The Power to Change (Coffee) is in Us All
Coffee is a choice we share, every morning, which means we also have the power to choose to do something about its problems. Using that power is also a choice, although I have to admit, it’s not an easy one in today’s climate where, amoung other issues, the consumption of coffee leads directly to deforestation.
Clearing room for growing more coffee, in order to keep up with demand, is also replacing the fractions of forest that remain intact. Let’s face it, coffee is an extractive industry.
Adding to this, the world coffee market, regardless of any good intentions is widely skewed and divided, which plays a big part in the slow pace of much-needed social, environmental and economic change. Because, well, money rules.
The weight of the negative information, without there being clear solutions, can easily lead coffee lovers to feel helpless. Feeling particularly powerless to the situation myself recently, I stumbled across the writing of Anna Mercury, particularly her short essay “How to Stand While the World Falls Down: Advice for transmuting a disaster”, and it immediately inspired me to get back on the horse and share some of its practical wisdom.
When faced with a difficult challenge, whether in our personal or our work lives, Mercury reminds us that we’re equipped with the tools for tapping into and increasing our personal power, and points out a simple yet important way to do this: By transforming our responses to things from REACTIONS into CHOICES.
“When we turn our responses from reactions into choices, we increase our power. We find we were not so powerless as we thought. We always have some choice. Not every choice — we never have every choice — but within the tiniest moment there are still infinite choices made. The more we practice, the more moments shift from obligations into choices.”
—Anna Mercury
It may seem obvious, but when these thoughtful “micro” choices (and actions) that match our true feelings and needs combine with a willingness to allow the future to unfold as it will (rather than try to coerce it), we not only build up our inner power but also honour the magic of what the future has in store; In other words, what is possible without anyone being able to know it yet. The magic is in the unknown.
“It is critically important in this life to leave room for magic. You cannot dictate for the future what it will. You can’t even dictate for the present. There is no point to living if you don’t give the world its chance to surprise you in ways you thought were impossible. Not all magic is good magic, but if you tell the future now what it will be, you’ll only end up wrong. Whether or not you want it to, the future will unfold, so you might as well want it to unfold. You might as well trust in its unfolding.”
—Anna Mercury
The world’s problems have always been big and complicated, but (thankfully) all of us are equipped with the power to make certain conscious choices towards the co-creation of change in the right direction, and have the possibility to become leaders of change. The “magic” is not in always knowing the exact outcome of our choices, but in the possibility created by them.
In the coffee context, becoming a leader of positive change might mean choosing to be the first among peers to say ‘No’ to coffee that’s exploitative, learning and talking about coffee’s social and ecological issues with friends and customers, helping to pass laws that protect coffee regions and regional biodiversity, or even re-evaluating a company’s bottom line in order to guarantee growers are paid fairly.
The key take-away is that it’s this amazing, innate tool we all share, the power to choose, that will ultimately be responsible for addressing coffee and many more of today’s important problems.
Care to Stop Feeling Powerless About the Situation?
Take a moment to support a project that is conserving and restoring forests and forest buffers zones alongside coffee farms! This unique program functions on a landscape level, and is linking the conserved forest patches into a forest corridor for migratory birds:
—> Visit the Yoro Biological Corridor website and sign your name 🙂
(We use the signatures to show support to stakeholders, major funders, and sustainable coffee buyers)
This is a project I help develop (with many others). It’s based in Honduras, and it’s on the brink of becoming the first legally recognized and protected forest corridor in Central America! (I post personal updates about this project here)
