part of Europe. You will hear no language other than English spoken there or the views of more than one political party expressed. The "look" is basically the same across the board as are the levels of education and economic status. And one faith is held almost exclusively by the residents, with only two of the numerous variations of that faith even significantly represented.

In sharp contrast, I cannot walk 6 blocks in Santa Monica along my typical paths without hearing the music of 2-3 languages, seeing a rainbow of skin colors and types of attire, or encountering those with dramatically different faiths and political views from one another. People without homes and incomes live along the pathways of the luxury hotels and condos so that I am brought face-to-face daily with both economic extremes. There is little about either the messiness or the beauty of diversity that I can ignore or hide from in my chosen lifestyle.

But for me it requires being a walker in this coastal city which deposits the world at my doorstep. Just living here--diverse though the city is--would not have automatically exposed me to that diversity. Walking everywhere is what has allowed me to begin to see things whole. Just as I could have cloistered myself away somewhere in a world of sameness like the rural town that gave birth to me or the "wealthy, white, suburbanite" culture I spent years of my adult life dying a slow death in, I could choose to avoid diversity in an urban setting as well. I could drive from parking structure to parking structure in a cocoon of a car and choose isolated groups to participate in and never learn either the lessons the beauty of diversity teaches me on a daily basis or ask myself the hard questions about the messes it creates.

When we cluster by race or by creed, by country of origin or by age, by social status or any other demographic, we lose the capacity to see things whole. If our "kind" is all we are ever exposed to--in any category--we begin to adopt the traits of only one face of humanity, without even realizing that it is happening. If we are not intergenerational, for example, we lose either the wonder of childhood or the vitality and reform of youth or the power and productivity of the peak years or the wisdom and patience that only life experience can bring. Whatever age group we isolate ourselves from is where we are losing out. If we do not integrate races, we lose out on the general traits each is known for and become lopsided and less than whole. If we are too afraid to expose ourselves to differing views from our own in faith or politics, we never refine and balance our own thinking. And if we choose to ignore either of the extremes of the socio-economic spectrum, we can easily hide from some very hard questions that need to be asked.

But it's messy to live that way. Every day in my walking I see some of the conflict that putting diversity together brings. The rich resent the poor for messing up their playgrounds and landscapes and the poor resent the rich for not finding better ways to share the whole. The races and cultures each wish the others would be more like them instead of learning from each. The young mistakenly think they know everything about life already before living it, and the old think there is nothing of the unseasoned vitality of youth that could in any way benefit the whole. It's rare to meet a person who prefaces any of his or her political or religious views with, "I realize I could be wrong, but..."

These are broad generalizations about the conflict diversity brings, but I watch them play themselves out as I walk on a daily basis. It's enough material for many books on the topic. But this blog is not the place for all of that and is mostly about a quest for learning to see things whole. Most days I simply wish there were a way to pick myself and everyone else up above the earth to look down on the situation and see how it looks from a distance. Then perhaps we would see how truly beautiful diversity is. How much it adds to life. And how complicated we make our own walks by fighting or ignoring that diversity instead of welcoming it, learning from it and eventually even embracing it--till the richness of the tapestry it creates is so stimulating that we can't imagine living any other way. Perhaps when that day comes we'll venture far enough outside the cocoons of comfort we create for ourselves to go out walking--with and among and alongside people who don't look or act or think much like we do.

Downward Nobility

My favorite phrase for balancing the good of the whole with the good of the individual is this one: downward nobility. Right within the expression itself is the secret I've observed to individuals being willing to dramatically sacrifice for the good of the whole.

The term "Downward Nobility" is not original to me. Watts Wacker, a futurist who was with the Stanford Research Institute think tank when he published an article in 1997 about the Dream Era in history projecting what we are now seeing quietly spring into reality was my first source for uncovering and thinking about the pairing of those words--downward and nobility--in stark contrast to the Upward Mobility trend of past decades.

