Nikayla: Your organization, Global Optimism, advocates for stubborn optimism when it comes to our response to the climate and biodiversity crisis. I’d like to hear more about the concept of stubborn optimism.
Christiana: Optimism is not denying the reality of what is happening. Optimism is not naive. It’s not about just sitting back on the couch twiddling my toes and fingers and assuming someone else is going to fix this problem. Optimism also is not some magical thinking that, ‘Well, this is going to take care of itself!’ When I talk about optimism, I’m talking about a choice that I make on a daily basis to go at the challenge that is ahead of me with a positive frame of mind.
So it’s not a celebration. When we have achieved something, we should celebrate. And honestly, we don’t celebrate enough. We should celebrate more of our big and small achievements. But optimism for me is not a celebration, it’s an input. It’s not the result of achieving something. It is a frame of mind that is an input. We have to take in optimism in order to address the challenges that we have. So it’s a decision. It’s a choice. It’s not easy, but the optimism I’m talking about is much more of an input into challenges rather than the result of achievements. So that’s first.
The stubbornness piece recognizes there are difficulties, barriers, challenges and despite that we just continue on. We find our way around the barrier.
Now, when I talk about the stubborn part of the optimism, what I mean is that there are many barriers and difficulties that are obvious, and many that are not, to go from where we are now to where we want to be. That does not mean we stop trying. That does not mean that we then draw the curtain or pull the blankets over our heads and say, ‘Okay, in that case, I’m not going to do it anymore.’ The stubbornness piece recognizes there are difficulties, barriers, challenges and despite that we just continue on. We find our way around the barrier. We continue to pursue the path that we are on. So that’s what I mean by stubborn optimism. I don’t mean just being obstinate.
Nikayla: Can you tell me what you believe to be the biggest obstacle to us making that mindset shift?
Christiana: Well, the biggest obstacle is how we’ve been thinking for as long as we’ve been alive! By that I mean, our status quo thinking is our biggest obstacle.
At the personal level, we’re not trained to do this. We and society and parents and schools and universities–the whole system actually doesn’t help us with this mental transformation. We’re all trained to be very individualistic as opposed to collective and collaborative. We’re trained to take reality as it is, accept it, and not pursue changes and transformations. We’re trained to accept personal barriers and limitations without questioning them much, without asking ourselves, ‘Is that the best I can do, honestly?’ So for me, it’s very much about unshackling ourselves from what we have learned, not just in our own lifetime, but also inherited through many generations. It’s about being willing to question more, being more assertive, and more open to new possibilities. Certainly it’s about being more decided and more determined to cultivate our agency for change.
Nikayla: We’re not trained to do this, so how do people begin their own training journey? Do you consider mindfulness as a potential start for this journey?
Christiana: Yes, absolutely. And when I talk about mindfulness, I don’t mean commercial mindfulness. I’m not talking about sitting somewhere and closing your eyes for five minutes. In the Plum Village tradition, where I am a student, we’re taught that mindfulness is not necessarily what we do on a meditation cushion. It’s about a mindful pursuit of everything that we do. We can eat mindfully. Walk mindfully. Talk mindfully. Shower mindfully. Brush our teeth mindfully. It’s a practice we use to permeate everything we do so we’re much more aware of ourselves in the here and the now. We begin to cultivate the capacity to put a little distance between the input I receive, the stimulation, the information, the news–whatever I get from the outside, and my reaction to that. So through mindfulness, we begin to understand that we don’t have to be automatically reactive to things. We can pause and breathe and really be much more careful and intentional about the way we react to things.
Collective action. Collective thinking. Collective decision making. Solidarity. Justice. … those are things that we aspire to and many of us work toward, but it’s not what we have normalized as a human society.
Nikayla: I’ve really been reflecting on the climate crisis as a teacher. What do you think the climate crisis has to teach us? What has the climate crisis taught you?
Christiana: Climate crisis is a huge teaching, that is for sure. Often in my humorous moments to myself, I think that the climate crisis–without minimizing it, I’ve devoted my whole life to it, there is no intention here to minimize it–I think of the climate crisis as a meta-level gym that humanity has been invited to go to now to strengthen muscles we haven’t used before. Collective action. Collective thinking. Collective decision making. Solidarity. Justice. I mean those are things that we aspire to and many of us work toward, but it’s not what we have normalized as a human society. I think about this meta-level gym not from the perspective of historical reality, but from the perspective of ultimate reality.
Nikayla: And if we all rise to the occasion of the climate crisis? What’s the vision of us in the most stubbornly optimistic vision of the future?
Christiana: I’m going to answer that with one sentence: we would be beings that are motivated exclusively by love.
