Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. Pablo Picasso
It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. Leonardo da Vinci
Someday is not a day of the week. Janet Dailey
From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. Epictetus
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. Ray Bradbury
Look for the opportunity to leap, and leap faster than your fear can grab you. Vironika Tugaleva
Procrastination is my sin. It brings me naught but sorrow. I know that I should stop it. In fact, I will — tomorrow. Gloria Pitzer
I’m not a nostalgic person by nature, but I do believe in the importance of being mindful of the opportunities which have been presented to me over the course of my life –too many of which I have squandered — to make stronger and more durable connections with others, to right at least some of the wrongs of history, to divert divisive energies before they can create chasms which cannot easily be narrowed, to counter threats before they can evolve beyond the possibility of straightforward remediation.
The (unfortunate in my view) ending of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the US coincides with Valentine’s Day and the mid-point of Black History Month, a troika of events which raised for me, once again, a bevy of questions interesting at one level and quite challenging at another.
For instance: How much love and care directed towards us and demanded of us have we mishandled over the course of our lives? How often have we inadvertently or otherwise reinforced privileges and inflamed injustices that in some instances have been begging for relief for centuries? How frequently have we looked away or allowed ourselves to become fully immersed in our daily circumstances hoping that our political and cultural divides would somehow, without any positive participation on our part, escape the deep acrimony and even violence that we now witness in the US and in other global regions?
As the quotations above also attest, and our own questions and experiences largely confirm, we have largely upheld our reputation as a species of procrastinators, happy to put off until tomorrow, or even the day after that, what could have more successfully been resisted or otherwise achieved in the present. We seem all-too willing to drag behind us a legacy of matters – both emotional and political — that we have treated as less than urgent, ignoring the long-term effects of our damaged relationships and unfulfilled social agendas, kicking problems as far as we can into the future in the hope that they land in someone else’s jurisdiction, hoping that “someone will do something” without owning ourselves as that someone, reinforcing a legacy of oft-ignored contributions by cultural and racial minorities by failing to offer such contributions their proper respect in the present.
While there are certainly exceptions, including our remarkable vaccine scientists, we have collectively yet to take that vow to stop “disappointing” ourselves, to stop settling for half a loaf when only a full loaf will feed our souls and reverse our unsustainable paths, to stop holding ourselves back from the boldness of thought and action which the times require. Perhaps our resistance to this vow is due to the fact that we fear we are just not good enough, not loving enough, not wise enough to get out front and resist the looming threatens to ourselves and our progeny, to amply interrogate our legacies and embrace current responsibilities, to fill our cup to the brim with knowledge, wonder, wisdom and care and then “tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out” for all to see, for all to benefit.
We are certainly capable of doing more of this tipping. We can find ways to keep our prior relationship misfortunes from damaging the love and friendship we are privileged to enjoy in the present. We can pledge to stop passing laws and resolutions that look too much like the previous ones, the ones that didn’t work out, that didn’t solve any problems, that didn’t communicate genuine hope to people, especially to younger people, to whom we have a special obligation. We can stop repeating the patterns that prevent our engagement with urgent challenges until they become embedded in our now taken-for-granted, become just one more task to accomplish and not necessarily to accomplish as resolutely as the task itself demands.
With full acknowledgement of my own disappointments, I must also report on a week at the UN that was replete with instances of “domesticated resolve,” threats that we failed to resist at early stages and which now constitute part of our institutional agendas-without-end, problems which our consensus-driven bureaucratic cultures are sufficient to highlight and explore, but not to lay to rest in anything like a timely manner. Year after year, cycle after cycle, we do our level-best to bandage the innumerable wounds created by the conflicts we have so far failed to sort out – from Syria to Ukraine — the climate change we have failed to mitigate, the atrocity crimes we have failed to prevent, the displaced persons we have failed to repatriate.
It is perhaps with respect to climate change that the disconnects between the insistent attention it demands and those forces and agencies which tend to absorb and blunt its urgent force come into sharpest relief. This week, as young people worldwide return to the streets to plead for swift climate action and articles appear in multiple formats about our diminishing climate options, the UN held a preparatory session for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) to be held next November in Scotland. As he has done in the past, SG Guterres issued stern and earnest warnings about the need for states to stop putting off their “collective determination” on climate action, to stop delaying and postponing, to cease procrastinating regarding the political decisions we have long needed to make and are running out of time to make. During this meeting, New Zealand issued its own blunt reminder to colleagues that the UN’s habituated, consensus-oriented working methods are of little interest to constituents who only want to hear that “states and stakeholders are determined to do what is needed, and all that is needed, on energy, finance and more, to get climate change under control.”
But many also recognize that successful resistance to climate impacts is becoming more difficult by the day; indeed there are some who believe that only the most radical responses to our climate emergency should now be considered. An article this week in the New York Times featured a discussion between Ezra Klein and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-elizabeth-kolbert.html) in which she laments the degree to which “We are in this very deep — there are only wrong answers, only hard choices at this point. Nothing is easy from here on in.” Without specifying the UN or any other stakeholder, Kolbert cites “the awful knowledge that our interventions have gone awry again and again” an acknowledgement which must then be paired with the “awful reality that we have no choice save to try to manage the mess we have made.”
As Kolbert intimates, we are clearly not managing our messes, nor have we taken those measures in our collective past which may no longer be viable options for us – to clean up the messes altogether, to learn from our “awry” interventions and repent of our erstwhile “strategic” procrastinations, to truly set things right, if not for ourselves than for subsequent generations.
If our procrastinating ways have indeed left us only with “wrong answers and hard choices” on climate, it is essential that the inheritors of this mess have a key role in its management. One of the highlights of this week for me was a discussion I had with students at the Institute of Leadership & Social Impact at Georgia Tech University who were interested in the sustainable development goals and what their lives (and those of their own progeny) might look like if these goals were truly to be realized. This group of talented students, like others of their kind, have been metaphorically stuck in the starting blocks as the pandemic mutates, the global economy fizzles and climate change continues to threaten a sustainable human future. They have skills and energy, they mostly want to make a difference beyond their salary negotiations and LinkedIn accounts, and they are looking for alternatives that might allow them to work on issues that matter to their future. They seem generally determined to avoid disappointing themselves, to avoid setting off on some path more likely to guarantee sanctuary than sustainability, more likely to exacerbate threats than confront them, more likely to enable further procrastination than release hopeful determination.,
I have too little to offer them, I’m afraid, aside from some pious platitudes about “finding your treasure,” and sincere offers to continue these discussions with them about global issues and options for involvement, including how best to let our “beautiful stuff out,” in whatever formats are available to us. But I also recognize that as they explore options to “leap faster than fear can grasp” we in the policy world must be prepared to leap with them, to overcome the various incarnations of inertia that suppress policy memory and domesticate policy options, inertia that continues to delay action germane to the severe threats we now face, threats that (as these students mostly understand) are only becoming more difficult to manage, let alone to reverse.
As the president-designate of COP 26 warned this week, our climate is clearly “closing in on us.” As our young people increasingly recognize, the time has grown short to prevent our collective suffocation. Delaying the practical decisions that we know we need to make is simply no longer an option. If the policy community tasked with guidance on climate cannot deliver on the urgency that is now required, cannot get beyond the inertia that stifles initiative at the scale now required, we need to find other means to put skills in the service of sustainability, to cultivate the hopeful actions that we in our centers of policy only imagine we are inspiring.
Young people can’t wait any longer for us to cease our habitual procrastination. We should welcome their decision not to do so.
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