The secret to a willingness to go Down instead of Up the ladder, is a recognition of the Nobility and ownership that already exists. I once attended a seminar in early childhood development that provides a tangible picture of the psychology behind this. The presenter emphasized how difficult it is for children to share anything with another child before they reach the age of 3. Something developmentally happens by the time a child is 3 that allows her or him to understand the concept of ownership. Try taking something away from a 2-yr. old and giving it to another and your ears will let you know immediately the developmental phase of understanding ownership which allows for sharing has not been mastered yet! But once the concept of ownership is finally grasped, the child becomes much freer with sharing possessions.

The dynamics are similar for adults. Much of the materialism of our culture arises from being stuck as grown-up toddlers who haven't yet deeply enough learned the secret of how worthy each of us is individually and how deeply the whole belongs to us. We run around frantically trying to collect things to prove we are valuable and that we are "owners" and that we are special. We haven't learned yet that it's already all ours. The whole belongs to all of us. To enjoy. And to take care of. We're not going to increase our individual worth or value by greedily stockpiling as much as we can gather around us like frantic 2- yr. olds trying to make sure no one takes what they're not sure belongs to them in the first place.

When we find ourselves frantically chasing material belongings, we have lost sight of the fact that we are already Nobility and the proud owners of the Whole. We are Princes and Princesses, Kings and Queens, Knights and Ladies, who have the incredible privilege of enjoying and caring for all of the people and the planet as a whole. That's what the new Nobility will soon look like. Our new Upper Classes will one day be the people who have tapped so deeply into that truth and allowed it to permeate their behaviors that they are free to enjoy without being driven to possess and to hold all they own with open hands for the world around them to freely share.

If you know you own it all, you don't have to hoard anything. You can let it all go at any moment for the good of the whole, trusting you will have exactly what you need in your hour of lack in return. Instead of the picture of a panicked 2-yr. old screaming over the departing object that has just been pried out of his or her hands, life can become a great adventure in which what you have is taken and multiplied for the good of others when you share it. Then you can watch as the love and energy and joy that comes back to you wraps around you like a rich and fulfilling romance with the whole. That's what we're hungering for in our toddler-like states anyway: adventure and romance. And we have nothing to lose if we give it all away--IF we recognize who we already are and what we already own.

Spiritual experiences are the new status symbols Watts Wacker projected back in '97 for this era in history--replacing material possessions. The shift has already strongly begun. I started my coaching business in '98 foreshadowing much of what I now see coming more strongly into play globally. Spiritually intense retreats around the topic of individuality and worth became one of the most popular services I offered. People paid the kind of money normally spent on latest entertainment devices or major wardrobe pieces or vacations to sit around with a small group of people and discover what made each person 100% unique and therefore irreplaceable and of infinite value to the whole. The deeper that kind of work went, the more passion and purpose each had and the freer each became at letting go of material possessions.

When you know who you are and the global Treasure you are as part of this New Nobility that every person alive can belong to, dramatically simplifying your tastes and your belongings for the good of the whole becomes second nature. It is the natural outflow. You automatically find yourself willing to go Downward instead of just up and up and up, because you recognize you were already at the top to begin with. Mother Teresa who lived one of the most non-material lifestyles on the history books continues to top "most admired people" lists no matter how materialistic our culture becomes. And I believe that admiration is the hidden Downward Nobility in each of us longing to be the kind of people who are known for giving it all away but unsure how to deeply enough own our own royalty enough that we feel free to do it. Let's be a part of starting that trend--of mirroring for each other our Nobility on a daily basis so we become more and more comfortable with letting the material things go and having the incredible spiritual experiences that giving and sharing and caring about the whole bring.

The Way of Simplicity

In my "Living the Questions" blog entry, the #1 question I have been asking is how we can justify lifestyles of excess when others have nothing? That has become increasingly more serious for me as dialogues have begun to open and books to be published (like Jeffrey Sachs The End of Poverty) asserting that we are living in a time when we have everything we need to end extreme poverty. IF we each do our part.

But for me a life of extreme simplicity didn't arise primarily from research and thinking and social awareness. In September of 2005 I had some amazing spiritual experiences that prompted me to give away my remaining precious possessions and start out on a journey of a minimalist lifestyle. And so I did. By that time I had already dramatically simplified my life in order to travel more with my writing, but this was a more radical shift. I quite literally gave it all away but what I could fit in two suitcases and my laptop case--and a box of memories stored with family.



