On Fire

First, I must thank the many of you who personally emailed messages of support for my recent surgery and observations about the supreme importance of love. Yesterday I had about 75% of my stitches removed and everything looks very positive. Thank you all.

Second, I live in northern San Diego County, which has been on fire for days. Living through such a sudden, uncontrollable, catastrophe is a soul-searching experience. The skies were filled with very creepy, smoky ash. The filtered sunlight created an end-of-world atmosphere. People were amazing: calm, helpful and mostly smart. Anytime 500,000 people are evacuated the chance for chaos rises at the same speed as the 60-mile an hour wind gusts fanning the flames. But no chaos. And we had more volunteers and donated supplies than were actually needed.

Priorities. That’s what dominates your mind in a life-threatening emergency. When you’re asked to evacuate your home it brings great clarity as to what you value. As we gathered up the “stuff” we deemed most important in our garage, and we watched thousands of others do the same on television, I couldn’t help wonder how distant our “normal” priorities are from our “emergency” ones. People were loading up their SUVs in their driveways of $3-5 million homes and mansions with three primary things: people, pets, and pictures. Add to that vital papers and passports and that’s pretty much it. People said over and over everything else was just stuff. Didn’t really matter. And any stuff people were trying to save had personal meaning, heirlooms and such. The same was true for us. When we got everything we valued in the garage there just wasn’t very much. It’s a vivid lesson in real priorities.

So why do we choose to live so differently when our world isn’t on fire? We’ve created a hyper-consuming society that has made the accumulation of stuff we mostly don’t value our religion. We have elaborate shopping rituals and even perform daily human sacrifices. The humans we are sacrificing are ourselves. We sacrifice our time and energy working and commuting so we can buy stuff that in the end, we don’t have much value for. We sacrifice our family and friends and hobbies, that genuinely enrich us; meanwhile, we increase our pace on a speeding treadmill fueled mostly by trivial goals often forced on us by others. Just what are we working for? What are we really trying to accomplish?

When I stood in the garage looking at what I valued enough to save, I couldn’t help but wonder of all the time and money I’ve spent in my life, how much of it was spent creating the experiences and relationships that matter most. As I watched people drive away from their burning mansions, I couldn’t help but wonder about all the time and effort invested and lost. How ironic it is that soon we will be back hard at work, preoccupied to restoring all the things we ultimately have so little value for. All of us only have so much time and energy, how we spend it is our most important choice.

Will Marre
Founder, American Dream Project

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