Picking Your Role in the World We Want
” …what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver asked that in her poem The Summer Day.
You may have noticed that the world is getting serious now. At least it is for lots of people. If you don’t need to feel that way yet you’re among the very fortunate. At this point though, it’s only possible to ignore the problems we face with serious effort, so escaping “serious” is not a reality for anybody..
This is the moment when it’s time to decide whose job it is to build the world we want to live in. Most thoughtful people would be ready to do something if they knew what the job was. But how many of us know just what our real role is in saving the world? It’s not an easy question when the issues are so big, complex and challenging.
Omni leaders would like to suggest a pilot project on saving the world.
We’re ready to share the project our Design Team of volunteers and Omni Board folk have been working on for a few months. We invite you to think about a time bank for Northwest Arkansas, starting in Fayetteville.
The Design Team is right now building a project called the NWA Time Exchange. A time bank like this is a structured way for neighbors to help neighbors. It has an added incentive to reach out in the form of a credit system where a helper receives a time credit for every hour of help or things they give someone else, and then can use that time credit in another place in the Time Exchange to get help or things they need themselves. Besides ways to help, we see this as a way to let our community reach out in low-covid-danger ways to neighbors they want to re-connect with, or to new friends that might be very different races, religions, cultures or backgrounds than themselves. The potential to nurture a cohesive community is huge!
You’ll be hearing more about this Exchange in coming weeks, but here is a 9-minute video from Longbeach CA about how their timebank impacts their town. We believe a time bank has some role to play in helping us find a place where we can use this wild and precious life for real good.
Longbeach Time Exchange –
Picking Your Role in the World We Want
