Jan 11, 2011

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About us | Issues

The Outside-The-Box Issue

Wow. Hooray! Our first issue is born today. Our big goal around here is to redefine the good life by searching for the best of what humanity is up to. In each issue ask 11 people the same 11 questions around a theme. This is our very first issue (!), which you can download for free or grab a print copy of over here. We’ll have four issues a year, so stay tuned.

To kick off this wild adventure, it seemed only appropriate to make the theme of our first issue all about people who are rejecting the status quo and living life on their own terms. As I got the issue together I spent a lot of time wondering why to even do this in the first place, and I think the best answer I came up with is in my editor’s letter, so here you go:

Editor’s letter:
I’m a chronic over-doer. I have one of those schedules that look like an elaborate game of Tetris. It’s by choice, of course, and I do agree with Chris Guillebeau when he said in his interview that he’s “not interested in trying to create the most balanced life. I’m really having a lot of fun being relatively unbalanced.” However, when I recently added this new project to the number of plates I already have spinning, I asked myself many times, “Why do this?”

Life is full. I love my other work (as a Rolfing practitioner and helper-outer of other holistic professionals), and I cherish my time with my young son. Adding a whole new adventure to that can sometimes feel like I must have been under the spell of some powerful wizard who just wants to see more inspiring magazines in the world.

I know no such wizard exists of course (though that would be pretty awesome), which leaves me with the question: “Why do this?” I could answer it with grandstanding sentences that include phrases like “…change the world” or “…transforming lives” but I’ve never been much of a blowhard and I’d rather be honest than puff up my chest about the whole thing. In reality, I’ve spent a whole lot of years- likely all 36 of them that I have under my belt- feeling alternately amazed and horrified by humanity.

“Evil” is a loaded word, especially these days, but I see the horrific things that people can do to one another and I have a very hard time coping with it. I spent this fall walking to my office every day past the blocks long stretch of news trucks surrounding the New Haven courthouse. A man, whose name I can’t bear to print in my own magazine, was being tried for brutalizing and murdering a mother and her two daughters in their own home.

Every day the same dark circus was there as I walked to work. Every day the newspapers leaked some new hideous piece of evidence. And then he was sentenced to death. Which did nothing to help me answer all the questions I had- questions I have always had- about what makes a person capable of something like that. I suspect, and hope, that I’ll never know.

What I do know, and what I try to spend my mental and emotional energy diving into, is that people can be thrillingly amazing too. With technology making our world smaller, I feel like now more than ever we’re able to hear about the wonderful contributions that people are adding to life here on Earth.

The diversity of those contributions is stunning. Not everyone has to renounce everything and pitch in Mother Theresa style. We don’t just need heroes here on Earth (though Desirea Rodgers rocks my world and gets my very enthusiastic hero vote for this issue); we need light in all of its lovely forms.

To usher in that light we need more and more people who are willing to break out of the numbing molds that we’ve been sold on, and to start finding their own particular gift that they can bring to both their and others’ lives. So what better way to kick off The 11 Project than with the Outside-the-Box issue.

As I mentally skim through some of the 11 people interviewed in the following pages, I get giddy just thinking about the forms that freedom from the box(es) can take: Michael DiMartino is bringing light to the world through storytelling and animation, Jill Miller through re-acquainting people with their bodies, Kristin Glenn and Shannon Whitehead through (true) eco-friendly apparel, and Lissa Boles through handing people their own purpose GPS. There is so much more, and it is all oh so delicious to me.

And to answer my own “Why do this?” question: We can focus on whatever we want in this life- the darkness, the light, and everything in between. Lord knows I’ve spent my fair share of time in all of those shades of grey. But what I want to do now, and what I’m capable of doing with The 11 Project, is to shine a light on the best of what humanity is up to these days. Let’s turn up the volume on the good stuff together, shall we?

Letters to the editor are always welcomed, as are submissions if you think you or someone you know should be featured in the magazine. Both can be sent to brooke@11project.com, or very handily just added to the comments:

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