From that point forward, my life has been a bit of a giant experiment in discovering the veracity of the words of Jesus: "a person's life does not consist of the abundance of things he possesses." It's been quite a journey. It's not one everyone has the choice to take or make, but it is one I can now highly recommend after three years of living it. The choice to give it all away and adopt a greatly simplified life of non-ownership and no ties allowed me the freedom from leases and caring for belongings to travel about the country during that time period and reconnect with past relationships as well as take more time to "see things whole."


Because this lifestyle of my past three years has been so dramatically different from the one I was once pursuing, I often get questions about how I did it. Housing has involved finding furnished places where others have extra space and something they need traded for it instead. I think this is a greatly underutilized idea that we will begin to see increase in days to come as people explore new ways of being in community with one another and in not needing to "possess" things in order to enjoy them--and life.

In my experience of these past few years, in one case my housing involved marketing in exchange for a room in a residential inn that was set up community living style. In another it involved childcare and chores for a room with a large family. In another pet sitting for my housing. And in some cases simply paying rent by the week or the month--rather than signing a lease or a mortgage. My income source to support this experiment in a greatly simplified lifestyle has also been varied--and has involved freelance writing and consulting and picking up short-term temp jobs whenever needed.


I uncovered whole new sides of myself I would not have thought possible to develop--traits like adaptibility and resourcefulness and flexibility and ingenuity. But I also developed a new understanding for what millions of people all over the planet who have little go through on a daily basis. Even with my minimalist lifestyle and capping my earning at under $12k/year for the past three years, I am rich compared to a vast majority of the world's population. And that is something I had greatly lost sight of as my income climbed during the previous years from $30k to $50k to $75k to six figure earning potential and mapping out strategies for making a million a year.



The more I earned the less the money meant to me. The less it satisfied and the more it seemed like it would require to really live the lifestyle I thought I was after and the faster I seemed to go through it without even realizing I was. The ideas I justified to myself about the poor and those in need during that time period in my life horrify me now. I specifically remember a time when I was upset with the others with me who wanted to give away their leftovers from a restaurant meal to a disabled vet in the parking lot. Ouch. But if you are in strong pursuit of accumulation, you sometimes feel you have to protect what you are spending your life in pursuit of. And that includes the mindset that "only the strong survive and deserve."

I do not plan to live at quite this level of austerity for the rest of my life, but I do plan to live on $30k or less a year. Giving away all that I owned a few years ago did not let me off the hook where the good of the whole is concerned! Part of what I still have to give is my money-making potential, and so I am now in a season of exploring what it will look like to put roots down in my chosen city of Santa Monica and for me to reactivate the money-making machine I was once rapidly becoming. The difference this time is a choice made in advance to cap my lifestyle so all the rest can be given away to the whole.

"Take only what you need; wisely use everything you have; give the rest away." That is the 3-part motto I want to live by and be part of sparking a radical revolution around. If we all live by that phrase, there is literally enough for the whole. And in my own journey of seeing what it is like to have little and to be out walking daily around those who have even less, the beauty and power of wanting to see extreme poverty ended wells up inside of me in songlike ways and I hope I can be one of the forerunners in making it possible worldwide.

A friend who'd been exposed to some of what my lifestyle was like "back in the day" visited me earlier this year and said he was inspired by the choices I was making. He bought me an engraving that has become one of my new precious possessions. It reads, "A rich person is not one who has the most but one who needs the least." May it become true in our time.

Living the Questions

"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Don't search for answers now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

Those lines from one of my favorite poets, Rainier Maria Rilke, are how I want to approach the somewhat radical lifestyle choices I’ve been making the past few years. I’m not making these choices specifically because I want to be a radical. Nor do I want to become someone who is defined just by the unusual list of things she doesn’t do. Rather, I want to be a part of a community in ongoing questioning process about these issues and the trial and error kinds of choices we need to make to live our way into the answers.

