are we all proverbial frogs in the pot?

Last weekend I did my first solo bushwalk and swimming excursion. Saturday’s hike wasn’t particularly long, only about 10kms. But more than half of it was spent on soft sloping sand walking into a stiff breeze. By the time I climbed the track back up the escarpment I was wasted, and when I dragged myself into the camping area about 2.30 in the afternoon, my appetite for further adventure that day was near zero. And so I found myself in my tent, shutting up shop for the day in the near broad daylight hour of 7.30pm!

At Maria’s suggestion I’d downloaded a couple of podcasts for such a time as this. Truth was I was pretty confident I’d not listen to them … I didn’t imagine myself with headphones in on a solo bush excursion, but there you go.

It turned out to be one of two encounters I’ve had this week with prominent Australians who have recently made a major professional transition. The story of those transitions is not the main point here, they deserve proper consideration in their own right. The main question for me is about the triggers, and more broadly, why change is so hard. But for the record, the two people in question are Clive Hamilton and Stan Grant.

I’m currently reading Stan Grant’s courageous and provocative Murriyang, a poetic and assertive book about his full embrace of his Wiradjuri and Christian spirituality in the wake of walking away from his high profile career in the media.

Equally provocative and courageous is Clive Hamilton’s abandonment of climate activism in favour of radical adaption. (We had our time to act, it’s now too late, we’re past major tipping points and so our best energies must be spent in readying our societies for the world we are now destined to live in.)

The paths chosen by these two are not tweeks, an improvement within their established life/work trajectory. They are radical shifts that are accompanied with a recognition they have been part of a problem, or at least a perpetuation of a system that is not delivering what it aspires to. And so I have been wondering about my own life.

If you have been following my weekly posts the last couple of months, you’ll know that Maria and I have chosen to make some changes that feel significant, at least to us. In recognition that we have benefited from a capitalist system that perpetuates growing inequality, we decided to liquidate the capital gain in our current home and use it to offer (professional) support to people that otherwise couldn’t afford it. In some ways it is a choice to step sideways, but I wonder what else we need to be aware of? What else is going on around us that is ‘boiling us’ gradually? (to lean on the frog in the pot analogy).

I think a lot about integrity. I sincerely lament how difficult it is to be the person I want to be. It’s easier for example to judge people’s personality, attributes and behaviour, than it is to have compassion. Compassion and appreciation for the history and stories that they (and we all) carry in our bodies, hearts and minds in every interaction. And it feels nigh on impossible to consume goods and services with alignment to my espoused values. Yeah yeah, I know all that stuff about ‘choose your compromises’ and ‘be kind to yourself’, but I’m having a different conversation here. It’s a conversation about being a frog in a pot, unconscious of the water in which we are sitting and it’s unhealthy, even lethal consequence. It seems to take extraordinary courage and insight to call out the dangers in what almost everyone else sees as unquestionable and accepted normal.

Some of the dramatic changes we’ve made are quite private, but when people find out can be worn as a badge of honour - or sorts. We’ve worked part time for many years, favouring slow living and flexibility to spend time with loved ones. We stopped watching TV some years back except for the news, then eventually took the TV out and eliminated the news too. We’ve tried to consume ethically, eliminate single use plastic and all those stereo typical progressive things … but many of these choices are ‘polite’, a bit weird and odd, but can be talked about without being seen as completely loopy.

I suspect Stan’s re-direction will mean many will write him off or at least won’t take him seriously anymore. But I’ve got mountains of respect for the courage it has taken for him to draw a line in the sand and say ‘no more’ of that in favour of this, when this will almost certainly be considered loopy. But the cost of integrity can be high. I wonder if I’m prepared to pay the cost?

Society as we’ve known it feels like it is teetering on the edge. Privileged people like us will be the last to experience the consequences of it, but as William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here - it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

We’re already living with the ambiguity and unreliability of truth. Already, not in a future AI controlled world, but today right now in the normal cocktail of social media news channels and mainstream media, which in turn is fuelling the full-on trainwreck of democracy. And I haven’t mentioned the crisis associated with our inability to navigate global warming which has now gone past the first red light tipping point of 1.5 degrees and is on track for at least 2 degrees with dire consequences. Those of us in the privilege bubble might not experience the consequences of these changes, that are now locked in, as early as Pacific Islanders, but we might sit up and take notice when our coastal houses or tree-change homes become uninsurable. And we haven’t mentioned the poly-crises associated with food, health and education systems and the things we have assumed would keep growing or getting better, but are now in decline.

So we’re sitting in this pot, this pot called modern civilisation. And I think it’s boiling us. What will it take to notice? And even if we notice, have we even got the ability as individuals, as families or communities to jump out. I seriously don’t know.

If this was in my private journal, I’d stop there, but given this is public I feel like I need to end on a different note. Weirdly, and perhaps paradoxically, this tragic scenario invites our best and most creative selves into being. At least for me, recognising and naming the sh*tshow that is blowing around us has propelled me to focus on what matters most, to be more courageous about my own integrity, that is the radical honesty to name my own hypocrisy and strive to face the darkest corners of who I am so that I have nothing to hide from either myself or those I love. And with that foundation, I can ask what is mine to offer, what is mine to contribute into this uncertain reality we are now navigating?

And indeed, this series of posts is part of that … to be stupidly transparent about things I would typically keep to myself, in the hope that it nudges others toward being attentive to the inner and outer world environments that we think are unchangeable norms. And to assume responsibility to be agents of change … not in some grand ‘make the world better’ way, but in a ‘I’ve only got this one chance at life and I’m going to make sure I don’t get stuck’ kind of way.