Bravery – as in Walking the Walk

~ Jenny Holmberg

In a newsletter I received the other day, a teacher mentioned – in the middle of a whole lot of other stuff, without further ado – that they were not going to offer the study trips to the country far away anymore. Trips that they have organized for many years, and which are – have been – a big part of their identity and work. Because they don’t want to encourage people to fly (more than they already do), any longer.

I screamed internally (of joy) when reading this. In the little email-exchange that followed (from me sending words of appreciation as a response to the newsletter), we talked a bit about this. Agreeing on the earth’s health being a higher priority than everyone’s “right” to fly far and abroad just as we like – even for “good” purposes of “cultural exchange” and alike. And also raising the questions that come with that – what about all the meetings, the connections, the understanding of each other…and so many other beautiful, and important, aspects of the possibility to travel.

Huge topics, and we obviously found ourselves lacking the “total answers”, to any of it. And yet. To see this decision being made, and acted upon, just made me so glad. Quite the opposite from what I encountered another time, when I sent a suggestion to another teacher that they could encourage people to take the train instead of flying to their retreat, and I got a kind of no-reply back, in a style I have simply named “Love and Light is Not a Complete Answer”. Because it isn’t. Action is what counts, in the end, not fluffy words (I don’t have anything against the fluffy words themselves, I rather like beautiful combinations of letters, I just don’t care for them when the fluffyness does not contain any sort of stable core, down there under all the feathers).

That’s why that little, and big, sentence in that newsletter made me so happy, the other day. Such a refreshing, unfluffy, core-filled little group of words…ahhh. More of that, I wish for more of that!*

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*And I better add a disclaimer here. I am not asking everyone to “do it all” or to try to be “perfect”. As I wrote in the Love and Light-post, I just expect people to at the very least understand their impact, to own up to the consequences of their actions, or no-actions. There are so many good examples of that out there, and also so many (in my view) not so excellent ones. So this exchange with this person who really just walks the walk – in the sense that they are acting out of the best of their knowledge, even when that heavily impacts their personal and professional life, just literally made my day, that day.

I can also add, that they informed me that they would still do those same travels, themselves, because of ongoing projects in this far away place. And how that is something they will not “advertise”, in order not to inspire more people to come along; that ceasing with the courses will at least do that – stop the idealisation of traveling (my choice of words), in addition to the perhaps more obvious non-selling of additional flight-seats because of those same courses. And that’s a huge point, I feel. Similarly to my own travels this summer – they were hardly “perfect” from an environmental point of view, at all. But I can still “use” them, in how I speak about them with people I meet. I can turn the focus to that very aspect, and at least plant seeds of thoughts and ideas, ask questions, investigate and so on, and in that way help spreading awareness and maybe even impact someone (including myself, it all starts there 🙂 ) to re-think their own traveling.
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That’s where we really met in this whole interaction, that day. And ah, how it also reminded me of the importance of having people to talk to, people that are on somewhat the same page, and who you can mirror and be mirrored back from, in the midst of all that is going on around us. So this is a reminder of that too – to reach out to people when they speak to your heart (or brain), it can be so rewarding in all its simplicity, even when just in the form of a couple of emails sent back and forth on a regular Wednesday afternoon!
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The other approach described:
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In Swedish:
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