Everything is connected - Part 3
The more beautiful world we all know is possible
To my veteran subscribers and newcomers, welcome. I’m excited you’re here reading the third essay in this series. This is much more personal than the previous two, more along the lines of narrative non-fiction I hope. All the same, I hope you like reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. And if you have any thoughts or comments to share I invite you to start a discussion. These ideas are mine, they may not agree or chime with yours but we won’t know or grow unless we share them together.
These free posts are only made possible by the generosity of my creative hub members.
Thank you.
Linda x
At the end of February this year, I was preparing to join a Regenerative Placemaking course and a key activity was a set of group projects. We were tasked to come up with project ideas we could vote on, those that garnered the requisite support from others would be the ones that went ahead.
Having been involved in various forms of community building for decades, that felt like a good place for me to start, the problem was, I didn’t know how to explain what I thought would be helpful. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention and as I know well, insights arrive at the most opportune time which is why, when driving back from a nearby town on a cold, wintry Friday morning I hit on a question I believed might be a useful starting point.
Last winter a few ‘cosy cafes’ sprang up around the village for locals to get a free coffee, a chat and some companionship, all whilst being somewhere warm. There just happened to be one going on as I arrived home and it occurred to me it might be the perfect opportunity to see if the question I had in mind might work with people not immersed in the regenerative or spiritual worlds. With coffee in hand, I asked if it would be okay to have a discussion, everyone agreed,
I’d been listening to a lot of Charles Eisenstein and was intrigued by his idea of the more beautiful world. It seemed to me that this could be the basis of an opening question along the lines ”What needs to change for the more beautiful world we all know is possible to emerge?” There were a few bemused looks, so I clarified things like the environment, ecology, politics, community, the economy, and education; and with a whoosh, the conversation took off so much more than I’d hoped for. It was as if I’d lit the fuse on a bomb already primed to detonate.
For about two hours the discussion ranged across all sorts of topics requiring me to do nothing more than pose the odd clarifying question. The group was in its element and there was a lot of banter, back-and-forth conversations, sub-conversations, agreements, and disagreements. Eventually, they settled on something they all agreed with, they were satisfied; and so was I, for a couple of hours.
Their solution could be summarised in a single sentence, that people needed to take responsibility for their lives rather than expecting others to pick up the pieces. There were lots of comments about politicians, business and finance, parents and parenting, farmers and farming, teachers and education, children, and family life in general. When the conversation finally ground to a halt and the coffee and biscuits were finished, I was thanked for bringing something different to the day.
It was only later the same day as I was mulling over the conversation trying to pinpoint why I still felt I’d missed some essential point, that it dawned on me that all the discussion, the comments, the suggestions, the agreements, and arguments were about the need for other people to change their behaviour. How other people should do things differently. It was at that point I realised I’d asked the wrong question.
I’ve spent the last few months reflecting on the question I now know I should have asked and how the answers to that question might point toward a more satisfying conclusion.
Instead of asking what needs to change for a more beautiful world to emerge? The question which might have resulted in greater impact, assuming it was understood as I intended it, is more along the lines of ‘What is it about me that needs to change for a more beautiful world to emerge?’ And I don’t just mean ‘me’ as in Linda, I mean ‘me’ as in all of us.
That’s a much harder question to answer or even to discuss because it demands an internal reflection focused on our own actions and inactions, our beliefs, as well as the cultural and social norms we accept and dismiss as ‘truth’. Instead of it being about ‘them’, it now becomes about ‘me’. The answering requires a tacit acknowledgment that we are each contributing in some way to the situation that, as a species, we find ourselves in.
It feels more personal because it is more personal. As a result, it is more threatening because it shows how everything is connected and that each of us is an essential part of the jigsaw puzzle that has put this particular picture of the world together in this specific way. It asks us to consider our participation, albeit mostly unintentionally, in the ecological genocide, the constant wars, the cruelty towards other species, and the political, social, cultural, and spiritual challenges we’re all enabling and tacitly supporting by living our day to day lives as we do.
The reason it’s taken a few months to write this essay is that I had no answer for myself and as a result no suggestions about what might be helpful. Until these last weeks that is, when the answer found me quite by accident through a series of insights rippling out from the act of simply voicing the question to myself. To be fair, I never intended the question to be anything other than a possible starting block to understand how a community might come together to help create a more regenerative world. It wasn’t intended to trigger a personal journey.
When I reframed the question I’d asked back in February, it was as if a deep pit opened up beneath my life and my beliefs. At times over the last few months, I’ve felt as if I was being sucked deep into the bowels of the earth, only to be spat out panting and desperate for the sight of sun and sky, perhaps a little wiser each time.
The most important of these insights turned out to be related to my working life. It’s probably no surprise to anyone who knows me well, or who has followed me for any length of time here on t’internet that I’ve harboured a secret desire to change the world, indeed I think I’ve written about it many times. On the surface, some might say I’ve achieved a little towards that goal.
