The issue of impact (or purpose) does not evaporate the moment you depart your homeland for some strange land.
Granted, some poopoo on purpose altogether. They claim that there really is no purpose to life, other than to live it. And then still others will tell you the purpose to live this life is to improve one’s lot in the next one to come…the so-called “afterlife.”
I don’t want to get overly spiritual here, but then again, the concept of “impact mindfulness” does have spiritual implications. It is inextricably intertwined with the idea that we do indeed have a unique purpose. And that purpose is the impact we have one lifetime’s worth of opportunity to make on this world…not so much for our own good, but for the good of everyone and everything else.
Impact mindfulness is at its essence an altruistic mindset. There is this ideology that has taken hold throughout our world that eschews altruism. It’s the idea that one should place a priority on self-interest, especially economic self-interest. The idea that if we all do that, and if it can be done without government interference, then the pie gets bigger for everyone. That’s the essence of the neoliberal, Randian, ideology. In my opinion, it has made the world a far less hospitable place. It has unleashed the forces of absurd global wealth inequality in which 8 human beings now own more wealth than 50% of the entire world population. It has unleashed the forces of global warming, which threaten the next great extinction of life on earth.
The answer is to reject that idea by pursuing your highest and best purpose to make your positive impact on this troubled world! If enough humans do that, well, perhaps we can have hope for the future.
Now, you might be asking, what does that have to do with my interest in becoming a Costa Rica expat? It has to do with the unique opportunity you will have in making an impact as as expat.
I can only speak from my own experience. Living as an expat has opened my eyes and my heart to certain things that I was blind to before. I think it started by simply observing the phenomenon of nonmaterialistic happiness. I thought one had to aspire to the American Dream to be happy. That you had to “have money” or economic power to truly be happy. Well, here in this country I found folks with no money nor economic power who were happier than most in the U.S. who’ve got gobs of it. How could this be, I asked myself?
A few years after my arrival Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, came out. At first I was too busy trying to make a buck by building a business in Costa Rica to really pay much attention. However, gradually it dawned upon me, and the documentary helped in that regard, that if we lose Costa Rica’s natural beauty, then the reasons people come in the first place would vanish and my business along with them. So, I started paying more attention to the natural beauty of Costa Rica and how this global warming thing posed a threat to it.
I also begin to notice, with the help of some Latino friends, that U.S. interventionist policies had for the most part tended to benefit the U.S., but at the great expense of other peoples and the planet. My politics gradually began to change as the result of having the opportunity to be an American on the outside looking in.
I started to blog about all these new revelations of thought that I was experiencing. In fact, I blogged 365 times about them in my first blog entitled, 365 Reasons I Love Costa Rica.
All this culminated in this mindset, or ideology, that I now call impact mindfulness. And I don’t think that I would’ve ever experienced this paradigm shift if it were not for my expat experience.
Now, have I done great things to change the world? No, I haven’t. My primary way of making an impact as an expat has been by writing and expressing my opinion. It’s what I do and what I’m most passionate about. I feel it’s my positive path to greatest impact. Yours, of course, will likely be entirely different, depending on your unique talents and interests.
But the point is that I strongly believe that the expat experience can be for you what it has been for me…a transformative one. If you keep that open mind that I suggested in an earlier chapter, it can and probably will remove impact blinders and open your eyes and heart to your unique purpose.
Many come here with that idea already firmly in mind. Others not so much initially, but gradually come to it. The bottom line is that if you actually go through with your expat plans, get ready to undergo some radical changes in how you view the world. And that can be a very good thing!
My hope is that making an impact as an expat, in your own unique way, will become the purpose that brings you joy and fulfillment and helps the world become a better place for all of us.
Below are some useful links to check out, if you’d like to learn more about impact mindfulness…
The Revolutionary Misfit Manifesto
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