Here are 5 of the current questions I’m asking and trying to live my way into the answers to, including at least one resource of another individual or organization inspiring me by living the same questions:
#5 Are we making conscious choices about what we produce, what we buy and how we dispose of it all? It's the Sustainability question--are we taking out more than we're putting in or the planet can sustain, and are we prepared for the consequences of that?http://www.sustainableworks.org/
#4 What is our favorite American past-time of eating out costing us--in our health, our budgets, our environment and our treatment of one another? And along those same lines, how far removed have we become from the actual production, processing and preparation of what we put into our bodies daily?http://www.circleofresponsibility.com/
#3 Do we think all the way through the implications of technological advances that seem to bring us more personal ease before we choose to implement them?For example, we're just beginning to ask hard questions about cell phones. Are scientists correct in their concerns that our cell phones are contributing strongly to colony collapse disorder for the bees--which has implications for some of the richness of life we take for granted, like nuts and fruit and flowers? http://omega.twoday.net/stories/3545166/
#2 What is our dependence on gasoline-powered vehicles costing us in all areas of life? What about the economy, the ecology, the political scene, our physical health and our socialization and engagement in daily community? http://www.newurbanism.com/ for pedestrian lifestyles and urban renewalhttp://www.altcarexpo.com/ for alternative car and transportation options
#1 And finally, the question I think is both the hardest to answer and the most fundamental: if we know there are some on the planet who have nothing, how do we justify lifestyles of excess and accumulation, owning more than we need or not sharing what we have with the whole?The Irresistible Revolution: Living As An Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne (founder of http://www.thesimpleway.org/ )

My own journey took me into living the questions #1&2 pose before any of the others. But in general I find that is backwards in order to even progressive cities such as the one where I live; those two are very unpopular questions! #5&4 are much more in vogue already—though I think the final two can make a far greater dent in the big picture faster if enough people begin to ask them. Individuals cannot be fully transformed without the systems and structures they live in being transformed. And in recent years our systems and structures as a civilization have begun to shift in ways that make questions #5 & 4 much easier than ever before. If all I am reading and observing on my travels is accurate, I believe we’re not far from the day when the other three questions will be easier for others to live their way into the answers on. But the systems and structures in which the individuals reside cannot be transformed without enough of those individuals asking the key questions and coming together to live into the answers. So for now that’s my invitation. Let’s begin to not only ask these questions; let’s begin to live them. Perhaps as Rilke suggests we may find ourselves someday living these questions right into their answers.

Caring About The Individual and the Whole

I mention in the About Me portion of this blog that I'm proud to connect myself to a growing wave of revolutionaries who are asking not only about the toxicity and oppressiveness of their own environments, but about how the choices we make create or contribute to toxic and/or oppressive environments for others. To me a fundamental issue that needs to be examined if we're going to enter into those types of discussions is our perception of the tension between the good of the individual and the good of the whole. In my observation, sometimes that is all it is: a perceived tension rather than an actual one. When the issues are fully examined for both the individual and the whole, usually the good of one is best for the other and vice versa.

Take smoking for example. It's a topic that in recent years especially we've begun to look at how it is neither good for the individual or the whole. Smoking creates toxic environments internally for the individual and externally for the whole and its addictive nature leads to a form of oppression for the individual as well. But to just make that observation without going to the next step of the good of the individual and the good of the whole isn't enough either! I don't hear us doing enough yet to get to the root of why so many in our stress-filled lifestyles would feel a need to escape into something as damaging to the body and to others around them as nicotine is. And I don't hear the important questions being asked yet about how we can find and fund some new George Washington Carvers who will do for the tobacco plant what he did for the peanut and the sweet potato so we don't have to shut down entire industries and bankrupt thousands and disrupt farms and destroy livelihoods in order to fully reform this trend.

