Editor's Note: Master writer Anne Herbert challenged many of us when she wrote a review of a book called "The C-Zone" in the March `85 issue of Whole Earth Review. The C-Zone is about finding a balance in your work between challenge and mastery, between panic and boredom. The `C' stands for balanced times when we are confident and committed, when we are challenged but still in control-when we feel good and do our best work. Anne's piece relates this way of thinking to peace and environmental endeavors. This is just a small excerpt from this brilliant essay. I recommend reading the whole thing. Reprinted from Whole Earth Review, No 45, March 1985. PO Box 38, Sausalito, CA 94966. Copyright 1985 by Anne Herbert. Reprinted by permission.

...If the environment is to be healed, there will be many many kinds of jobs for people to do. Outdoor persistence and mastery jobs. Indoor challenge and talking jobs. Jobs we haven't yet imagined. It would be fun and useful to start imagining them and imagining how they will be supported - what needs to be done to create the Earth as green and abundant and healthy and fair and open to everyone as the Earth could be. I'd like us to imagine together all kinds of good things, good jobs that could happen. I get tired over the years of getting scared by and writing letters about various versions of the old Senate Bill 1, that includes a rewrite of the criminal code with lots of stuff I hate and hope never happens. Why don't we ever think that big? Create a large various plan for running things for environmental richness and interpersonal fairness. A big dream with lots of specific ideas and room enough for everyone, even people whose taste in clothes is radically different than ours. Of course, to include them we need to talk with them (as opposed to trying to convert them) and that could be fun too.

I think when we're thinking of changing things for the better we unconsciously exclude many people from our efforts, or unconsciously assume they are a burden we have to somehow bear and drag along. No.

Let's include everybody in. I remember the times when I really enjoy what I'm doing (like right now) and I think what would the world be like if everyone could have a chance to have their work and fun like this? Everybody should be able to live out their unique good times. Making a place where that can happen is what all our movements are about. I'm having fun. Other people can have fun too-as many as possible. That's it.

To be in a movement like that, we can slow down and loosen up a bit. Make room for fun, make room for mastery, make room for other kinds of people. A peace/green/justice movement that works will look unlike anything we've imagined. It will feel like the most alive times in our lives now. It will have in it many of Earth's residents we didn't think we were going to talk to. They won't join us. We won't join them. We'll meet in the unsuspected new place where we can all play our best game together. I think a lot of that will follow from slowing down from the panic zone, letting ourselves master what we're doing, think about where we're going.

We're going to need a lot more mastery if we're going to nurture and heal the Earth we have harmed. I liked reading in CoEvolution about a couple who are looking for 50 badly eroded acres to spend 20 years restoring. Yes. We need to do a lot of work like that. You can be sure when they find their 50 acres a hyped up, urgent, gotta-fix-it-now approach will do them no good. And they'll have really mastered that piece of land in 20 years.

Some people truly like to work in emergency rooms. It's the right level of challenge for them. Any community needs firefighters, and has people who want to fight fires. In environmental work, we need to make places for people who don't like responding fast to an immediate crisis. We need to start doing the slow healing of damage that has already been done, start the slow growing of farms and parks of the future. Nature works slowly. To work with nature, we need to learn to slow down.

Of course, if we all got as hung up on mastery as we now are on challenge, we'd be a stagnant group. However, that doesn't seem like a danger among people in the United States. We're surrounded by and participating in endless thrilling tales of trying to do way too much in way too short a time and getting away with it.

We lose track of the kind of quality that mastery can bring - the kind of quality that our environment and our souls greatly need. Working frantically on deadline, I know from experience, creates brilliant compromises, intense group emotions (sometimes positive and sometimes negative), efforts that are amazingly good considering. Considering how little time and thought we let ourselves take. We don't even know what we're missing. Building the good future needs better than creating one brilliant last-minute solution after another.

What if we took the time to create change the best way we know how? We'd learn a lot...