By the 22nd mile of the Kampala Marathon last fall I realized I had reached the final limits of my body. Each further step was a bitter negotiation with my skeleton, my muscles, my neural pathways—they tried to shut the whole system down; I pleaded and commanded and tantrumed to keep it moving, at least one more step, over and over and over.

Yesterday in Boston, before the explosions, athletes far better than me made their own negotiations. At the excruciating frontiers to which marathons push us we struggle not only with our bodies, but with embodiment, our vast souls stuck with these little legs, little lungs, these short little lives. The stride of a runner near the end of a marathon is a practice in transcending the body, a skate along the edge of mortality.

Then some scared and desperate soul set off two bombs, killing three people and injuring almost 200. He (it was almost certainly a he, wasn’t it) wanted to inject death into a day of life, to bring a city and perhaps a country face to face with our own final fragility. To what ends, we don’t yet know.

Tragically he took a few lives, and forever changed some. But death did not win the day. When 78-year-old Bill Iffrig was knocked down by the explosion only yards from the finish line, then got back up and finished the Boston Marathon, it was clear that death did not win the day. And when bystanders rushed into the smoke, dismantling guard rails on their way, to start aiding those who were injured, it was clear that death did not win the day. And when runners finished the marathon and kept running to the nearest hospital to donate blood for the victims, it was clear that death did not win the day.

There is a longer race we all run. And we, too, court our own mortality, a mortality of the human spirit. In this race we are confronted with the boundary between the love and courage that define us at our best, and the waste of fear and violence that lies beyond. Acts like the Boston bombing aim to knock us into our own darkness. It is up to us whether we stop, give up, let death take the story. Or whether we get up, rush into the smoke, and keep running towards love.

Esther and her family live in a small, one-story block of grey concrete rooms in a slum outside of Uganda’s capital city. Laundry hangs in uneven lines across their little compound. When I duck into her sitting room she gives me a big, wry smile and a welcome so wholehearted I hardly know what to do with it. She serves me a Coke. Ugandan Coke, made with real cane sugar, is transcendent.

Not too many years ago, Esther was beaten with the business end of a machete by a rebel soldier. She showed me her big, raised scars. The rebellion drove her and her family from their home, making them, suddenly, poor refugees in their own country. She found shelter in the Acholi Quarters slum and found work crushing stones in a local quarry. The work is grueling, done sitting in the hot sun with a makeshift hammer, and pays, at best, $1 per day. It was all just barely enough to stay alive.

But Esther is not content to just stay alive. Esther is one of those special souls whose dreams simmer near the surface, just behind the eyes, who will keep chasing her dreams no matter what she has to overcome—civil war or otherwise. She started trying little businesses, like selling bananas and charcoal, to get money to send her kids to school. Soon she bought a little piece of the rock quarry as an investment.

These days Esther makes jewelry for Ember Arts and helps lead the other women who work with her. She is building a home for her family and running a couple small but successful side businesses. Her oldest son is in college. Some day, Esther told me a couple years ago, she’s going to buy herself a car and park it in her own driveway. I can’t wait to sit shotgun.

Ember Arts exists to support women like Esther as they pursue and achieve their dreams. We partner with 28 Ugandan women, all survivors of war and poverty, who handmake every piece of our jewelry from recycled paper. And they use the money they earn to chase their dreams: to educate their children, build homes, start businesses. They are transforming the future for their families and communities.

And they are reconnecting with deep, hopeful parts of themselves. People are at their best when they pursue their best dreams. Our dreams are the little white rabbits that we follow, often tumbling, into the color and wonder of life.

Esther chases her dreams, and brings that color and wonder into the world around her. Sipping my Coke in her little sitting room, I think about real cane sugar. And I think about how dreams are like the real cane sugar in our lives. And how people like Esther are the real cane sugar in our world. They show us that there’s something more than just staying alive. They elevate the mundane. They transcend.

My friend Emily lives in Uganda, a 6-foot-tall white girl in East Africa. She has a tattoo on her wrist, on the outside part that would be facing down if you shook hands with her. People ask her about it out of the blue. Sometimes she forgets it’s there and has to bend her arm and crane her neck to look at it before she answers.

“How then shall we live?” it asks.

