Why I Think We Should Examine Our Motivations to Help Others

This is Adam Fletcher Sasse in 1992 at Omaha North High School.

When I was young, I was involved in programs at a church in the low-income, predominantly African American neighborhood where my family lived.

One day when I was 16 years old, some friends and I were walking down the street when we came across a couple of shiny new vans delivering a small hoard of white kids dressed in optimistic clothes to the church.

Curious, we we asked some of the youth what they were doing. Nonchalantly, they said they were here to paint this ghetto church, pointing at our fortress of hope.

When we asked if we could help, an adult with the group told us it was their project, and they’d be doing the painting. We brought our concerns to the minister, who explained they were missionaries from another state and this was mission trip, to paint our church.

That didn’t make any sense to me then, and I spent more than a decade trying to reconcile their well-meaning intention and my sense of dejection.

As an adult, I’ve met bunches and bunches of well-meaning middle class people and white people who want to save the world without ever looking at how to empower people to save themselves. These same folks rarely examine their own complicity in oppression and the ongoing slight of snobbery in volunteerism and philanthropy.

With so many people more focused on “changing the world” today, I think it’s high time that we reflect on Gandhi’s call for us to “be the change we wish to see in the world. We each have to examine our motivation.

I’ve been writing about that process for a long time without ever offering rationale for why that matters. The story I share here is meant to show one reason.

If you’re interested, check out my PETS (Personal Engagement Tip Sheets) for practical ways to look inside yourself before you try to change the world. You might also read my poem, Missionary. One of the most powerful pieces I’ve ever read about examining our motivations is a speech given by Ivan Illich called “To Hell With Good Intentions,” where he critically examines what it means to serve others. I also recommend Paulo Freire’s last book, which pushed me to embrace my own assumptions in new ways. Its called Pedagogy of Indignation.

After that, if you want to connect about what to do next just drop me a note.

3 Ways to Look Inside

This is the logo for the Personal Engagement Tip Sheets by Adam Fletcher for CommonAction

Carl Jung once wrote,

“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”

While a lot of things in our world want us to watch shiny, flashy stuff going on around us, the practice of personal engagement encourages us to look inside. That doesn’t mean you have to sit uncomfortably and call out “Om” for answers, or spend hours journaling alone in your backroom.

When I look inside, I’m most often in a contemplative space.

When you take a look inside you might be sitting in traffic or getting dressed for work; walking your dog or grocery shopping. Of course, you can meditate, do yoga, journal or paint, or do anything that you know gets you inside of yourself, and away from the world.

Becoming personally engaged means we learn to do look inside on purpose, instead of by accident. Personal engagement is a choice we make in our every breath, whether consciously or unconsciously. Engaging in a practice of personal engagement means that you are choosing to become engaged on purpose.

Here are a few ways I looks inside myself.

Get alone. Whether I’m rushing through the airport or cooking dinner, when I want to look inside myself I have to get alone. That means turning inside myself and away from everything going on around me. When I do that, I can hear the small inner voice that animates my heart, and I can hear what it says. Sometimes I need to go away from everyone else, while other times I can be alone in the middle of a crowd. Either way, getting alone lets me look inside myself.
Still the racket. Good ol’ Carl Jung. “Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” I have big eyes that like to see the world around me. I love traveling, exploring, being enticed by motion and getting absorbed in doing things. However, to look inside myself I have to still the racket. I have to acknowledge the things distracting me and then consciously, deliberately look away and turn them off.
Hear the small inner voice. In the middle of everyone is a small inner voice calming waiting to usher us through life. This voice is our connection with the middle of us. For me, it can come in the dark of night when I’m rolling around and unable to sleep; as I walk down the street and I’m approached by someone for a few dollars for a coffee; or when I’m rushing around and trying to do too many things at once. Its can be inconvenient! But its always true. Your small inner voice is waiting to talk with you.

Looking inside is an avenue towards personal engagement. In his classic work, Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse wrote,

“‘I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha.’ He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time.”

What are the ways you look inside you? I would love to hear your ideas – please share them in the comments section!

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It’s a DIY Life.

I believe that we can each change the world. I believe we can all change our lives, too. After all, it’s a DIY life. Here’s why.

We have to look at the details.

