Two moving sidewalks
Ever feel like you’re zipping through the fast-paced hours of your day, the crowded pages of your calendar, like you’re on a swiftly moving sidewalk?
Then you learn about alternative lifestyles, other ways of living and pacing one’s life. As you learn about the Transition movement, perhaps you get caught up in community events and activities within this other way of viewing life.
It begins to feel like you’ve hopped off that swiftly moving business-as-usual sidewalk onto a second moving sidewalk — one that isn’t necessarily headed in the same direction as the first one.
This image of two moving sidewalks — each headed in a different direction — was posed by Sophy Banks in our Training for Transition in Los Angeles in December 2008. The image has stuck with me, and come back to me many times since.
Sophy counseled us that we will feel for a time like we’re hopping back and forth between sidewalks. We hop between mainstream life — perhaps with a competitive corporate job, perhaps with children to get off to college — and the new ways of the future: the garden, the chickens, the bicycles, the ways of The Great Turning.
As time goes by, Sophy told us, we’ll spend more and more time on the sidewalk that is headed toward the saner future: more and more time in local food production, local economies, community events. We’ll find less reason to hop back to the old-paradigm sidewalk. It wasn’t headed where we wanted to go anyway.
