Extreme Thriving and Me

Encountering Anti-LGBTQ+ Prejudice, Climate Change, and the "Rapture of Being Alive"

I grew up in a life-sized Monopoly house in Levittown, New York, the birthplace of suburbia. I always felt a powerful expectation to fit in, though I never felt I did, and I suspect other people didn’t, either. It was always clear to me that there was so much more beneath the surface of our neat little homes — all of that wild, authentic energy that cannot be contained by any box.

So, I left hungry to learn about the world. I spent six years at Columbia University, had many relationships with men, then had a career in journalism.

But still, I felt there was more beneath the surface of my life. I did a lot of journal writing to try to get at it, and eventually, I fell in love with a woman. Then, my life changed completely.

Encountering Prejudice

I learned that what brought me the greatest happiness — love — was something others thought was wrong. Something others had judgments about, debated about, and legislated about. And I learned that suddenly I had fewer rights than I had before because now I loved a woman and the two boys we were raising together.

Unable to understand why something I knew to be so good should be judged as bad, I dove into studying the nature of prejudice, particularly toward LGBTQ+ people.

As a fellow at Harvard University, I conducted a 50-year study about the history of anti-gay prejudice in America. I learned that prejudice is rooted in not knowing — essentially, a lack of experience with others. I also learned that not knowing can be perpetuated across families, societies, and institutions for years and years.

This gave birth to a drive to make a difference. To help people better understand. I became the founding director of an education project for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ organization. I wrote studies and articles. I gave speeches and media interviews.

And eventually, my partner and I had children. One son followed by another. The great happiness I had experienced in my relationship grew a billion-fold.

Encountering Climate Change

Then, seemingly by chance, I was caught one day by a sudden awareness of the growing threat of climate change – and great fear about what this might mean for my children’s future and the future of all children. Again, I felt the drive to make a difference. To help people understand what was coming and help stop it.

Of course, if fighting prejudice is hard, fighting climate change is infinitely harder.

Still, I found hope in the many brilliant scientists, artists, innovators, and activists who were working toward solutions. I found help in a book collaboration with Daniel Goleman, which eventually led me to apply the insights of emotional intelligence to facing the climate challenge. And I found inspiration in the ordinary heroism of countless others who were doing their best in the face of this formidable challenge.

And yet the forces unleashed by our burning of fossil fuels eventually outpaced all my and others’ best efforts. For a time, I felt that awful feeling of being powerless to protect my children and the world they would go into, that vast world I had come to discover and love so much.

Breaking Through

For some years, I spun in frantic activity. I sunk in heartbroken grief. I was stuck in a sense of hopelessness. And then, from my depths, something shifted. I discovered my own version of what Eckhart Tolle famously called the Power of Now.

It is something I have come to understand this way: No matter what challenges we face, we have this moment to make a difference. No matter how bad things are, we can always make things better. No matter how powerless we feel in the face of destructive forces in the world, we have the power of love.

And even if our love only touches a single life for a single moment, that could be the greatest thing we ever do. So, it is all worth doing. Every good word uttered. Every good action taken. Every expression of love – in whatever shape or size it comes in. The impulse should never be locked up in a box but released into the great wild swirl that is life.

This is the journey that informs and inspires me today—and how I have come to an exploration of Extreme Thriving. “Extreme” because we live in extreme times. And “Thriving” because that is what we are here to do.

Thriving is about growth, pure and simple. And it’s growth that gives us what the mythologist Joseph Campbell said we all truly seek: not the meaning of life but “an experience of being alive … so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

I deeply believe we all deserve that feeling, no matter how great the challenge of our times. I also deeply believe it will better equip us to address those challenges.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey and share your experiences and reflections.