Climate leaders to gather for COP21 in Paris December 2015 photo: Uday Arya

Kevin Fisher lives and works as activist for global HIV treatment and prevention access in New York, but has begun the feel the pull of climate protection advocacy.

To experience the natural world in 2015 is to experience simultaneously its beauty and the stress, loss and pain caused by human action. How can we react? Is outrage consistent with contemplative practice? Is change possible without outrage?

On a warm Saturday night in September a few hundred people came together in New York City for an evening of singing, chanting and teaching entitled “Mindfulness – Stop Waiting and Start Living” organized by Senior Monastics in Thich Nhat Hahn’s tradition. The evening’s program, with its very “American” title as one monk wryly noted, had special significance coming during a month when Thich Nhat Hahn had spoken his first words after a year of debilitating illness. It was a time to stop waiting and to start talking. As we entered the auditorium and walked to find our seats, the monks exhorted us to sing with them immediately. We sang as we moved quickly to our seats. There would be no waiting.

The path to COP21, also known as the 2015 Paris Climate Conference in December, has been the story of talking and waiting over 20 years of UN negotiations. The aim of COP21 is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate among as many as 25,000 delegates from up to 190 countries to keep global warming below 2°C. An essential and critical goal, but how is consistent with mindfulness and living in the present. COP21 will come together to agree on a course of action for the next century that will engender conflicts of interpretation over decades. It would be difficult to envision a less “present” undertaking.

Yet if we engage and participate and contribute, is that work alien to contemplative practice? This issue was on the minds and the audience the monks shared their own experiences that night at “Mindfulness – Stop Waiting and Start Living.” Can mindfulness co-exist with social activism. How does one bring oneself back to the present while also projecting out into the world? And what to do with anger that is so much a part of activism? The conversations that night left the impression that activism is one end of a seesaw that has at, it’s other end, mindfulness. This balance is one to be watched, managed and ultimately accepted. One thing is clear, a contemplative practice that embraces the notion that there is no waiting, is necessary, right and overdue as we approach COP21.