The Right Reasons
“Make sure when you do something you are doing it for the right reasons,” a wise, perceptive and humble man said to me last night. It was Dana’s celebration night last night. That rockstar just landed a great job at a rural land use planning (super exciting stuff — that is all way over my head. I’m sure she will tell you all about it).
What are the right reasons? I asked myself, am I doing everything to satisfy my own emotions? Is there such a thing as pure altruism and if it exists is that even a right reason for doing something? How can anyone tell what the right reason is if it is always dependent on an individual’s values?
A little over a year ago I started with an idea.. that became the Carbon Neutral Co-Op. I was fighting between grad school in architecture & sustainable design and corporate energy work. I chose energy. I wanted to share what monetary resources I would get from work and at home collaborate with my best friends to build a sustainable home and share our knowledge with the world. ….Well, at the least was the idea.
I loaded the cannon, primed it with powder and then jumped in ready to fly off into life…. Only to realize my wings that I thought were there were in fact little floppy stumps. Oh how the supportive environment of college can lead to such delusions. My trajectory followed a perfect parabolic arc - just as Newton would have predicted - with a face first splat onto frozen concrete at the bottom. Now it’s time to get up and learn how to walk all over again.
I started with an idea to work for others and I ended up ravaging with myself in a fight to hold on to passions and ideas that were entirely self-serving. I held on too tight pushing myself harder with each failure… the screw kept tightening and doing good became doing harm.
How do we ever know what the right reasons are without history to guide to tell us. Looking back I started to do things for all the wrong reasons, hurting my friends and running backwards faster then I could run forwards.
So now I’m sitting at my desk on Valentine’s Day looking for the big red: “