It’s a question that, taken seriously, is impossible to answer fully. Because a full answer would require a full understanding of the universe and our place in it, something no physicist, philosopher or theologian of any merit would claim.

Nonetheless, it’s a question worth pursuing. And especially now, as there is no historical precedent for many of the choices we face.

Those of us in rich countries live in a strange new utopia, in which basic human needs, and many luxuries, are easier to come by than at any time in the history of the world. Seasons no longer dictate our diet, weather no longer threatens our comfort, even our own disabilities hinder us far less than ever before. But we are neither happy nor content with our historic windfall. And the massive, emergent, global system that delivers this ease of life is upsetting the fragile planetary balance that it is built upon.

Consider climate change. Recent data shows that the Earth is warming exponentially faster than it has at any time in the past 11,000 years, as far back as we can currently study. A few hundred years ago, mankind didn’t have the power to change our planet’s climate so dramatically. Today we do. We are. And we have no idea what the consequences will be.

We live in an unprecedented age. Two hundred years ago there were only about a billion people on the planet. Fifty years ago there were only 3 billion. Today there are over 7 billion. Growth in population, consumption, and waste are so far beyond any historical example that the past is no longer a good predictor of our world’s future.

Some of the smartest people around warn that, within a generation or two, our civilization will imperil itself, our excesses eroding the foundations on which we rest. There will be great turmoil—war, massive migrations, famine and drought.

How then shall we live?

How do we make the choices that shape our lives when we don’t know what sort of world we’ll soon be living in? How do we plan for the unprecedented?

These questions can not be answered fully or with complete certainty. But there seems to me one answer close to a certainty: that staying our present course is foolish. In the face of a mounting tsunami of evidence showing that our way of life is leading to its own destruction, continuing with that way of life, unexamined and unchanged, is a sleepy kind of madness.

So what changes should we make? I see two basic routes here, both of which lead us in roughly the same direction. We can try to change our lives enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change and the other consequences of our global, industrial economy, or we can prepare for those consequences, learning the skills we will need to survive in an economically and environmentally turbulent time.

Both routes lead us towards simplicity, towards weaning ourselves from consumption and living more lightly upon the planet. Both routes lead us towards locality, towards decreased use of cars and planes to transport ourselves and our necessities. Both routes lead us to learn the basic skills of human life: growing food; making, reusing and repairing the basic implements of our lives.

Take my friend Emily. She grows some of her own food, makes her own bread, mends her own clothes. She doesn’t own a car. She recycles. She made me a case for my e-reader out of recycled plastic bags.

If we all lived more like Emily, would we turn the tide on global warming and the rest? I don’t know. But we owe ourselves an answer to the question written on her arm. The way we’re living now will not last, and is cutting a shameful path of environmental destruction through history. How then shall we live?

At the oldest university in the English-speaking world, a small team is searching out threats to humanity’s future. In his essay for Aeon Magazine, Ross Andersen introduces us to philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, whose job is to figure out what is most likely to exterminate humanity.

Only 100 years ago, but in a completely different human epoch, German poet Rainer Maria Rilke also thought about humanity’s end. He wrote about it in a poem called Dear Darkening Ground:

Dear darkening ground,
you’ve endured so patiently the walls we’ve built,
perhaps you’ll give the cities one more hour

and grant the churches and cloisters two.
And those that labor—let their work
grip them another five hours, or seven,

before you become forest again, and water, and widening wilderness
in that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name
from all things.

Just give me a little more time!
I want to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they’re worthy of you and real.

Take two of the red ones and call me when death do you part
Whatever else love is, it’s definitely a bunch of chemical reactions in the brain. Which means we’ll probably be able to make drugs to manipulate it. But should we? How about to save a failing marriage? Or to bond a mother with her child? Ross Andersen leads us into the debate.

The rich fields of frozen North Dakota
Let’s hand it to them, the North Dakotans have earned this one. What with the bleak winters and, well, that’s really all I knew about North Dakota, until I learned that one of the world’s largest oil fields has been found there. And people are making millions.

Bonus
Michael Chabon on Wes Anderson (if you know those two names, you know how great that sentence is), and The Lone Bellow in an old church.

