What to do?

So, I just finished up this conference of young urban leaders from around the country, who are all doing pretty good things. As usual, I started holding forth in a conversation about the radical restructuring of our society; and a fellow Vanguard quite reasonably asked how much I was doing some of these radical things in my own life. I made some response about works in progress and the need for a community to exchange with, blah blah blah. The honest answer is that my life is still not particularly radical ... But I appreciate the question, because it prompted me to reflect more on this new radically just and sustainable lifestyle I keep talking about, and whether or not I'm really moving toward it.

There have been some changes, albeit pretty incremental (darn those incrementalist for being right! at least this time). I pay more attention to my energy use, waste disposal, and the source of my food (often) and clothes (much less often). My Lent resolution helped me get back into tithing, and realizing that I have abundant resources I can give to others. But I live mostly the same: same nice house and neighborhood (no sharing the lot of the poor by living among them), frequent spending of my disposable income on non-necessities (no curbing my expenses to give away even more), lots of accumulated possessions (no large-scale disposition of stuff to simplify my life). I'm a big one for insisting that making radical change is just a matter of firm decision; but apparently it's a decision I have no small amount of trouble making.

This is a frustratingly slow process that often makes me feel quite hypocritical. If there's anything that this recent experience with my faith and job has taught me, it's that the Lord will change my heart and give me the grace to make the right choice at the right time; I suppose I'm just eagerly awaiting the period where he starts to strip me of some of these cultural and material encumbrances. Wait, maybe I don't exactly mean eager ...

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This is sort of related to the above, but also not. I've always thought that my real vocation should be philosopher more than anything else; I want to be able to think and talk and write about things and encourage others to think about them, too and put them into practice. It's kind of why I want to go back to grad school, for the freedom to think more.

But as I was also railing in the above-mentioned conversation about people who generate intellectual "products" but no useful goods or services to meet the basic needs of themselves or others (i.e., dependent on a producer class so I can be an intellectual leader whose needs are provided for in exchange for my beneficent wisdom and rule), I decided I'd better start learning to produce some things. So I'll see if I can use this free time to become a philosopher-maker (as opposed to philosopher-king).

In another bit of randomly inspired goal-setting, here's what I'd love to do by the end of the summer:

1) Learn to cook. I can prepare some very basic meals, but I lack a general understanding of how to cook meat well (especially poultry) or how to season anything with some modicum of deliberateness. I'd like to feel like if you dropped me in a kitchen with a random assortment of common meats, vegetables and spices, I could create something passably tasty.
2) Learn to make something with my hands. My first thoughts are learning to sew or knit ... I feel like I lack a basic level of self-sufficiency with not being able to sew properly. I also feel like I could make cool, useful things for myself or other people if I could knit.

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My last set of revelations for the day, besides a simple solution to poverty, had to do with the need to get really civically involved in my city. I need to know and have talked to my alderman; I need to start attending some of these public meetings and keeping myself informed; I need to subscribe to my local paper. I was also railing at a different point during the day about how we aren't active enough as citizens and we don't acknowledge our responsibility to be consistently engaged in our own governance. Again, if I'm to avoid being a total hypocrite, it's about time I did some more of that active citizenship myself.