The real challenge of changing the world and changing our lives is to learn to see nuance and acknowledge subtleties in ourselves, in others and all the way around us. In a society that is constantly dumbing us down, we are all becoming increasingly polarized society within ourselves and with other people.

Its a DIY life because we have to look at the details. The systems that want to control us would like us only to look at big pictures and ignore the little things. They anesthetize us with sitcoms and reality tv, paint gigantic swaths of misinformation on the nightly news and internet, and bombard us with too many Facebook friends to actually care for any of them. Looking at the details leads us to caring for the little flower petal pictures made by young kids, hold hands with old relatives, and be kind to strangers on the streets. Little things matter, and living a DIY life teaches us that.

We have to see beyond black and white.

More and more, everyone seems to believe in A/B, either/or, black/white, us/them thinking through reductionism and isolationism. Anyone wants to make a decision for themselves or prove a point to others will just follow the formula taught to us by today’s media:

Be dichotomous and show only two sides to the issue.
Demonize people you disagree with and make sure they know how much you disagree with them.
Point fingers and alienate others whenever possible.

We have to learn to see the colors beyond the outlines drawn for us by other people. It’s a DIY life because of the greys, blues, yellows and awesomeness all around us. We miss those in between areas when we rely on the world to paint our pictures for us. We can miss the in betweens, the both/ands, and the we/us thinking that is inherent in an interdependent world.

We have to hold out hope.

Great ideas routinely die in the hearts of brave and strong people because of this formula, at home, in businesses, across communities, throughout organizations and all around our society. Politics are rotten inside the Beltway, in state houses, and in city halls because of that thinking. Talk shows and the news are generally terrible because of it.

In each and every moment lies hope for the universe and eternity. This DIY life can teach each of us to let go when its time, and hold on when we’re supposed to. It embraces sustainability and eschews disposability by seeing more broadly than just this moment, this place, in this specific way. We have to hold out hope no matter what is going on in the world around us, and that hope won’t come from outside of us; it comes from within. The real hope is for you, and that’s why it’s a DIY life.

We have to accept responsibility.

For almost 20 years, I have taught people to see that we are all part of the problems AND the solutions in our world. We are all responsible for the status of the world today. Whether or not we’re conscious of it and accept it, we are ALL responsible for the world today and we ALL act on that regardless of our best intentions.

It’s DIY life because nobody else can effectively drawn a plan for your life that you have to follow. Your mind belongs only to YOU, and you are the ultimate person responsible for what goes into it and comes out of it. Accepting responsibility means owning up to your station in life, embracing it and moving forward boldly towards who I am and what I’m doing. My station in life isn’t complete, isn’t finished and doesn’t mean that I cannot change. Instead, its the opposite – it means that I’m unfinished, my life is a process, and this is a journey we’re on, not a destination.

We have to begin with ourselves.

Only after recognizing the subversive ways our own hearts and minds have been manipulated can anyone begin the work of dismantling the powerfully oppressive hegemony of injustice throughout our society. Only after recognizing our own fallibility can we challenge our culpability, and only after challenging our culpability can we call others to the carpet. Trying to do it before that makes us hypocritical at best. At worse, it makes us the worst offenders.

Learning to look within, be within and change within ourselves can be a scary, frustrating and obtuse process. That’s why it’s DIY! No human on Earth comes to their born day with a guide prepared to be implemented. Society constantly urges us to rely on large, impersonal engines designed to command and control our movements, actions and thoughts. Beginning with ourselves is the opposite of that; the rewards are boundless.

Then we have to change the world.

When we’ve confronted ourselves, then we can confront others. Then we can take action for social change. Then we can try to change the world. But it all goes back to what old Gandhi said: Be the change you wish to see in the world. It’s a DIY life because the world isn’t waiting for you to change it, and you cannot wait on the world to change. Instead, as you accept responsibility for yourself and lean into DIY, you’ll discover there’s an inevitability to engaging with the world around you and working to transform it, either accidentally or on purpose.

I have learned that we have to change the world because the world we see around us reflects the world within us. When we’re not satisfied with who we are, how we are we cannot be satisfied with the world and how it is. The converse is true, too: When we change ourselves, the world around us has to change because of that change within us. If it doesn’t change, we have to change it. That’s the nature of being human!

Live your DIY life as fully, wholly and meaningfully as you wish. Embrace it! And take action steadily knowing that you can be the change you want to see in the world!