When Geniuses Worry
Edge.org might be the smartest site on the internet. It’s where many of today’s top thinkers first air the things they’re thinking about. And every year Edge.org creator John Brockman asks them all a big question. This year’s question is “What *Should* We Be Worried About?” You can find all their answers here, but start with Sherry Turkle on shiny objects, Steven Pinker on the causes of war, and Barbara Strauch on the decline of science journalism.

Around the World at 3 Miles Per Hour 
Journalist Paul Salopek just started a 7-year, 21,000-mile walk around the world. He’s tracing the route that anthropologists believe the first humans took out of Africa as they colonized the world, ending up at the tip of South America in 2020. He wants to move through global stories “at about 3 miles per hour” in order to understand our world better. Listen to this interview and follow his journey here.

The Goal of the Universe 
The universe has goals, philosopher Thomas Nagel argues in his latest book, Mind and Cosmos. He says that consciousness, our personal experience of living, can’t be explained by blind, materialist evolution, so there must be something else at play. That something is called Teleology, the idea that there are goals, undiscovered thus far, that everything is working towards. Biologist H. Allen Orr is unconvinced. (For more on consciousness, here’s David Barash on the latest (mis)understandings.)

Bonus 
Lebron James tackles a fan, Jerry Seinfeld addresses Apple shareholders, and President Obama is urged to resign after Beyonce lip-sync scandal.

I’m running my first marathon tomorrow, and everything I’ve learned through the (pretty grueling) training would be perfectly suited to a poster with a bald eagle on it. Things like:

‘Perseverance: Every time you can’t go any farther, just take one more step.’

On any training run over 10 miles there comes a point when your body just starts to stop. This might just happen to me, but I tend to think we’re all made of similar stuff. Your body, on orders from some deep, untouchable part of your brain, just starts slowing down of its own accord, trying its best to stop running, to maybe walk for a while.

I notice it especially when I’ve been distracted by something like a bad memory or a pretty Ugandan girl staring at me from the back of a motorcycle taxi and my mind is elsewhere for a few moments. My body takes the opportunity to start stopping.

When I feel my pace slacken I have to snap back to the present and override that deep, internal command center. I have to shove the big goal of finishing this marathon to the top of my system’s priority list.

‘Goals: The higher you cast them, the further they’ll pull you into the sky.’

In college I once ran six miles. It was down by the beach in Los Angeles, sea level and nearly flat. It wrecked me. I decided that evening I would never run a marathon, or even a half. I just wasn’t constitutionally capable of it.

The training plan I’ve followed has seven runs longer than a half-marathon. The big goal of 26.2 miles makes 13.1 miles doable, even eventually routine, no longer daunting and well on the near side of impossible.

‘Plan: Every towering achievement shines down from a mountain of boring tasks.’

Running a marathon with the body and mind I had six months ago would have been impossible. I knew I wanted to do it, but I didn’t know how to get there.

Hal Higdon, whoever he is, broke down marathon training into a simple daily spreadsheet and put it online: run 3 miles today, 5 tomorrow, 3 again the next day, 8 on the weekend, etc. This became my plan. I followed it every tedious week.

Today I can say I have run half-marathons, I can say I have run 18 mile out-and-back routes to the shore of Lake Victoria, I can say I ran a 20+ mile loop on the savannah backroads of Gulu in northern Uganda. Today I can say I’m ready for a marathon.

‘Potential: You aren’t only who you think you are. That body, that brain, that short precious life, they can be so many things. Inside of you are futures. Hundreds, thousands of futures for the choosing. Futures in which you climb mountains or write books or see Europe or adopt children or run marathons. They can be made real. Like all new creations they will be birthed with pain, with fear, with sacrifice. This is the natural cost, this is what it feels like to make a living, breathing choice against the inertia of the cold universe. It is your tithe to entropy. Pay it gladly. You are not only who you think you are.’

[Update: Went ahead and made that last poster.]

Do not start a nonprofit, says Becky Straw, co-founder of The Adventure Project, a nonprofit. She makes a strong case. If you start a nonprofit you’ll be broke, stressed, and you’ll have to be boring while you work long hours with no money. You will be rejected a lot. And, by the odds, you’ll fail within a few years.

Becky has been through all of it except the failing. For the last two years she lived couch-to-couch, maxing out her credit cards and relying on gracious friends and family, and working with her co-founder Jody Landers to build the foundation of an enormous vision. They aim to create one million jobs in the developing world within a decade.