I am for both the good of the individual and the good of the whole in all areas--and for the kinds of serious dialogue and discovery that uncover how both can coexist. That's true in the area of transportation as well. We know enough now to know that the ideal probably is to reverse the trail technology has taken us down toward destroying our planet by the way we move about it. But that doesn't mean the good of the whole has to sacrifice the good of the individuals who can't make the same choices as easily as I can for a pedestrian lifestyle. What about large families with several babies and toddlers living out in the middle of rural America? What about the many who cannot find work to support themselves that is anywhere near where they live yet? How do they get from place to place until enough of the revolution has taken place to make pedestrian lifestyles more feasible and rewarding for more people? Or what about those in highly intemperate climates? Or those whose health or age does not allow them to use their feet for transportation?

That's why I get excited about the Alternative Car Expo that Santa Monica hosts free for the public each year. It starts this kind of dialogue going about the options and the possibilities. Fun and creative modes of transportation are showcased for anyone and everyone that do far less harm to the individuals and the whole than the ones we're using now.

They talk about important issues like how more cities can do what New York does in making public transportation convenient and accessible and very much the norm. How we as a country could do more of what works so beautifully in Switzerland and other countries for moving people about from place to place. One option that was showcased at last year's event--www.tritrack.net--did an amazing job of combining the needs of the individual and the needs of the whole, with a model for zipping around in little vehicles that go up onto the rail for mass transit and then down on to streets for individual mobility without harming the environment in the process. I sent the link to my young nephews so they could start their engineering brains going now with ideas like this one for new fun ways to zip about the planet without destroying it in the process.

I'm not suggesting the billions of people on the planet should suddenly adopt a pedestrian lifestyle like my own anymore than I'm suggesting we shut down the tobacco industry overnight. What I do hope is that we open dialogues about what the choices we make are costing us--both individually and as a whole. And that we start working toward solutions. That's how every successful revolution I can think of in history has begun. Small groups of people start gathering together to ask the hard questions. And soon it turns into community meetings. And then into public forums. Until finally enough of an army of revolutionaries has been amassed to actually get something done.

We are living at a time in history where we have the resources to get things done. We can "rally the troops" on these and many other important issues of the quality of our lives and the lives of those generations coming after us. We can start A Walking Revolution.

It takes caring about the individual. And it takes caring about the whole. If you've read some of my earlier entries in this Blog you know from the "Why I Walk" one that I first took to foot for my individual benefit and you know from the "In Memory of..." one that the events of 9-11 caused me to take that decision even more seriously for the good of the whole. It takes both to revolutionize the way we do things.

That's what I hope to plant the seeds of. And if you live in or near the city of Santa Monica, I hope to see you at the free Alt Car Expo next weekend (Sept. 26 and 27) in the Civic Center across the street from the beautiful RAND Corporation I work for part-time asking yourself what you can do for the good of yourself as an individual that will also benefit the whole where moving about the planet on a daily basis is concerned. www.altcarexpo.com

Why I Walk

If you've read any of the archives of this Blog you know that 9-11-1 had a lot to do with my more serious commitment to a walking lifestyle. But the initial seed of the idea had been planted well before then and I have to admit my reasons at the time were anything but altruistic. As a child who walked before she crawled and skipped kindergarten in a desire to get right to the good stuff, I came into the world with a highly developed sense of efficiency. For me, there was a lot about the suburban drive-everywhere lifestyle I was living that was supposedly the great American Dream that I found highly inefficient. Well into it by my early 30s with a beautiful 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom, 2-car garage and vehicles to fill it and all the gadgets and "stuff" I needed to fill the house and all the services--from landscaping to house cleaning to maintenance--I needed to maintain it, I was rapidly becoming disillusioned with the inefficiency of this model taking me anywhere close to an actual Dream of a life.

Long before I started questioning its moral roots I was questioning the practical value of a car-dependent suburban existence. You live in row upon row of houses filled with people you never even see because you go straight from your remote-controlled garages to your climate-controlled homes and your vicarious worlds of radio/television/internet in which you never have to have a single conversation with anyone outside your nuclear family or anyone who radically disagrees with you on anything--unless, of course, a telemarketer interrupts your dinner and then you're fully entitled to be as rude as you want to this unwelcome invasion into your quasi-Paradise. And if you ever want to venture out of this comfort-oriented cocoon, you have to drive 10 minutes to an ugly unpleasant strip mall to get your goods and then 10-20 minutes in the opposite direction to a bunch of ugly medical offices to get those services and then 15 minutes another direction to get your haircare needs attended to. The equally unattractive utilitarian bank and post office are about a 10-minute drive in the fourth direction. That was my life in Suburbia in a supposedly highly coveted area in which to live. And the one I observed friends in other supposedly desirable areas of the country living as well.

