“You talk a lot about Gandhi’s message, ‘be the change you want to see in the world’, but what are you actually doing about it? How is that actually affecting your life?”

National political leaders underestimate Americans’ capacity for unselfish choices. The current pandering to the baser instincts of fear and resentment over issues like health care or climate change does an injustice to the generosity and good sense of this country.

I attended the first week of the COP15 (Conference of Parties) in Copenhagen with a small international team from Initiatives of Change. I am American, but I split my time between energy efficiency work for the U.S. government and graduate school in London where I am a PhD student at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

By nature, humans are social creatures with an innate need to belong. At what point did I as a human feel that I had a particular set identity? Did I choose it or was it imposed? Why did I hold onto it? How did it benefit me? And more importantly, was the identity I clung to innocent, or had I fallen into the trap – as so many of us have – of unassumingly donning a politicized identity that others had created?

People who were close to Frank Buchman in the Oxford Group (the precursor of Initiatives of Change) used to tell me the Guided Path is marked by serendipity and coincidence. If we follow these markers, sometimes the path takes us into territory we never wanted to know about or visit, a landscape most people would prefer to avoid.