(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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21st December
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Autumn has always been my favourite season, and over recent years it brings additional succour, signalling time to start preparing in earnest for the winter's Deeper Dive. This now-annual tradition has become a real highlight of my year, as a new small group capped at just fifty folk gathers to reflect meaningfully on our tumultuous times, and the ways we might choose to move through them. Starting in January and running online for nine weeks,... -
I was deeply shocked to hear last night of the death of Michael Dowd, creator of the wonderful PostDoom.com. He and his wife Connie Barlow have been good friends to me, as they have to so many others. Michael and I had exchanged a few words on Saturday, so I knew that he was in New York with his family, after the passing of his father on Thursday. I had absolutely no idea that...
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As John Lennon had it, "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans". And as this culture continues the gruelling, methodical work of devastating our world in the face of all wisdom, and I accordingly work at preparing this winter's Deeper Dive into Surviving the Future, I actually want to write here about something more personal than my usual themes! You see, lately I've been giving a lot of time to my...
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.