Heart and Head

At the beginning of the week, I thought it might be a challenge to write five posts. Now I'm thinking it’s a challenge to stop at five! After tonight, the blog will be open for anyone to post over the weekend, then I hand over to Elena to be guest-writer for next week. I’ve really enjoyed writing this week, and am looking forward to seeing what Elena will write about.

In the meantime, I’m going to finish off my week as guest-writer by talking about motivation. Part of the challenge of transition must be in motivating enough individuals to join in, so that we collectively reach a tipping point in terms of our environmental footprint and our ability to respond to a post-oil world. The question is how to do this. Some people will be motivated by the heart, some by the head, some, possibly, solely by a self-interest that just happens to be served by transition-like activity. If someone wants to comprehensively insulate their home just so that they have smaller utility bills rather than because of their carbon footprint, does that really matter? The outcome is still the same.

I have a strong heart motivation in that I don’t want my children to have an impoverished future as a result of my society’s actions today. However, overall I consider myself motivated more by head than heart. I’m drawn to the complexity of the twin problems of peak oil and climate change; I like solving problems and understanding the underlying causes of those problems. I like working from facts, evidence. I like to understand the arguments for and against before making a decision; I like to know that a solution to one problem won’t have unintended consequences in another area.

Finding good solutions to these problems will require heart and head, and I hope that the solutions to the challenges of climate change and peak oil will also go some way towards creating a more responsible world, a fairer and more equitable world, the kind of world that I would like to bequeath to my children.

I'm hugely encouraged by the people I've met so far in Transition Norwich. And I hope it continues to grow. And to do that, we need to motivate, in different ways, all sorts of people to join the Transition movement – teachers, builders, agronomists, economists, town planners. Practical people, leaders and visionaries. Thinkers and doers, head people and heart people. Ordinary people who want to do extraordinary things.

In other words, everyone.