Well, sofar it absolutely feels like the right choice. Instead of living in suburbia in Melbourne, with a view of your neighbour's kitchen or fence, we now look out over the southern ocean (with about 5000km to go til you hit land at Antarctica). The air is a lot cleaner, it's beautiful to walk around here, the people really are very friendly, and seem more genuine or authentic too.
The general lifestyle seems more in tune with what we value these days: an emphasis on life, and enjoying life, and less on the rat-race of our western 'civilisation'. I put this in quotes, because it reminds me of an email I got from my brother in law who asked how we were progressing with our move to the 'edge of civilisation'. I actually don't find what we live in a very civilised society. Just look at what a few millennia of 'civilisation' has brought us: we're raping this planet (and each other, if we're not killing each other in wars with dubious motivations). If we don't act soon and drastically, in a few decades a large percentage of the world's population in low-lying areas won't have a home because of rising sea levels - Hobart being one of those areas (luckily our house is 40-50 meter above sea level: ours might become waterfront property ;). We're burning fossil fuels at a rate that is unsustainable, and worse, will deplete the resource for the plastics we use everywhere. We are eating poisoned foods, and we're wondering why there's such a large incidence of unexplainable diseases and afflictions. Our living environment has been polluted by thousands of chemicals that our bodies didn't have to deal with 200 years ago!
And this is what 200 years of progress in our industrial western civilisation has given us. Of course I'm not saying we didn't make real progress in those years, and I personally continuously take advantage of the comforts we've obtained - sometimes too much actually. But I am questioning the motivation behind many of our so-called improvements. And that motivation, especially in the last few decades, has simply been profits, money. We wouldn't have to have hunger in the world if we all became vegetarian or ate meat in moderation: it takes as much resources to grow 1kg of beef as it does to grow 50kgs of tomatoes!
But the gigantic and powerful meat industry would loose their huge current profits if we all suddenly stopped eating meat. And of course you can't make decent money selling food to third world countries...
And we'd possibly get safer and cheaper medicines if more scientific research was done into developing natural remedies. But they can't be patented, so of course the pharmaceutical industries aren't interested in going down that path.
The only thing that is missing is our willingness. Our interests in our western society lie with ourselves, our profits, our comforts. We waste ridiculous amounts of money and energy competing with each other, and in multiple ways: from competition for better job positions, through competition for the consumer's dollars, to literally killing each other in our wars.
If we're going to change any of this, the next generation (so our children) will play a major role in that.
By partially withdrawing ourselves from the big rat race and exposing our children to different values and different ways of being, we think we help to bring about the transformation of consciousness in the world that I think we need. The problem is too big for any one of us to solve. But by teaching our children teamwork and not competition, the importance of group well-being over individual well-being etc, our children's modus-operandi will be one that will benefit the world, and not just themselves. Hence our interest in a Steiner education.
And finally, we like this place!
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