Use Your Personal Story to Inspire a Movement
Part of the reason one person can make a difference is that one person’s efforts soon inspire other people’s efforts. So inspire other people to get involved by sharing your personal story. Not just the story, say, of the hungry children in the Global South who you are trying to help, but your own story.
In No Impact Man, I share stories of how I tried to keep my food fresh without a refrigerator, how I had to eat mostly cabbage in the winter, and how I washed my laundry by hand. People didn’t suddenly realize that they, too, should hand-wash their clothes. Instead, they learned, not that they should make a difference—which statistics and figures tell us—but that they can make a difference—which personal stories have the power to tell.
It is through the personal that people connect with the political.
No matter what your cause, look for the powerful, personal story about how you got involved and how being involved has improved your life in some way. I’ve heard it said we shouldn’t have to tell these stories—that people should automatically care. The thing is, once they know, people do care. The problem is that they are often overwhelmed by it. So the job is not to shove information at them that makes them feel guilty for not doing something. The job is to give them a story that shows them how to do something
So the observant person might notice that I never wrote a day two. That is because yesterday turned out to be a very bad day for me healthwise. I started of with a migraine that just kept getting worse as the day progressed. So I sinned, I drank some coke to stop my stomach going bonzai. This means that there will be no coke or soft drinks in the weekend, tough call, but I needed it more yesterday.
So now we are at day three. We went shopping again to stock up for the weekend, we are still under budget but not with much. We discussed that it will be hard once our stocks start running low, because we like normal people, did have some surplies before we started this project. But that time that sorrow. When we where walking home we discussed Osho's philosophy of being vegetarian. Basicly vegetarism is just connecting more with your food (not in a creepy way) in a way that people on diets do as well. For us shopping has become a sort of meditation, because a low budget forces us to really consider our basic needs. If one of us decides that we want something speciel in our food that the other one can't have (meat for him, peppers for me) then we are also making a direct decision to prioritise our own individual needs over the couples. How do we get around this so none of us feel cheated? So far none of us have become pissy when investing in things for the other person, but it might change when we get further into the project and the weird cravings start flooding in. Luckily we are still in our "honeymoon phase" so love will hopefully conquer all.
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