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Tuesday 11 September 2012

THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED: Part 1 of 2

Before we go any further on this journey together I feel that I should probably properly introduce myself and set out my qualifications as your guide.  First, as has already been stated, I’m a lawyer and, as such, I’m acquainted with public policy and familiar with the rule of law. In fact, I love the law – I actually enjoy leafing through tomes upon tomes of statutes and I particularly relish the opportunity to get up in front of a full Court.  The law’s complexities and intellectual challenges energize me and its power to effect social change both inspires and motivates me. Yet, neither my interest nor my intellect is fully satisfied by legal questions or problems; indeed, my attention, awareness and curiousity have always extended far beyond the realm of legal issues and concerns.  Second, and perhaps on a related note, I have lived and worked in a surprisingly diverse set of locations and conditions – including the heat and congestion of equatorial Africa and the cold and isolation of the High Arctic. I’ve also spent my 9 to 5s toiling above the world in 40-storey monoliths of steel and glass, as well as on the ground floor in compounds of dirt and mud covered by a roof made of corrugated scrap metal. I feel as though the cumulative experiences of having seen our world from many vantage points has helped me to appreciate the real circumstances of both people and the planet in a way that few others have.  I see this as giving me a unique perspective on the world in which we live and the issues that this blog intends to engage. [You are of course welcome to come to your own conclusions.] Third, and as my last post hopefully makes clear, I have not always been a ‘public interest lawyer’.  I understand the world of business. But I also know that business cannot exist without strong communities in which to thrive and to grow.  I like to think that I can fit into boardroom just as easily as at protest rally; at times I've found myself working along the ambitious and unconcerned, people in dark suits with standardized minds, and I don't think I rocked the boat too much. Yet, few who know me on a personal level would ever say that I belonged on Wall Street or Bay Street; nonetheless, this full range of experiences has been indispensable to me – some things in life can never be fully appreciated or understood by a virgin.

I know that such a CV is by no means an automatic qualification of being either well-informed or of having the right answers but it should at least reveal that my views and opinions have been thoughtfully formulated and well-tested in the laboratory of life.  I didn’t just wake-up one fine morning and decide that I wanted to find intolerable and corrosive problems with our present-day society and priorities, they hit me in the face. And I wasn’t born with any predisposition towards wanting to change the system; in fact, I - perhaps even more than most - was initially far more hung-up on fitting in and proving myself within that system than on changing it... and that's where my story begins. 



All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them" – Galileo Galilei

The Personal Story that Frames My Understanding

The hard truth is that when I was much younger I think what I wanted most was to find a high-status, high-paying job. Like many of my peers, I thought that was the surest way of not only proving myself but also to paying off my school debts and stamping my ticket out of my middle-class background. But I don’t honestly ever remember questioning whether or not achieving this goal would make me happy – it was more than assumed – and I certainly never thought about how reaching it would impact those around me or what effect it would have on society as a whole.

Then, somewhere along the way, things changed.  My experiences began to alter the way that I looked at things.  For instance, when I was in high school I thought I would go to Wall Street, make millions, and retire by 35. Then I took a trip around the world.  I was 25.  I visited developing countries for the first time in my life. I saw real poverty, not the poverty of the urban slums in my native Canada but those of the squalid shantytowns of South East Asia, refugee camps in Ghana and the ghettos of places in Palestine, Bosnia, Mexico and Russia. It was only then that I started to contextualize my own life.   

It was a series of moving and unforgettable experiences for me.  I found myself both changed and broadened. Perhaps at risk of sounding a bit cliché but, gradually, I was filled with a burning desire to ‘give something back’.  I slowly began to understand what all the great religions and revered spiritual figures of the past have preached (if not always practiced). And this marked the commencement of my own commitment to fight for those same things.  To be clear, it wasn’t a transformation that occurred all at once and overnight – in my experience true change seldom does – but it was from this vantage point that the process of my developing a fuller humanity was underway.

When I returned to Canada I took my station in life at an office downtown, surrounded by people who cared more about client development than personal development.  I couldn’t help but wonder if it was the right way to go. What I learned was that those making large six-figure salaries generally were not sages a whole lot smarter than you or me. Sure, a few of them could throw around stirring rhetoric or drown you with their rolodex of global contacts but, underneath the veneer, the judgement and intelligence of the brightest in a ‘seven sister’ law firm was about on par with what I find in my day-to-day life.  No more, no less. I was far from impressed.

I went through my routine well enough I suppose, but there was a deep sense of having taken the wrong fork in the road awhile back. What I wanted was to lead a life of integrity, one where the things I cared about were given a level of attention commensurate to their value. In the pit of my stomach I knew that spending time at a job which made me dread waking up on Monday mornings, and with people whose lives were filled more with desire and pride than meaning or value, wasn’t going to get me there. Realizing that so often who it is that we become in our twenties determines what we’ll do for the remainder of our lives, I knew I had to take another road before I found myself aged and worn, looking back in time only to discover that I wasted the majority of my hours on things that meant absolutely nothing to me personally. It was from here that my individual search for authenticity was born.

 
'Voluntourism'

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” – proverb

Leaving old trails for new ones always entails a certain quantum of risk but in my heart I knew that I had absolutely everything to gain and nothing to lose by leaving behind a career path that I despised.  I knew that the path I was on was wrong for me; although everybody around me told me that it was the road to success, I was certain it wasn’t the one to significance. (I never did understand, how being a spectator in the effort of building a better and fairer society, rather than an active participant, could mark a life of substance?)  See, what moved me wasn’t a hunger for a bigger house or a faster car: it was the far deeper desire of wanting to live a life of congruency and meaning. In short, I had come to the Rubicon – to that moment of decision which faces most young people when they start out in life. I didn’t want much - not to change the world or even necessarily to ‘make a difference’ - my goal was far more modest than that: all I really wanted was for my work and personal life to be just one life. 

I began down this path simply by travelling, truly seeing the world – living the life of an itinerant.  I know what some of you are thinking, “I’ve travelled, I know the world”.  And maybe you are one of those whom have and does, but I’m also skeptical because of my interactions along the way with all the travelling Westerners that I met who intentionally avoided seeing the countries they claimed to visit and know because they never experienced them in the way that the majority of people living there do.  You can only get so much perspective from the comfort of your resort, your spot on the beach or even the local museums, attractions and tourist traps.  These are the same Westerners who go on to say things such as, “you can live like a king on $1.25 a day in a place like Cambodia” when they themselves certainly never tried to do so while they were there. Such statements are filled with apathy and deception. Sure, many goods are sold for less but salaries more than offset the savings. In short, anyone who thinks people are living a life of comfort in any part of the world on $5 a day, much less 1/5th of that, is disturbingly misinformed. I know this because I did it myself.  Those who say otherwise are the people who come back home and still don’t know the difference between relative and absolute poverty, although they often think that they do due to their newfound 'worldliness'. Unfortunately, because of that they are often among those who do far more to confuse global empathy than to assist it.  Alternatively, I found that the less I packed on my journeys (both physically and financially) the more that awaited me on all accounts. 

My travels were expeditions undertaken in search of a greater and truer understanding of our global commons, ‘learning journeys’.  I lived with people who had to make decisions as to whether or not they could afford to let their children go to school (and I’m not talking about college or even junior high), orphans who prostituted themselves in order to eat, children who didn’t expect anything for Christmas and young girls for whom sanitary wear wasn’t even an option.  Seeing such suffering shook me to my very core and forced me to become more than just an armchair critic. [Please see an earlier posting of mine “Crossing Borders to Make a [small] Difference”, to get a fuller idea of my experiences]. I was fortunate during this time to engage with people and places that were worth knowing and to be exposed to problems and issues that were worth working on. This enabled me to transcend my normal, localized sense of self and it is this that has driven me to possess an almost obligatory passion for activism. 

My experiences led me to volunteer in places I never expected, from WWOOF locations in Central America, to giving English lessons and on to West Africa as a legal intern working for medical advocacy and basic social justice.  I’m not going to lie, there were times where I questioned myself. Times when I wondered whether or not there was any use in keeping on. For instance, after 7 plus years of post-secondary education I found myself surviving on a stipend of less than a couple $100 a week. I had moments of weakness where I let myself worry about whether I’d be able to pay off my student loans [I did] or if I’d ever make enough money to take care of the people I love [I do].  The key was that I never let those worries overcome me, veer me off my present path; never did they trump my passion to persist.  The main source of my faith was a direct result of working with people undergoing far greater tragedies than my own, those enduring real misfortune. It was from this experience that I finally learned to put my own frustrations and worries into proper perspective.  It is also for that reason that I sincerely believe that if you and the rest of us would put ourselves in these positions – work alongside others in this way, give a bit of ourselves for a cause and purpose greater than what we can ever do when only thinking, acting and living as individuals – we would all, united and together, come to these very same conclusions.

Once you’ve walked through a vanishing forest, you’ll want to try and save it. Once you’ve seen a woman die of a curable illness because she was deemed too poor or old to warrant medical attention, you’ll want to make a difference. Once you’ve sat with a sick and starving child without a family, you’ll want to get involved.

(To be continued…)

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