(Just a quickie, but the frantic process of preparing my book for publication is nearly complete, so posting here will resume in earnest soon. I have so many half-written posts to finish up! In the meantime, check out the below radio interview I did with Carl Munson of Traydio.com the other day)
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Ah, Schumacher College. There's a name to conjure with... For so many of us, it summons magical memories of truly life-changing times. To this day, I remember the tingling surge of energy in my body during the fortnight of the "Life After Oil" course I took there in 2006 — as one attendee put it, I had the air about me of a man in an oasis, after wandering a desert for years. And with good... -
Last month the wonderful Kim Hare invited me to be the keynote speaker at a reunion for attendees of her freely-offered The Edge Retreat, which doubled as the launch for her book At The Edge. I decided to offer a 20 minute whistle-stop tour of my life so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY0-qhPd-1I Before opening the conversation on the theme of ‘Transforming Our Relationship with the Future’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mRJbLDiH4M It felt a potent event — and gave rise to an enjoyable impromptu evening...
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A few months back, amidst the stimulating ferment of The Deeper Dive, I literally woke one morning with the short analogy below in my head. Prompted, without doubt, by my frustrations with the burgeoning popular debate on whether there’s “still time” to avoid the worst effects of destabilising our very climate. I'm glad the climate scientists are doing their specialised work — who knows what useful insights they might unexpectedly turn up — but honestly,...
Hi Shaun – loved your interview with Carl Munson and your closing comment made me think of this Tom Atlee quote, which is in the Transition Handbook and is quite long so I’ve cut it:
“Whether I expect the best or the worst, my expectations interfere with my will to act…all the predictions — both good and bad — tell us absolutely nothing about what is possible. Trends and events only relate to what is probable. Probabilities are abstractions. Possibilities are the stuff of life, visions to act upon, doors to walk through. Pessimism and optimism are both distractions from living life fully.”
It is so important that we do what we feel moved to do and hopefully our actions will help Doomers become Do-ers!
Looking forward to your book – do you have a publication date? Couldn’t see it listed on Green Books site. Good luck with it all!
Hi Mandy, thanks. Copies of my book are available to order from the Green Books site here. I have just checked, and when the first books are dispatched depends now just on when they arrive back from the printers, but the latest they should be sent out is the week of the 16th March.
And yes, you’ll find Tom Atlee’s work in my book too, and in my thoughts, so I’m not surprised I put you in mind of it! As you can gather from the title of this site, I’ll defend optimism as a useful tool, but he’s right to say that hiding in it can distract us.
As Ran Prieur wrote recently, “Arguments for and against “hope” are usually semantic, and nobody notices because they haven’t clarified their definitions. The bad kind of “hope” has been defined by Derrick Jensen, in this essay, as “a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency”. I would define the good kind of hope as the confidence that if you persist, you will find a way through.”
And then, I would add, there is faith – the belief or understanding that even if there were no “way through”, holding true to whatever we most respect – whatever makes us come most fully alive – would remain the key to a life of joy and satisfaction. Once we acknowledge and fully face the insidious creep of despair in ourselves, I have found such faith to be an even stronger shield against its debilitating effects than hope.