Those brush strokes have become a metaphor for all that seems impossible to me. Painting used to be one of those things, but I am thinking larger here -- to big issues such as world hunger and global warming. These things seem impossible to solve, and so we all stay in a trance of impossibility, and not only do we fail to take steps to rectify these wrongs, we keep adding to them. I know I do.
Writing a book seemed impossible to me until I started setting a timer and writing 15 minutes at a time. Before long I had 250 pages of material to work with. Now, books and paintings are smaller things than feeding the world or reversing climate change, but the requirements for these larger initiatives are the same -- imagination for the big picture and small steps to get us there.
Imagination is an important part. Can we imagine that painting or book? Can we picture a world in which everyone has food and water? Can we believe that a workable health care system is possible? We've been conditioned to think no, but that conditioning is simply wrong.
My imagination was kindled recently by a movement called Advent Conspiracy (adventconspiracy.org), which addresses the issue of clean water -- the lack of which causes untold suffering and death across the globe. What will it take to provide clean water to every man, woman and child on our planet? An impossible amount?
No ... the price tag is $10 billion. That's a lot of money to raise with a bake sale, but consider this ... we in the U.S. will spend $450 billion just on Christmas (and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa) this year. If we spent $440 billion instead, the world could be drinking clean water, and we'd still have a heck of a celebration here at home.
So, in simple brush strokes, that means that if every one of us bought one less gift this season, we'd see the end to water borne diseases. Oh, the naysayers will find flaws in this thinking as they always do. They'll shout about the impossibility of distribution. I maintain that the systems that can ship American beverages to most of the remote villages in the world can manage to get a well there as well. Imagine that. Literally. If you still have gifts to buy, go to adventconspiracy.org and get a clean water gift card for that special someone.
Now, I like to read in the bathroom and am always grateful that Seventh Generation, the provider of our paper goods, provides interesting literature. Their paper is 100 percent recycled. If every one of us replaced just one roll of regular tissue with recycled we would save 469,000 trees, 1,700 garbage trucks full of waste, and 169,000 gallons of water (enough to supply 1,300 families for a year). That's a powerful brush stroke!
Christmas Day is upon us and the New Year, with its lists of resolutions, looms ahead. Most of us tend to pen impossible goals that discourage us, and so we quit by February or March and go back to our old ways. We look at the 15 pounds we need to lose and not at that one extra dessert or second helping to which we can just say no. We can't really imagine ourselves healthy and fit, or a country that takes care of all of its citizens, or a world with ample food and water. We can't imagine a planet that isn't itself diseased by our harmful ways, or even a beautiful painting that our own brush stroke has crafted.
It is time to imagine all of these things, and time to pick up some tool and start creating them, just one little bit at a time.
Susan Gladin is a freelance writer, United Methodist minister, and executive director of the Johnson Intern Program in Chapel Hill. She tends horses and a home business on the farm she shares with her husband. Their two grown daughters live nearby. You may e-mail her at sglad1210@aol.com or write c/o The Chapel Hill Herald, 2828 Pickett Road, Durham, NC 27705.