So there wasn't anything particularly noble about my first stirrings toward a walking lifestyle. In fact, in some ways it was sheer survival instinct. I was getting fatter and fatter--both symbolically and literally--sitting around in my lavish remote-controlled lifestyle pretending I knew something about the world I was experiencing vicariously via the media and stressing out over the energy it took to maintain my so-called American Dream and the sheer hassle of getting in and out of my car and running around in four different directions for little short trips that left me drained and exhausted and fighting traffic and parking and school zones just to get in and out of some ugly buildings for goods and services to keep up my rather nonexistent quality of life.

"The Emperor has no clothes on" was the initial reason I started planning and working toward a simplified pedestrian life. I wasn't thinking much about the good of the Whole by then at all. I was just making the common sense observation that no one I knew--including me--was actually living a very dreamy life in his or her pursuit of the American Dream. We were fat and tired and lonely and demotivated and stressed out trying to maintain our lavish little individual remote-controlled cocoons. And we seemed very asleep about the whole thing. I used to zip in and out of my two-car garage in my top-ranked little car and think to myself that future generations might well consider this period in our history as something sci-fi like and foreign. How did we go from tribes and communities that integrated all areas of their lives from where and how they lived to access to goods and services to relations with each other and communities of faith and work and play and enjoyment of the beauty of nature to compartmentalizing all of those areas off into unattractive little cookie-cutter like boxes and calling it an American Dream while becoming increasingly dependent on fuel from other sources to maintain this kind of an almost nature-less existence?

That's what started me out walking. Because I wanted a better life for myself. Not because I cared about global wars over oil and what rising gas prices were doing to the global economy and the quality of life of the masses. But because I was tired and sick and fat and bored and lonely and frustrated and certain there had to be more to life than working 60+ hours a week and zipping around in short stress-filled trips in my car to get anywhere just to make my life work and to keep myself in that condition.

My first attempt at making the city of Santa Monica my home--after careful study of what kind of place would allow for a more efficient lifestyle and let me get rid of the hassles of a car altogether--sold me on the personal benefits of a walking lifestyle alone. I dropped from a size 14 to a size 4 in my first 9 months of walking everywhere and my physical health approaching my 40s became clearly better than it had been in my 20s. I also started to notice a clearing of my thoughts and my emotions in the ocean air and a more even-paced lifestyle with the way walking slowed me down and road rage over traffic and parking issues disappeared. Others began commenting on the more pleasant and enjoyable person I was becoming and the way I started relaxing and actually enjoying my life--even in the midst of a difficult personal transition.

That was the beginning of my walking revolution--but only the beginning. The more I walked the more I realized all the other reasons for why I was walking. And now if I'm asked why I walk there's hardly an area of life or social justice issue I care about that my walking isn't directly connected to. The Arts? Walking is when my most creative ideas come to me. Urban revitalization? My refusal to let fear of crime scare me off the city streets is one way I'm making a difference in reversing the trend of "white flight" to the suburbs that helped destroy our cities in the first place. Theology and philosophy? My best times alone with God are spent walking by the ocean and some of my best observations about life and humanity are gleaned from what I observe on my walks. My interests and passions have come alive in my walking lifestyle.

