The Paper

Imagine yourself in a 3° world – the stakes are high: theCalifornia coastal cities are flooded out, and the flood watersmeet desertification, fires, and populations searching forfood. California agriculture, which fed the world, no longerexists. Or supermarkets or gas stations. We will all be facinghardship and upheaval. What are the values that will sustainyou and your family as the economy collapses with theenvironment? What sacrifices will you make, and how willyou explain those sacrifices to your children?

• Write about how you will cope with and respond to thechanges that 3° of global warming will make in your lifein the next 25 years.
• Write about the changes in your life that you willCHOOSE to make. How are you deciding to livedifferently?
• Knowing what lies ahead, will you decide to bringchildren into this world?
• How will you decide to raise children in the context ofthe huge environmental, social, and economic changesthat will be underway? What are your strategies? Writeabout the positive effects of raising children in thesedifficult times. What will be the high points of theirlives? And write about things that will be difficult.

• Conclude your paper with what you will have to say toyour children at breakfast 25 years from now, whenthey are the age that you are now – college seniors.

This paper is meant to be helpful to you as you imagine andchart the next 10 to 25 years of your life. When you write, beas specific as possible to your real life and your real lifechoices so that the act of writing the paper becomes useful,creative, courageous, and informative.

Guidelines

1) This paper is for you and is intended to mark an important moment of arrival,departure, or transition in your own life. Please write the paper that you need towrite at this time in your life, a paper that can serve you as a guide, a reminder, amoment of vision, a period of reflection, assessment, regrouping, reaffirmation,revitalization, and renewed commitment.

2) Please write this paper for yourself. This paper will be important for you to readin 10, 20 and 30 years from now. You are writing at a formative moment in yourlife and the act of writing this paper will be a significant contribution to theformation of your future. This paper is an act of self-empowerment. Take thetime to write beautifully.

3) Academic language is completely unacceptable, as it tends to falsify, inflate,deflect, routine, or otherwise calcify the nature of your actual experience. Youare the only person in the world who has had your experiences. You, therefore,are the expert and the authority, and your search for your own words tounderstand and describe your experiences, and the aspirations, values, beliefsystems, and personal standards that are a result of those experiences, is itself anact of courage and care and is a gift to the world.

4) The paper should address issues or situations that you have dealt with in the pastor are in the process of dealing with right now in your life. It must also lookforward, and become an occasion for you to project yourself into your own future,and create a scenario in the life that you would like to live.

5) It is important to be very clear about motives, their complexities andcontradictions, and to deal as accurately as possible with the layered personal,political, social, economic, psychological, or religious contexts of theenvironment in which you are acting. Those tensions, and their repercussions,create the need and opportunity for leadership, honesty, attentiveness, mutualrecognition, divergence, and skill. The more honest you are, the more surprisingand helpful your writing will become.

6) All narrative is “multiple” — voices, time frames, and points of view. Experienceis both intensely personal and shared. A deeper look into the intensely personalside reveals that you yourself have many voices and conflicting selves. And, anacknowledgment of shared experience leads to the awareness that so doeseveryone else.

7) Many people spend a lot of time doing things that do not need to be done. Thispaper, in contrast, should be something that needs to be done. This paper shouldbe something that helps you and the people around you, a moment in your lifewhich you can focus your attentions and intentions unselfishly. As with thecreation of any work of art, this paper will require you to deal with what you donot understand as well as with what you imagine you understand. The struggletowards understanding is your own story of complexity, subtlety, skill, tenderness,insight, persistence, and humility.

8) Infinitude. Open-endedness is one of the most important aspects of your life. It isimportant to be conscious of ongoing processes and continuously transformingexperience. In fact, your life has no fixed points; experiences are lived andrelived, always with new meanings and new possibilities. Even as you arewriting, talking, and acting, things are changing.

9) The paper should be 8 – 10 pages.