“Progress is impossible without change, and those that cannot change their minds cannot change anything” George Bernard Shaw.
For many years, in my Sustainable Living textbook and when I was at conferences talking about my positive views of a sustainable world, people would come up to and ask why I was so confident and optimistic that a sustainable world was possible? My simple answer is that historically when people are faced with crashing into any proverbial wall wake up and start to act in unity.
Well, the response to the global Covid-19 pandemic certainly has shaken things up a lot. While to many it may seem just the social distancing inconvenience and lock-down restrictions, it is so much more than this. If nothing else, the pandemic response has awakened many people to the realities of consumer living. Economically 2020 is a disaster for many as they were laid-off indefinitely, or had to adjust to a new working environment from home with meeting via electronic group software (e.g. Zoom). As a retiree I didn’t see too much change except that most of my group involvement was through email instead of over a coffee in a local coffeehouse and whenever I had to go out to get groceries, I was required to wear a mask (and still have to). Yet, I recognize that for many this was a chaotic period with lots of uncertainty requiring challenging changes in their lives.
To quote Deepak Chopra, “All great changes are preceded by chaos.” Solutions come from doing new things not hanging on to the old ways. I hear comments on social media about returning ‘back to normal’ and I have to smile. What was so wonderful about how we were living before this pandemic. For most people, the consumer lifestyle with all its stresses, growing personal debt, harmful air and water quality, and food system problems became obvious in the world of 2020. The lockdown allowed many to actually sit back and review their lives in a way that wasn’t easy to do before. What I have heard and read is that for many it helped to emphasize the quality of life (QOL) factors instead of the standard of living (SOL), which I have talked about may times (e.g. see earlier post Centralized versus Decentralized Living 5 – Another look at SOL and QOL). Having a decent SOL is important, but having the quality to appreciate life and the freedom to be with people has taken on a whole new level of need. Social media has its good points but many are seeing that being in the actual presence of one’s friends, family and colleagues brings a lot more benefits that anyone appreciated before the lockdown.
It isn’t just personal connections that have been highlighted. So many things are in chaos at this time. Our economic systems are collapsing, political systems all around the world are destabilizing as citizens question and rebel against draconian regulations under the auspices of protecting people, environmental regulations are being rolled back under the guise of economically protecting industries instead of people. Overall, the whole biosphere seems to be under attack by corporations, and governments acting on their behalf, use Covid as an excuse to do what they want without regard for the overall health of life on the planet. Yet, I also see an upsurge in spirituality as more people begin to see that the interconnectivity of people is linked directly to the interconnectivity of all life itself. As Ken Wilber calls it, we are becoming more aware that we need to be more ‘Worldcentic’ (see last posting).
I post little things on Facebook and get a few commentaries, likes, and some reposting’s, but by far the most surprising one I posted in September with over 300 comments (in just 2 weeks since I posted this blogpost it leapt to 600 reposts) and many reposting it, was a quote from a ‘Lion’s Roar interview’ with mountaineer and former war reporter Dahr Jamail about an intergenerational perspective. He said; “The single biggest thing I learned was from an indigenous elder of Cherokee descent, Stan Rushworth, who reminded me of the difference between a Western settler mindset of “I have rights” and an indigenous mindset of “I have obligations.” Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I am born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.”
We can use this chaotic time to start building a future we want to see instead of one that draconian laws may force us to accept. I’m not saying that we ignore the threat of a virus, but that we make our voices heard to those that think we should merely accept what is pushed up on us by bureaucrats’ trying to keep their power rather than do what is right.
I love a recent comment by Indian Author Arundhati Roy who said, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. …we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
Rather than being stuck in the heat-beat-treat technological world we live within (see earlier posts Biomimicry 2 – Learning from Nature – BioEngineering processes, and What will our Descendants say about us?) we can push to innovate while the chaos deconstructs the world, we always were told was normal. We keep hearing of how long it will take to get us back to normal, and it is obvious that the old normal is no longer possible any more than plane travel now is as easy as it was before 9/11 in 2001. Maybe, now is the time to be asking ‘what a new normal should look like.’ In spiritual circles, it is taught that to reconstruct one’s self requires that we deconstruct the old self first – deconstruction precedes reconstruction. The same is true of societies. In this age of Covid, this raises a fundamental question I have been talking about in this blog, “Are we as a set of different global cultures and societies capable of thinking about rebuilding our economy, our productive activity, and our lifestyles on a different basis to promote sustainable equitable living rather than trying to resuscitate a dying consumer paradigm controlled and manipulated by capitalist elites?” What kind of normality do we truly want to see? What could it actually be if WE set out to create it for ourselves without waiting for disorganized corporate-governmental controlled system to do it for us?
To Be Continued …………………
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