When I reflect back I realise how much I have lived with that as an aim. Most of the time it’s been hidden under the layers of roles and jobs, only really emerging into consciousness as my fascination with the way words are used to create information, which might become knowledge, that sometimes results in wisdom, before finally ending up with the all-important insights, without which I now know change is not possible.
And previously, my assumptions about how such change happened were along the same lines as the discussion that took place on that cold Friday morning in February. I believed the answer lay ‘out there’ in someone -anyone- changing what they were doing so a new paradigm could emerge. I realised working in change management for most of my career hadn’t helped, instead it served to reinforce the belief that change is something activated by events and circumstances in the world that happen to us. I even developed a ‘model’ for change and used it almost exclusively in the digital transformation work I was doing, believing it might also be useful for enabling personal change.
In fact, I’d started writing a book about it called IMPACT with several chapters already completed. But I was deeply frustrated as I never seemed able to complete the first full draft. Initially, I thought I must be a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle and which I thought I’d found in early March, but that turned out to be a false dawn.
In the end, the missing piece did arrive, but rather than completing the picture, it showed me it was the wrong picture in the wrong box. It turned out that the model I’d spent so many years working on and perfecting had never been the answer. In fact, it demonstrated quite candidly that the only piece of the model I’d created which was based in any semblance of reality was the first piece which acknowledges that all change initiates out of insight. The remainder of my now defunct work had then carried on as if the changes that followed could be manufactured in a mechanistic follow-my-leader process driven by an external ’out there’ source. What I learned was that it didn’t matter whether the change was personal, organisational, or global, they all had the same source, and the flaw was that we believed we could both manufacture and manage it.
For about two minutes I was deeply upset, the years I’d spent working on this model were shown to be a waste of time, until I realised my inner voice had been speaking to me throughout those years showing I was on the right track, but had missed an important turning. Fortunately, I finally paid attention long enough for the truth to emerge. That insight and the many that followed brought me closer to what I now believe to be true, which is that change is always, and without exception, an inside job.
That doesn’t mean that things don’t change in the outer world or that events and circumstances don’t impact us individually and collectively, of course they do. We see it every day if we read, watch, or listen to the news, hear about the latest disaster or war (cultural or otherwise), or discuss our leader’s political ‘interventions’.
But those changes happen as a result of who we think we are in relation to the event or circumstance. They happen because we’ve all given our power away to others (usually those in some sort of power hierarchy) giving them the responsibility of fixing things, rather than accepting that our thoughts, actions, and behaviours are the very ripples creating our experience of the world.
Following that revelation, it rapidly became personal. Despite being on a journey of transformation since my teenage years and regularly ‘feeling the fear and doing it anyway’ I now see clearly how fear has been THE driving force of my life, rather than the extra with no speaking lines I’d believed it to be. For me, it manifested in two key ways; control and anxiety. I hadn’t noticed how anxious I was most of the time, nor had I seen how controlling that made me in my own life, as well as in the lives of others.
I can now see the hand of fear behind my constant need for change; changing relationships, jobs, homes, locations, and interests. As long as I kept changing things on the outside I could believe I was in charge of the future. It meant I didn’t have to look too hard at why I was constantly on the move to something different. It also meant I genuinely believed all my problems were a result of something outside me. In my defence, I always knew I was the common denominator but successfully framed it as me responding to an outside force that was greater than me, which I now know was never true, no matter how much I wanted to believe it.
Through framing the question from a personal perspective I came to understand the change I needed to make was to let go of fear. When I looked closely I noticed that fear in the guise of control and anxiety showed up in the strangest of ways. I used to joke that when my knickers matched my bra then I knew all was right with the world and I had it under control. Sadly, my knickers ALWAYS matched my bra. Even worse, if I’d been carted off to hospital after some horrific accident nursing staff would be able to discern what type of day it was if they understood the secret code. Flesh coloured meant it was a paid work day, black was weekend and casual wear, and white was for high days and holidays. When I didn’t wear the right knickers with the right bra on the right day I never felt quite right. I guess I must have had an inkling what was coming when, in 2022 I decided to buy a pack of brightly coloured knickers on impulse, mindfully challenging my standard purchasing behaviour.
After realising the extent to which I’d been in its thrall I was horrified. I’d prided myself on recognising and overcoming fear on a regular basis, feel the fear and do it anyway had been a core mantra, so to have it revealed as a still dominant force felt like a slap in the face. Over the ensuing weeks, I’ve started coming to terms with it and feel an incredible lightness of being, as if a weight has lifted I hadn’t known was there. It doesn’t mean I won’t fall into the trap of fear again, I’m certain I will, but now I’ve opened that particular Pandora’s box I can’t unknow what I now know, which gives me a better chance of not letting the trap door of fear close on me again.
