Note: the audio version of this posting is available here (also on any podcast player)
Ok, are you still with me after that subtitle? :-)
If so, when you get a chance, please try this exercise:
Think of something you are currently doing - anything - and then shift your perspective on that activity from an ‘endless growth’ lens to a ‘societal collapse’ lens.
Everything changes, right?
Well, maybe not right away…
Here’s an example: You’re driving a car and you’re ‘endless growth’ mode. You might feel encouraged, seemingly without consequence, to want a bigger or faster vehicle, whereas with a societal collapse lens, hum, you would make rethink owning a private vehicle altogether and focus your energies on other things such as on our dying planet.
Same car, two very different lenses.
Jimmy Ung’s in e164 jimmy ung - proximity proportionate responsibility of the conscient podcast said something that I think is worth remembering at this point:
· ‘If we were to do an inventory of where all the things we own were made, that would give us a very interesting map of where our responsibility, our attention and our donations ought to go because our pressures on the global systems can be revealed. That's a much more reasonable way to interact with different crises than to simply read about it on the news and interact with the whole of it without the context of our footprint.’
Right, context.
So, having done the exercise, what does one do? : car sharing, keep our old phones as long as possible, donate strategically to charity, learn to unlearn ? There are many things that we are doing and can continue to do more of…
But, the critical part is to apply this idea of ‘lens shift’ in every aspect of our lives and see where it takes us.
Personally, it has brought relief, relief in the spirit of the Deep Adaptation Forum’s ‘embodying and enabling loving responses to our predicament’.
Relief, but not in a doomist or defeatist kind of way, but relief in the sense of releasing pressure.
Releasing pressure that helps me deal with things as they really are and direct my energy based on what I feel about that reality not what I imagine through the fairy tale of modernity.
I got an interesting response as to this posting from an artist and colleague Don Hill who said:
‘Any dichotomy —an either/or dilemma— is suspicious from the get-go. A zen parable is helpful perhaps: If you answer my question incorrectly, I will beat you with a stick. If you answer my question correctly, I will beat you with a stick. What is your answer? Thump. You must address the query — non-answers are an answer. Whack! No matter — you answered... There may be a resolution, if only you would _take the stick_…’
My response was:
‘I’ve been told that I’m heavy handed and paternalistic in writing, not leaving enough room for the listener or reader to take their own space. Ive been working on it, but in this case, I wanted to be black-and-white as a polemic and provocation (most people will ignore what I say anyway so why not tell it like it is) knowing, alas, that there’s a lot of space in between those two polarities.’
Since then I’ve been thinking about Don’s zen parable, notably what it might mean to ‘take the stick’, e.g. not responding to unanswerable questions but to act with relevance to situations such las iving in the fairy tale modernity.
Maybe ‘Taking the stick’ means changing the story?
Thank you, Claude Schryer, for this intelligent, sensitive comment that is filled with wisdom. I hope this "lens shift" can be spread out to the whole world. It is an eye opener.