And so has my ability to care about and contribute to the Whole. I walk because of what it does for the global economy, for the environment, for the political scene. I walk because if more people who could make that choice did we could literally revolutionize some of those three areas. I walk for the physical health decline in this country that desparately needs to be reversed. I walk because of how it clears my head and reduces stress and regulates my metabolism—as well as for my mental and emotional and spiritual health and the way those are all intertwined. I walk because in the city in which I have chosen to begin this revolution walking forces me outside my comfort zone as a natural loner and theorist into the world of others and community and the greater whole. In my cocooned 90% North American Caucasian suburban neighborhood lifestyle I could adopt and adhere to some pretty narrow views. Those have a way of shedding somewhat naturally when you walk past people from an average of 50-60 different countries in the course of a day. You start seeing things from a variety of perspectives before you even realize that you are.

As my About Me portion of this Blog states, perhaps the main benefit of a walking lifestyle in Santa Monica that I would hate to ever give up is that it gives me the opportunity to at least begin to See Things Whole. That's the core of why I walk.

In Memory Of...

My Blog--and the Revolution I hope it helps catalyze--is in memory of those whose lives were taken 7 years ago today. I owe each of them a debt of gratitude for how they've helped me on my journey of this Walking Revolution--one toward Seeing Things Whole.


Although I'd traveled internationally some by 9-11-1 and had some international friendships and business relationships and was living near Dallas. one of the largest cities in America, my world was still a very small and narrow place. I remember sitting at my computer desk that morning, running my rapidly expanding business over the internet from the confines of my comfortable home and actually feeling a twinge of irritation that everything suddenly shut down because of some apparent airplane accident. I wasn't a big news watcher and I'm sorry to say it took me a few urgings by email before I even stopped what I was doing long enough to take the time to watch what was happening to people I didn't even know a thousand miles away.


But a few short hours later what had happened wasn't a thousand miles away anymore. It was the pastoral staff of our church who were called in to comfort the Dallas-based flight crew that often flew with the pilot and copilot of the plane that hit the Pentagon; they were raw with pain and grief and struggling with survivors' guilt. It was the sister of one of the few New Yorkers I knew who had been in the World Trade Center that morning and was missing. It was the international club of coaching colleagues I was managing from which I suddenly had people frantically calling me from Australia and England and Canada trying to see if I--their sole personal connection to the U.S.--had some additional news and insight for them they weren't getting from the media. And in the days and months to come it was my rapidly expanding business that just as rapidly went into a tailspin setting in motion other events in my life that upended my comfortable little world.

Up until that day I'd lived a fairly cocooned existence in which the events I watched (or more often avoided watching) on the news didn't have to have anything to do with my personal life--and therefore, with the daily choices I made. Not so from that point forward. While I didn't realize it strongly until in hindsight, that day marked a turning point in my life toward beginning to see more fully how the parts impact the whole and how every choice any of us makes matters to all the rest of us.

My favorite magazine ad about the environment has a picture of the world with the continents drawn out in words. The words that outline the face of the globe are one sentence repeated over and over again: "It's not my problem. It's not my problem. It's not my problem." The world is drawn out by the voices of those saying, "It's not my problem."

And then down below the picture is one simple word: "Yet." The Whole is not my problem...yet.

9-11-1 became my "yet" day. From that point forward I recognized how dependent we all are on the choices and actions of one another and that no matter how much we may wish to withdraw from the global issues that aren't in our own backyards "yet," we do not have that luxury.

We haven't answered all the questions yet that 9-11 raised; I'm not even sure we've asked ourselves the most important ones loudly and long enough yet. But for a few brief shining moments many of us tasted what it was like to suddenly see things whole and care about the whole. And that's part of what I walk now everywhere I go in memory of.

So this Blog is dedicated to the memory of all the casualties connected to that sad day. I hope that in my walking and my writing I can preserve some part of the legacy they themselves might have asked for if given the chance. Maybe if their voices were here among us today they would say, "Please. Learn to say 'It's my problem' now. Learn to say 'the whole is my problem' now. Don't wait for the 'yet' moment when it camps out at your doorstep and disrupts your business and shatters your dreams and claims the lives of those you love. Listen now. See it now. Make it your problem now."

Walking is just one choice we can make to begin to do something about the problems. I know I only represent one car that isn't adding to its role in the ecology and the economy and the political scene. But it's a start. And it's a way to remember all of them and what it cost them for us not to have made the Whole our problem sooner.