I think I can say with some certainty that at least one of the reasons the world we have right now is how it is, is because fear is a dominant emotion for a majority of the population. We have been encouraged to trust others with our safety and security, despite evidence that by all objective measures, an increasing majority of the world’s population is safer and more prosperous than its ever been. Regardless of daily updates, media reports, and Governments telling us to be scared of this, that or the other, we are now less likely to die from illness, poverty, or war.
The problem with fear is that it keeps us locked into the conformity of what ‘is’, neither challenging ourselves or the system. It is what enables us to avoid standing up to the personal, corporate or state bully, hoping against hope that their attention won’t be turned on us. It is what ensures we carry on living the life we live without having to think too hard about the impact we are having locally and globally, because as long as everything is controlled and OK in my world, then I don’t need to consider the bigger picture. It is what drives the illusion of external security, and this is perhaps where the challenge needs to be thrown by accepting that security is that internal ‘home’, it is always there and can never be turned off but we have often forgotten that this is so and look to the external world to provide it instead.
I could at this point go off on a tangent about how this is deliberate on the part of the ruling elites and the media cabal, but that simply continues the same old paradigm of blaming something outside ourselves for the problems we’ve created. Even though I am more aware of the way society has been manipulated and controlled, particularly in recent years, that doesn’t give me a get-out-of-jail-free card that says if only they would change it would all be fine. That thinking harks back to my conversation in February enabling to me to refuse to look closely at myself and how I live my life.
Perhaps I will indulge in one little tangent. I have been mildly amused and at the same time appalled, by the antics of some activist groups, particularly those related to environmental and ecological movements. Wearing and using the products of oil whilst campaigning against oil has always appeared somewhat lazy, hypocritical, and insincere. We see this schizophrenic behaviour in all activism to some degree as people use the tools of the day to fight the tools of the day, without apparently realising they are exacerbating and contributing to that which they are campaigning against. It becomes obvious when you ask how many of those actively campaigning against things have accounts with companies like Amazon! And if it’s not obvious why that’s important, it might be worth just thinking about it for a while.
It’s all very well to say that other people must change their behaviour, but it’s not okay to say that whilst indulging in our own behaviours that equally exacerbate and impact other challenging issues. Let him who is without sin, cast the first stone springs to mind!
My journey into understanding how fear has encouraged me to make decisions, take action and indulge in behaviours that are not ultimately helpful to me, others, or the planet has just started. I’d like to say I’m not afraid of things in the world changing, but I’m not quite there yet, There are residues lurking, and like layers of the onion they are slowly being peeled away, exposed for the lie they are. I know the change is real because behaviours I’ve had for what feels like forever have shifted, and in some cases disappeared completely. My fear of travel is one, I’m actively considering a trip abroad; I laugh more than I used to, I’m asking for help instead of thinking it’s all on me to sort things out, but most importantly, my bra no longer matches my knickers!
However, my knowing that fear has been a key driver doesn’t really explain why I think my reframed question is one that might help set us as a species free from the burdens we carry that cause us to abuse ourselves, others, and the non-human world.
With that in mind, I’d like to share a few of the outcomes so far of my letting go of fear:
Money. The last bastion of fear around money was my home, the one Steve and I thought we’d never be able to buy. It was worrying about paying the mortgage that kept me awake at night, most nights, for the years since we moved in. In the last few weeks that fear has gone, not because I’m confident we can continue paying the mortgage as I have no more money than I had before, but because now I’m prepared to let the house go if I have to.
Home. I used to think that eventually, I’d find the perfect ‘home’, whether that was a place to live, a relationship, or a job. I spent most of my life chopping and changing everything because I now know I’d missed the point that ‘home’ is an internal sense of belonging. Paul Young’s song ‘Wherever I lay my hat’ now means something different to me than I think he intended because now I am ‘home’.
Feel the fear and do it anyway. It’s a great book and one I read many times over the years; but it’s wrong. To feel the fear and do it anyway encourages us to do things that ‘prove’ we’re not fearful. However, in the doing of them, we are proving exactly that point. Letting go of fear completely means I no longer need to prove to myself I have no fear so no longer need to do things I just don’t have any interest in doing.
Each one of these shifts has an impact on the wider world too. If I don’t need to buy things to be someone I’m not, then I use fewer resources. If I know that home is internal then I don’t worry about selling myself or my husband to the highest bidder in order to simply keep the roof over our heads and as a result, I’m encouraging us both to do more of what makes us happier than miserable. When I don’t need to do things to prove to myself I’m good enough then I stop making those demands of other people.
It is seemingly little personal changes like this, replicated on a bigger scale I believe have the potential to change our world into something much more beautiful and fulfilling. With that in mind, I’d like to encourage you to ask yourself the question: “What is it about me (add your name here) that needs to change for a more beautiful world we all know is possible to emerge?” You might be surprised by the answer that comes to you.
(Image by Tiểu Bảo Trương from Pixabay)
If you enjoyed this, you might like the previous two essays as well: