Is my life a task or a mission? Or something else entirely?

My life has gradually developed into being mission guided, and the tasks I set each day largely follow my unwritten mission. My desire is to make my impact on the earth a positive one, for my family, students, community, and our larger world. In my inner circle this means kindness, leadership, labour, sharing, helpfulness, sometimes even challenging others (mostly my kids) to grow and step into thinking about their own impact on this earth. In the larger circle, it is things like voting and being involved, and lowering my carbon impact.

My husband (I’m smiling) is a bit of a throw-back to a by-gone era. He’s the first to admit it. Yesterday we were talking. I told him I’d been reading about several dozen very large companies pledging to be carbon-neutral by 2040, ahead of the Paris Agreement. I had showed him that the Amazon delivery truck in our neighborhood is now electric (even though we rarely lead technology in our part of our country). He found it interesting and said we had better get more EV stations. And I said to him, you do know I’ve been working towards our own household becoming carbon-neutral, right? …And he said, “ye-aah” kind of uncertain. I think he started realizing there is a theme to the “weird” things I do. And I said, yes, we had the grant to give us a new HE furnace and insulation, there is the HE washer I asked for a couple of years ago, and we’re hanging clothes, I’m keeping a vegetable garden for a lot of our food, I’ve cut back on clothes and other shopping… (he thought this was to save money, but he’s agreeing now, says he’s noticed I’ve cut back on packaging, that our trash is little now and we only have enough to put out every couple of weeks)… I’ve told everyone I’m on my last carbon car and I’ve been saving up for electric… I’ve got plans with our next roof we will get solar. I think he sort of thought many of the things I do or strange products I buy were just fanciful, unrelated actions on my part. You know… “tree hugging, female silliness.”

The advantage of having focus, which being mission oriented does, is that things gradually fall into place. There’s no pressure. It makes things easy. It’s mostly little steps. The big steps, like the furnace, happen when you need to do something about an old furnace anyway. Little things like putting a compact reusable bag into my purse for shopping. Not buying cookies at Walmart in a clamshell box, but instead baking cookies at home with a 25 lb. bag of flour. Yesterday when my husband helped me unload the car from shopping, he found an apple tree. He sighed. It’s just that if you have a focus, each little step adds up so quickly. It’s not that I’ve done anything impressive other than keeping the “mission” in mind each day and letting it guide my everyday choices.

The point I’m trying to make is that anyone can do this, with whatever mission matters to you. I believe that many of you ARE doing this, even though some of you don’t realize it. You are here. You show up every day or nearly every day, and make gratitude and compassion your mission because it matters to you enough to show up every day to support it. Many of us here are growing or healing every single day, just by keeping it in the front of our minds. And that, to me, is being mission-oriented.

Each little step, adds up. Like I have pointed out to my kids, you wouldn’t expect to exercise once and be fit for a lifetime. Instead it takes doing a little, but doing it nearly every day.