Sitting across the table from Becky in a cafe in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, she says she’s tired from flying across the world and spending three long days in the field catching up with a social business she partners with. Still she crackles with energy. I’ve been in the country three extra, less busy days and I’m fading with jet lag. She shares with me the grand vision she and her partner are building, lamenting that it’s hard to shrink it down to the elevator pitch that many would-be backers want.

Her vision sees good businesses in poor countries as the final solution to poverty, and to many other endemic problems, like access to clean water and affordable healthcare. The Adventure Project aims to focus international attention and money on these businesses, helping them scale and make the biggest positive impact.

And, in a way, it all started with swimming.

“As a kid I was terrible,” Becky told me later over email. “I’m not trying to be modest, I have multiple last place ribbons to prove it.” Then, when she was twelve, a swim coach took her aside and gave her this advice: “Everything in life is 90% hard work and only 10% talent, so just work harder than everyone else.”

“That stuck with me, and he was right,” said Becky. “I put my head down and never stopped trying.” Her hard work earned her a scholarship to swim collegiately on a team that won two conference titles. She still wasn’t the fastest on the team (“I was the worst of the best”) but, she recalls, “it didn’t really matter to me, because I learned that I love to work hard, and will go to great lengths to make something happen.”

“I experienced that feeling that hits you in the gut, and you know you’ll never be able to live blissfully ignorant again.”

That sort of determination, ‘Grit’, as it’s often called, is being hailed by top researchers as one of the most important characteristics of successful people. And Becky clearly has large grit reserves. Which means that she could likely succeed at just about anything: movie making, real estate development, technology startups, fields that could win her fame or fortune or both. So why put all that determination towards stopping poverty?

“I think the main experience for me was volunteering in Romania after college,” she said. A couple from Ohio ran a group home for kids who had been orphaned and abused. Some of them had been confined to cribs for the first ten years of their lives and had to learn to walk starting at age eleven.

“I experienced that feeling that hits you in the gut,” said Becky, “and you know you’ll never be able to live blissfully ignorant again. It made me horribly sad to see the vast disparity between the rich and poor. But it was also incredibly hopeful, because I witnessed resilience and love. And it gave me purpose.”

She earned a Master’s in International Social Welfare from Columbia before joining a fledgling non-profit called charity: water. Becky was employee number three, and helped launch one of the most innovative and successful non-profits in the world. She left charity: water during some challenging organizational growth pains and soon reconnected with a donor named Jody she had become fast friends with a year earlier during a trip to Liberia. Over dinner in Colorado they discovered their common passion for social enterprise and started a Google document titled, “Launch List,” filled with items like “Assemble a board” and “Get charitable status”.

They started in on the to do list in October 2010 and launched The Adventure Project a month later.

So far they have partnered with four social ventures in four developing countries, creating over 350 jobs. These businesses are helping solve the problems of hunger, water, environment, and healthcare, and are serving almost 900,000 people.

When I met her in Uganda she had been visiting one of these partners, a company called Living Goods that combines the Avon door-to-door sales model with the effectiveness of community driven healthcare. Women are trained as community health workers and visit the homes of their neighbors, checking on family health and offering advice and selling low-cost solutions where necessary.

On her organization’s blog Becky shares a story (with beautiful photos from Esther Havens) that epitomizes the impact she and Jody are having. A Ugandan woman named Gertrude, recently widowed and left with three young children, was hired and trained by Living Goods as they expanded to her village. When she started visiting homes she met a woman who had three children sick with malaria and no money for medication. Gertrude decided to trust the woman and paid for the medications herself before moving on to the next house. Two days later the children had recovered, the woman had repaid Gertrude for the medication, and the village was buzzing that Gertrude had saved these children’s lives. Now her new health business is booming and she can afford to send her kids to school. And all throughout the village she is known as “the Kind One.”

Becky’s dream, and the vision of The Adventure Project, is to take Gertrude’s story and multiply it by a million. One million new jobs. One million people solving their communities’ problems. One million families out of poverty. It’s the kind of goal that will take, more than anything, a lot of grit.

Learn more about Becky’s work here. We’re donating 50% of all online sales now thru November 9th to The Adventure Project! Shop our new Fall Lineup here!