Personal (Inner Resilience) - Review of the Week

When I first suggested this topic week on Personal or Inner Resilience, I was concerned there would be little interest in speaking about inner matters. But this weeks’s posts have proved me quite wrong. And I have a feeling there’s a lot more where they came from.

Jon and Charlotte both talked in different ways about practising self-discipline and cultivating a warrior attitude. A great lethargy began to come over me when I first read them... Discipline?!? Speaking up in the face of denial!?! Pass the chocolate! But I caught it before it put me to sleep, and used the irritation I felt at the thought of having to actually do something different about it to get me up again. Thank you both.

Another beauty of the posts this week for me has been that I’m not just reading them and saying, ‘Next.’ They are really thought-provoking. Gary and Andy both ask how we are going to be able to get along with each other? What happens when we have Transition in common but little else?

The fact is that most of us born in ‘rich’ countries have, over the past fifty years at least, had access to enormous amounts of fossil-fuels to drive a lifestyle which says ‘you can have it all, and even if you haven’t got it at the moment, you can get it’. This personal and collective fantasy is not resilient in the face of either the geo-physical restraints which peak resources and climate change are placing upon us, or the continuing economic crisis.

This is what we have in common and real awareness of it could lead us to drop our habitual hostility, antagonism and blind competition, and get up and do something different.

So whilst no one is an island and we can’t save the planet on our own (‘it’ll take at least three of us’, as permaculture cofounder, Bill Mollison, says), there are inner moves and changes that no one else can do for us.

I can’t get Charlotte or Jon to pull me up from my phlegmatic lethargy, I have to get up myself (although encouraging words from Andy this week have had very benficial effects!). I have to decide whether the day will be crappy or whether to take a warrior approach to what life presents. Whether to speak up in the face of oppression, or to keep silent. Whether I’m going to listen to an unkind and critical inner voice which tells me ‘it’s all gone horribly wrong and there’s nothing you or anyone can do about it’ or tell it to ‘shut up, you’ve had more than your fair share of my airtime’.

And start going down a kinder path.

Deep wave relaxation east coast style; shingle structures; peacock and buddleia - all August 2010