No Home For Old Ways
Surrendering to create
Picasso said the first act of creation is destruction. To make anew involves replacing something else, to remove what’s already there, to get rid of. To make requires space and access to see and feel and think with fresh perspectives, unencumbered by what’s come nor what hasn’t worked.
In a cultural context where doing more equates to being more, our current lives should be overwhelmed by meaning, fulfilment and satisfaction. More meetings, more content, more reports, more events, more digital connections, more of everything all of the time. Yet we flounder. Our neighbourly relations eroded. The planet’s ecosystems collapsing. What if embracing less was in fact the path to what we all seek - “how to live wisely and agreeably and well?”. Maynard Keynes posed this question in 1930 in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. What are those possibilities now as London cooks, the far right flourishes and remote seal colonies are devastated by bird flu? How long do we really think we can keep this up? Endless more-ness of material accumulation and short term gross domestic product performance?
You know the answer as well as I do. It can’t. Yet we can’t stop either. More flights, more large cars, more stuff. It has to stop. We can’t stop. Tormented by the painful reality of where this path has taken us, terrified of withdrawing from this way of living. Our culture’s problem is our problem, is my problem. I want the flights and the stuff too. A house bulging with too many books to read, yet I can’t stop myself getting another everytime I pass another bookstore on another fossil fuel powered drive I probably could have avoided.
To create a whole new way of living requires the death of this one. Fortunately or unfortunately I’ve had those deaths personally and professionally. A relationship ended and a job I was kicked out of. Destruction. Oblivion. Terminated. I had no choice but to create anew. The gift of desperation, the necessity of trying again knowing my best efforts resulted in despair.
Those identity deaths were excruciating. Before them I did my best to sit in a state of persistent mild discomfort about how to make change in and through my life. I was tormented in the stuckness of my circumstances, but at least I had the security of knowing I could handle it. The unknown was an abyss. A story can be told - it’ll work out, with this shift and this minor alteration, if I plan my diary like this and we set time together and if I read this book and the boss approves this thing then I have this holiday and my child achieves this result and everything else just eventually and magically falls into place, I can avoid the death. I don’t have to deal with collapse or destruction.
I wish my life had and still would just fall into place. It’d be far more pleasant and easeful. Could I just plan a little more and thought a touch harder? Perhaps and if only and maybe if this had gone how I’d imagined, it would all have fallen into place. Maybe. It didn’t though. The inclination to repeat what I’ve always done occurs automatically.
My struggle is our struggle. Dealing with avian flu and a disinformation apparatus billionaires built and use to stoke far right sympathy and promote insanity requires struggle. Meaningful action requires the destruction of stories that all of this can be out-information’d through reports or on group WhatsApp threads. They can’t. My life has only shifted because I have learnt to take the contrary action to what my impulse and instincts want more often than I did and could in the past. Instead of immediately judging and dismissing Pauline Hansonites, I wonder how society and institutions have failed to maintain cohesion and dismissed values and practices of compassion and curiosity. It’d be much easier to continue to dismiss them, but I’ve always reacted with contempt and look how things are.
As London cooks, as Mumbai cooks, as Bamako cooks, I don’t find it useful to promote ‘this is climate change’ rhetoric from my keyboard to a captive social media audience. You reading this know climate change is real. You know climate change means places are cooking and more of it is locked in. You know there is devastation and hardship and loss in how the climate has and will continue to change. Will my post make any difference to Albanese as he most likely plans to approve the expansion of more planet cooking projects? The struggle is in removing and replacing him with someone who won’t approve more projects which cook earth. Actions to depose a sitting PM and political member are a lot harder to generate and requires destroying my paranoia where my actions and perspectives are open to conjecture and judgement. I’d much prefer to get along. I’d like the planet to not cook more. Destruction of my fears is required to allow for something else to emerge.
So what are my contrary actions in this moment? What do I need to stop doing, stop telling myself and stop accepting so there is space to try what else might work? One of those is trying to work out how to talk about the greenhouse cycle, atmosphere and climate to my boy’s pre school class. In the beginner’s mind I need to inhabit, what is the most simple, clearest and straight forward way to just talk about the remarkable magnificence of our miraculous planet’s life force? A straight forward task objectively - no doubt there are a million online resources to do just this. More difficult is surrendering my desire to over complicate it, to add a little more detail, to feel the pay off of getting a hit which feeds my identity and wants to validate my intelligence and expertise. There is a greater challenge in leaving behind those inner desires for me than explaining the basics of the greenhouse cycle to pre schoolers. All I need to do is attend, be present and playful, and follow the instructions someone else has laid out on how to talk about life on this planet.
Without taking away from what I’m doing I keep ending up where I’ve always been. An endless to do list is everyone’s burden, apparently normative it seems for all of us, no matter how unwell, disconnected and resentful it makes us. Do I choose to keep pursuing the completion of my infinite to-do scroll, or step back and worry about what really matters? To dial down or takeaway what’s not serving me but I’m holding on to for some internalised story tied to an identity I project and delude myself to uphold. Do I need to halt the pursuit of busy-ness and exist in the awkwardness of staying still? What makes the stillness so deeply uncomfortable? A fundamental story is it all comes down to me. It doesn’t. I matter, and yet I don’t. This strange, abstract understanding comes from examining my relationship to my own behaviours and what fulfils me, beyond the doing-ness, the more-ness, the chasing-ness. On the other side of my examination lies an ability to relate more healthily with myself, which enables healthy relationships with everyone and everything else.
I’m learning day by day I can only create something new, something novel, something potentially valuable by firstly ending what’s not worked. This enterprise building phase is fear-inducing. Not because I don’t have access to information or people who can help me, but because I need to give up the comfort of a pay cheque hitting my account every fortnight, of detaching from a job title at a prestigious* organisation, to accept I have absolutely no idea how any of this is going to turn out.
Daunting, yet thrilling.
See you in the pit.
Life Properly On The Outside
The last eight weeks has been a little bit of everything. Besides being more present as a father, very slowly working my way through the NY Times best films of the 21st list and spending time literally finding nature, I’ve been working on what I want to evolve this enterprise into. That means a temporary event hiatus, with those to come back in August (plus our next trip to Djanaba Farm late September).
If you’re interested in hearing about this work, what it’ll involve and how you can support (for example, suggestions for organisations who might want to partner with one of the largest sustainability pods in the country are very welcome), please get in contact.
Until Then, PodLife
The podcast continues ever on. The guests over the last month have been wonderful, diverse, illuminating and expansive to learn from and spend time with. If you like listening to clever people exploring how to make the world a healthier, safer and more just place, please check it out. And if you know people who also like that, please share on an episode you’ve enjoyed.