I Wish I Didn't Know

It's 1:28 AM on April 24th; I lay in bed wide awake, unable to sleep. It has been like this for the past few days, a total anomaly for me. My chest feels heavy, utterly heartbroken, but I can’t pinpoint exactly why. I know I am mourning what feels like a deep loss, but I’m not sure what it is.

I turn to social media, as do millions of people around the world with insomnia, and the first post I see holds the answer to my sadness. A friend and colleague of mine has shared an Earth Day message from Cody Petterson, the Director of Sequoia Foundation. I begin to read and, just as he describes in his post, I break down sobbing like I haven’t done in years — I too hear myself thinking “Right now, wish I didn’t know…”

Here is what Petterson writes, halfway through his post:

“The sadness, the fear, the despair comes over me in waves when I think about it. The whole biosphere, sixty-six million years of adaptation and speciation, is dying. I took personal responsibility for repairing, conserving, stewarding my half-mile square of it, and it finally hit me — what I’d been wrestling with unconsciously for a long time — that I can’t save it. No amount of wisdom, or sacrifice, or heroism is going to change the outcome. It’s been wearing on me for years, but when you’re raised on Star Wars and unconditional positive regard, you think that no matter how long the odds, you’re somehow gonna pull off the impossible.

And at the crescendo of sobbing and loss, the saddest thought I’ve ever had came to me: I wish I didn’t know. What else can you say, when faced with a catastrophe of such vastness, with the unravelling of the entire fabric of life on earth? I mean, we need to fight to save what we can, but the web of life as we know it is done. All the beautiful things we saw as kids on the Discovery Channel. The forests I grew up in. The mountain lions, and the horned owls, and the scat and the tracks in the washes. We’re so early in this curve, and the changes that are already baked in will be so profound. I don’t think humans are headed for extinction. We’ll survive, though many of us will suffer and many die. But all this life with which we’ve shared the planet, much of it won’t make it. I wish I didn’t know.”

Reading his words, identifying with his sense of powerlessness, I curl up in my bed and sob.  

Right now, I wish I didn’t know. I wish I didn’t know that some of my clothes are made by enslaved women and children, that 40% of the clothes produced each year end up in landfills, because as a collective we’ve decided that they’ve “gone out of season.”

I wish I didn’t know that so many others have nothing at all to wear, and that girls in developing countries have one or two pairs of underwear, and when they get their periods they stop going to school out of shame and a lack of basic supplies.

I wish I didn’t know that the very phone I used to read Petterson’s words required children as young as 5-years-old to go down into deep holes, scraping their tender skins against the rocks of the shaft and often dying in the process.  

I wish I didn’t know that our drinking water is full of chemicals, that the fish we eat are going extinct, and that plastic plagues the ones still thriving, filling our oceans.

I wish I didn’t know that “organic” doesn’t necessarily represent or stand for everything we think it does, as policymakers continue to lower the standards, enabling food companies to fool consumers.  

I wish I didn’t know that loneliness has become a worldwide epidemic, and that more people are committing suicide at younger and younger ages — and that some of the loneliest people are people I know.

I wish I didn't know that when parents tell me their children are spending 6+ hours a day playing videos games or on social media, they might as well be sharing that those kids have a drug addiction, for all it changes their brain chemistry and behavior. “Why don’t you take the gadgets away?” I ask, knowing full well the answer yet hoping I will hear something different.

I wish i didn't know how EMF negatively impacts our bodies and the environment, and that 5G is being forbidden in many countries because they’re aware of the dangers of its radiation on our health, while many other countries still race to adopt it.

I wish I didn't know of the bombings in Sri Lanka, the burning of Notre Dame, that Iceland’s ice sheet is melting six times faster than ever before. T

I wish I didn’t know that if Elon Musk’s promise to bring in driverless taxis within the next few years becomes a reality, then it also means the acceleration of the loss of millions of jobs after the fact.

Many of my friends have stopped inviting me on shopping sprees, to events and even picnics, because they don’t want to know what I know — I don’t blame them. I am not some Charlie Brown character, moping around and seeing the bad in everything (on the contrary, I was once asked to leave a position because I was too Pollyannaish for them), but I see what I see.

This is why it is so important for me to write and to share this with whoever finds this blog. We are not our bodies, we are not our thoughts, we are not our emotions- we are not our phones: we are the observers of them all. Our job is to notice those things, to allow them to wash over us and pass. However,  sometimes we jump to conclusions — that we’re depressed, that something very dark has overtaken our soul — when in fact, allowing ourselves to feel sorrow and pain is what brings light into our darkness. Rumi said it best in these quotes:

“ The wound is the place where light enters you”

" What hurts you, bless you. Darkness is your candle”

“There is hope after despair and many suns after darkness”

I am an eternal optimist. I believe the future is full of promise and that the best of humanity will prevail. I am surrounded by hope and people bringing massive solutions to massive problems: I coach executives on how to design innovative high impact business models for a living by deprogramming their limiting beliefs, activating their emotions, and stepping into their courage. On another project, we’re close to scaling a financially viable model that lifts whole communities out of poverty within two years; friends are transforming whole healthcare systems with blockchain technologies; others are changing our food system as we know it.

There’s a whole generation of changemakers rising. The world is shifting. The question is, will we shift in time to save ourselves and our planet? Can we collectively create the exponential  change needed to allow the best of humanity to lead us forward? And how will we fair in the process? I believe we can do it all, but that a key component will be learning how to maximize our full potential in all four dimensions of our capabilities: mind, body, source, and digital.

Yet, right here, right now, at 2:45 AM, I still wish I didn’t know. As Brene Brown puts it, “It is easier to be courageous than vulnerable.” At this moment, I feel vulnerable — I am exhausted and heartbroken at the loss of our planet’s species, the lives in New Zealand and Sri Lanka, the children trafficked and used as weapons of war, those close to my heart who are battling with Alzheimer’s, cancer,  and other diseases.

Right now, I am not pretending that the evolutionary procession towards positive change will be easy and seamless: it will not be. Right now, I feel a brilliant rage that as a group, mankind has chosen to lead with its reptilian brain, framed by our old economic model of competition, greed, greater accumulation of money, and an Us vs. Them mentality, rather than working together and co-creating from a place of awareness.

The time ahead will test us as a species beyond anything we have encountered. It will require all of us to lead from a higher level of understanding of what it means to be human — we must lead through our emotions, and by putting technology to use for the betterment of the planet and humanity, not the other way around. To lead from a place of consciousness, one that celebrates empathy and compassion and allows us to break down and weep in each other’s arms and then gently nudge us when we are ready to soar again. To lead by embracing the entirety of human experience.

Right now, I give myself permission to cry myself to sleep. I turn off the alarm. I may skip my morning exercise, I may cancel my meetings, I may disregard texts — I may even give myself a full day of rest and meditation to allow my emotions to rise and to move through me, to notice my thoughts.

Right now, I give myself permission to share this with whomever feels called to read it. If you are going through a similar experience, know that you are not alone. Reach out to someone. People care; we want to support each other. We are all in this together, and together we can move through it and can co-create a kinder, more loving world.