Kathleen Wheeler
“Helping Learning Happen”
As we continue the quest to build a culture of more awareness, compassion, and equity, I hope we will take to heart the story of the Ugly Duckling. Developing awareness—of how we each have both suffered from, and contributed to, inequality—is only a beginning. Awareness doesn’t translate to skill and grace immediately. Let’s allow each other some inevitable “ugly duckling behavior” as we learn.
I have exhibited my share of ugly duckling behavior. Usually, the resulting disapproval I get leads to feelings of guilt and me vowing to keep my mouth shut. Once, however, a misguided outburst on my part was met with patience and kindness. The result? I was finally able to grasp a complex concept that had eluded me, and to replace resentment with compassion.
It happened during a week-long Climate Leader training. As someone who is heartbroken by the human-caused devastation of the earth, I was impatient with the presenters’ emphasis on social justice. I decided to throw caution to the wind and express my feelings of anger and confusion. “It feels like the climate is taking a back seat here! Why does one man’s death, while horrific, cause a global outcry while the burning deaths of one billion animals in the wildfires of Australia cause hardly a ripple?!”
The leader of my group listened carefully, then throughout that week gently helped me understand that if we don’t take the crises facing humanity as confounding and intersecting issues, we will leave people behind and we can’t win. …That the climate movement’s biggest mistake would be calling itself an environmental movement. …That we can’t solve the climate crisis with the same exclusionist and extractive mindset that created it. Racial justice is economic justice is gender justice is environmental justice—there’s just one fight and we need to break through our silos if we are to build a movement with a chance of making a difference. After that week, I finally “got” it: Unless we understand the principle of intersectionality, we can’t begin to build a just and sustainable world, in harmony with nature.
My entire worldview changed that week, not because of the facts presented during the training, but because of the accepting, patient, kind response I received from this woman as I was struggling to understand. By making room for people being wherever they are on the learning curve, she helped me learn and to restore my hope. Let’s do that for each other as we continue to expand our minds and our hearts.