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“She and I are really close. We made a great team.

“Once school started, I decided to start from the bottom with a petition saying students wanted more Fair Trade coffee, and we got two thousand students to sign. That’s out of ten thousand. It worked. We sent a letter to Starbucks. We pushed for Fair Trade coffee at every university event, like teachers’ meetings.”

I asked Lina what approach she’d found most effective in reaching students.

“The main thing is getting farmers themselves to come to the campus. Hearing the farmers, I see the students say, ‘Oh, my gosh—I didn’t know this.’ Almost like I was!”

After three years, George Washington passed a resolution that called on all on-campus vending outlets to serve 100 percent Fair Trade coffee. In only five years, the student Fair Trade movement Lina and her friend Stephanie launched has spread to three hundred campuses, and roughly fifty campuses now serve only Fair Trade coffee.

Lina and Stephanie would probably find it hard ever again to view economics as simply about things exchanged in anonymous transactions. They are helping shape a new norm, an economy that’s about people, people relating with each other—fairly.

Joyful living, I’m convinced, happens when we hit that spot where a potent entry point that touches root causes fires our own deep passions. I know that when I first discovered that spot—my mid-twenties’ “aha” that our daily eating habits make huge ecological and fairness ripples—it set off a personal revolution, and I’ve been forever grateful.

To find that spot, a critical first step may be to recognize that the negative spiral can start deep inside us. If a feeling of “lack” lurks at the center of our pain, pain that we then project out and create in the world, we can start within ourselves to reverse it: we can acknowledge sufficiency. Right now, we can focus on the strengths of ourselves and our loved ones and the possibilities in front of our noses to enhance our capacities and meet our needs for fairness, cooperation, efficacy, and meaning.

Awareness of these capacities can propel the spiral of empowerment busting us out of any downward spin.

So think of something you are doing right now. Maybe you are engaged in your children’s schools to make them more empowering for students, or you’re sending off an email to the newspaper shaping your community’s views. Maybe you’ve chosen to lighten your weight on the planet by eating less meat, converting your home to solar energy, or joining in “community-supported agriculture” by buying a share in a nearby farm’s produce. Maybe you are finally speaking about discrimination you see in your workplace or going door-to-door on behalf of a candidate who is actually listening to citizens’ concerns.

Think of what you are doing, and then think about what you have always wanted to do. And ask yourself: am I expanding and spreading power? Am I easing fear of change and fear of the other? Am I learning and teaching the arts of democracy? Am I creating a sustainable movement? Am I replacing the limiting frame with an empowering one? Ask yourself these questions, and believe that change is possible.

I admit it: in the 1970s I never could have imagined the world as I experience it today. I assumed things would get better (if people listened to me, of course!); or they would get worse. But, it hasn’t turned out that way. Things are moving fast in two directions at once: they are getting very much worse and they are getting very much better. The real challenge is staying sane in this both/and world: it is holding both realities.

It is not possible to know what’s possible. This is how I now understand humility. Believing we can accurately predict outcomes, as cynics claim to, has become for me the utmost in hubris. And because this is true, we are free. We are free to act assuming that our action—no matter how “small” it appears to us—could be the tipping point setting off tectonic shifts of consciousness and creativity.

We cannot predict