Visions beyond crisis

The next day, day 6, is very much the same. Same encounter with the floor. Same time slip except this time I look at my watch while heading to the floor, noon. I am more aware of an hour passing while I am lying there. Except, when I look again, it is 5 pm and I am realising it is not just time compression. I’ve been somewhere else for at least a short period of this. This time, the memory of that dream is a little less detailed but the sensation of it, of being in another place, remains vivid.

Perhaps I was just asleep?

If you are reading, or have read, the known side effects of the covid vaccines you’ll know that fatigue is one of them. I am certainly feeling tired. The night before I’d headed to bed at 8 pm and pretty much slept for 11 hours. When I-you sleep for that amount of time it is rarely continuous. I lifted out into different levels of wakefulness through the night. However, my ‘dream’—between noon and 5 pm the next day—is wildly different. Calling those five hours, or a short bit of it, sleep is an inadequate explanation. I have a strong sense it is different.

Vaccine side effect information says 48 hours. I am a lot further past this yet thinking, just an outlier. I’ve never liked statistics but I can do enough of it to understand probability curves and standard deviations. I was far from the average reaction already by this stage but yet to reach the wild outer limits.

Outer limits

For many people, including me, we are already at or into the extremes of our meta-crises. How many more people need to die because of the color of their skin? How many more are limited in life, capacity to be educated or survive on unhealthy or inadequate food? How can a couple of thousand billionaires have more wealth than over four billion other people while many of those folks don’t have clean water to drink, sanitation or health care?

A reality today is we have more than enough technical solutions. Yet we’re submerged by crises that seem to defy time. For example, our capabilities to address infection disease are phenomenal. 12 months to develop vaccines for a new human killer is a staggering achievement. Especially when viewed against the ravages of, say, smallpox on previous generations.

Uniquely, as a global and unusually self-aware species, we are able to predict future threats. Despite this we seem to be in a collective continuous time-slip, a compression within which past knowledge does not crystallise in the present and the felt future states we all wish to avoid can be shifted from our current timeline.

I’ve heard “we’re sleepwalking into the future”. Just as I was not asleep for those five hours I don’t feel the sleepwalk does us credit. We know. We know the issues and pathways we could follow for thriving, for sustainability, for humanity. We’re letting ourselves off easily by failing to acknowledge that reality.

Easy

There’s a relief around letting myself off easily. 

Day 7 and—despite ongoing symptom now so far out of the norm I should really be questioning them hard—I’m cycling to the beach. Doable but a two hour round trip takes double as long. Still, it feels glorious to be in the sun and not on the floor. I am sure this must be good for me—a weekend gently out and about. Surely by Monday I’ll be past the symptoms and able to work, write and concentrate. They are all things that have been completely impossible for the whole week.

Our climate crises is similar. We know and lived through Australian bushfire infernos, California, Oregon, Washington and Canada forest fire conflagrations, floods, stronger and more frequent hurricanes, heatwaves and more. Yet, on a day like today—it is peaceful and still outside, not a cloud in the sky, about 50F, ten degrees centigrade outside—I can shift that cataclysmic reality to the side. 

It is not like it goes away, the ever present awareness of threat to the viability of many of the life forms around me. I don’t believe the step away from being directly and continuously concerned with our meta crises is compassion fatigue or becoming used to a new normal of disaster. However, it is a concerted practice to hold via positiva and negativa, hope and despair, grief and awe, all simultaneously. Like any practice it requires work. It can feel easier to shirk that. For example see Surfing simultaneous states here> http://be-benevolution.com/2020/04/10/surfing-states/ 

Connections

Regardless, in our lighter moments, I believe it is easier to envision a brighter future. 

As I cycle back from the beach I meet my doctor for the first time (we had only been in contact by email until now). I am in a rural and remote area—a small population scattered between hills, hidden bays and lakes. 

Alex pulled over and said hello, asked me how I was going—I guess I am rather easy to recognise! I answered optimistically, feeling the beauty of  this outdoor day and this is mixed with hope alongside the relief still present from the day of the vaccination. It is lifting me even now, after a week of struggle, and surely I am on the mend. No matter that holding a conversation with the doctor and the cycle back is straining me—the individual positive pieces are prominent for me and I was sure the difficulties will pass.

We do a similar thing with our crises. We live with the consequences and advocate for alternatives. We actively embody and create such alternatives. Our struggle is connecting the extraordinary local and personal examples—new economies, social enterprise, regenerative systems, planning and action for thrivabilty—together so that they are more than the sum of the parts. That helps to overcome our predominant thinking patterns. These inhibit the emergence of such positive potentials (e.g. see Strong attractors here> ). 

New meta

One way of thinking about such a shift is what’s our new meta? The old one has comprehensively outlived its usefulness.

That new meta is our current reach, how do all these individual stories become something greater? What emerges that is more than the old competition plus individual excellence will solve everything narrative? 

I am not thinking about a new meta as I’m heading into the next week. While I’m taking it easy the small steps past my floor are making me feel this is passing. We-I am on track for something brighter. Yet is it really that simple? Do crazy outlier impacts such as those I am experiencing, a week already, simply leave?

> Read on for part 3. Descent here>