Everyone needs a cause…
…it can extend your humanity in both good and tough times.
Is there something you care enough about to make it part of the rhythm of your life? It might be a daily routine or an annual event.
Longer ago than I wish to admit, I heard a keynote speaker make the statement, “Everyone needs a cause they care deeply about.” I don’t remember the speaker, but I remember what he said.
A life without a cause is a life without effect.”
–Paulo Coelho, Author
You might already have a cause, but if you don’t…
Would you like to figure out what really matters to you?
It seems like we should know, doesn’t it? But when we’re hit with a question like, What really matters to you enough to do something about it? we often shrug and say, “Well, I haven’t thought about it that much.”
Sometimes knowing what matters deeply to us can be one of the hardest things to figure out even though it seems like it should be easy.
Okay, so, how do you figure it out?
Start with two simple, but very powerful questions…
The first one is this—What breaks your heart?
Then ask yourself this—What really ticks you off?
Your answers to these questions will give you important clues, if not the actual answers, to the question, what really matters to me?
Why are these two questions so effective?
For something to break your heart or tick you off, someone, something, or some institution must step squarely on one or more of your values. So again, your answers to those two questions give you important and meaningful clues about something that matters deeply to you.
And if you’re feeling anger, you’re likely seeing an injustice in the world.
Something else that makes this two-question combo so useful is this… you can apply them to almost any area of your life by adding simple qualifiers.
For example, What is something that I notice nearly every day when I’m outside that breaks my heart?
Well, one thing that breaks my heart is seeing our most beautiful places, whether man-made or God-made, destroyed with trash. Litter is no longer a powerful enough word. Doesn’t litter sound more like the random cup or wrapper here and there? We see trash everywhere we turn.
Pay attention to what you pay attention to.
What about it ticks me off the most? Plastics trash really, really ticks me off because it never, ever goes away. If that’s not enough, 90% of it is produced purely for our one-use convenience and it simply enables human laziness.
How many times do I have to walk past this litter, I thought, before I am complicit in its existence? Even if I moved to a place where this didn’t happen, I thought, it would still be happening here. Marcus Aurelius was right when he said that you can also commit injustice by doing nothing. So, I started cleaning it up.”
–Ryan Holiday, author
All that trash eventually ends up in our waterways and oceans because trash flows downhill. That’s right, a plastic water bottle that a hiker discards on a mountain climb can eventually travel to a tropical beach somewhere. Hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to learn that millions of plastic bottles get to hang out on the beach more than we do.
Once you find your cause, you can commit justice by doing something about it.
Be untucked.
p.s. I’d like to give a hat tip to 4Ocean, an amazing organization that’s taking on the heavy lifting of cleaning up our oceans. Because our life depends on it. There’s no affiliate relationship, I just think they’re doing important work.
p.p.s. If trash bugs you too, here’s an interesting post by author, Ryan Holiday.
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