oases of connection

On the morning of my 38th birthday, I woke up in a hotel bed in Alexandra Headlands and turned the radio on. The first words I heard were “The World Trade Centre is no more.” It was like I was listening to fiction.

Nearly 20 years later, as awareness of the dangers of the then-little-understood COVID19 virus were beginning to grip governments, I turned on the TV news to the headline, “China has closed its borders.” I again felt like I was watching a Hollywood movie. What followed was a season of unprecedented weirdness as stay-at-home orders were issued, face masks became mandatory and cities that never shut down became deserted. It was completely surreal.

It was hell-on-earth for many. For others, it was surprisingly heaven-on-earth. We’ve all heard the reflections on how what matters most became front and centre. People reached out to neighbours, spent time with their kids like never before and discovered ways to tap into their creativity and ingenuity. Yes, for some it was unsafe and catastrophically lonely. For others it was refreshingly calm and deeply transformational.

Fast forward to now.

We are witnessing a new world order materialise in front of our eyes, led by megalomaniacs pathetically out of touch with common decency and civility, whose agendas, both explicit and hidden, kick sand in the face of Martin Luther King Jnr’s famous “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it tends toward justice.”

It feels like wherever I look, our society is in crisis. We have hunches that social media addiction is messing with our social competencies and metal health but it’s slippery to name what’s going on without sounding luddite. We found out during the pandemic how the systems that annex manufacturing and supply chains are vulnerable with single points of failure. Financial systems are under stress, particularly insurance as the industry teeters on the brink of collapse. Imagine what will happen when that domino falls!

Despite bourgeoning clean energy, our use of fossil fuels continues to increase, not decrease, which is critical for our collective safety. We could blame China, but it is also true that our preferred lifestyles here are energy insatiable; we’d rather build the big new house, go on more holidays or buy the new appliance. For my part, I need a ‘big’ car to tow our ‘big’ caravan a ‘big’ distance, up a ‘big’ road to avoid the cold winter. Our diets are dominated by processed food to the extent we’ve lost touch with what proper food actually is. And when we try to reclaim some sanity in what we eat the cacophony of voices telling us what we should and shouldn’t put in our bodies is paralysing. The cost of health care is completely out of whack with its centrality to community wellbeing. Education systems designed for a world long gone persist. Species have of course always come and gone, but our biosphere is currently facing unprecedented challenges to its health and stability due to climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction.

All this without mentioning the face planting reality that 1.5 degrees of global warming is already locked in. This was the rise that all the efforts to reduce carbon emissions were supposed to avoid. Now, on the current trajectory, apparently 3-4 degrees before the end of the century is probable. Gulp.

This predicament, all these crises (and others I haven’t mentioned) happening simultaneously, is sometimes referred to as the poly-crisis. But one of the things that makes the current reality unfathomably difficult to get our heads around is that these crises are all connected. They don’t happen in isolation from each other. This is called the intra-crisis.

But the gnarliest and most staggeringly sober angle on this predicament is the meta-crisis; our inability to do anything about it. The Conference of Parties (COP) gatherings were supposed to be the global collaborations to respond to climate change. How’s that working out for us!? The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was a thorough and technically beautiful set of aspirations to respond to the broad range of intractable challenges facing humanity, but despite the rhetoric of support from the majority of countries, extreme poverty rose in 2020, hunger has actually been on the rise (again) since 2014, and many of the health gains were shocked into remission by the pandemic. Overall, in 2021, the UN reported that only five countries were on a trajectory to achieve the SDGs by 2030, with 134 not expected to reach them by the end of the century including 69 developed high-income’ or ‘upper middle income countries.

It’s been some years now since Maria and I consumed TV or radio news. But the scanning of online news channels gives me the same feeling as when the World Trade Centre collapsed and when the weirdness of the pandemic images of deserted cities that ‘never shut down’ invaded our screens. I’m living in a fiction.

I find it hard to understand the extent to which people are just pressing ahead as if this is an extrapolation of normal. At least during COVID we would say to each other with hope and confidence ‘this too will pass’. But this predicament of poly-crises and meta crisis … I’m struggling to see the pathway to this ‘passing’ without an unravelling, a disruption that will shake our societies to the core.

As is typically the case, it will be privileged people like me who are the last to feel the effects of this disruption. Some astute writers are already angry at the educated white elite for talking about these probable social, environmental and economic tragedies as if they are future scenarios to be avoided. Many communities and nations are already experiencing the existential impacts of the train wreck that is the end of democratic capitalism and the global order as my generation have known it.

BUT … and this is the main thing I’m thinking about, as with our experience of the pandemic, chaos and uncertainty in our environment propels us to consider what matters most. Our survival instincts wind back the superfluous and we sense the call of authenticity. We seek out kindred spirits, not only because of the social safety, but because it is with like-hearted, like-minded and like-spirited people that we can rally to offer connection, to be kind and good in a world that is in pain.

I have thought a lot about what is ‘mine to do’. Yes, it is in part about (paid) work, but it is more broad than that. I am increasingly conscious of the pressures of normal life and how that impacts the wellbeing of the communities of which I’m a part. I want to help curate oases of connection, or as Meg Wheatley calls them, islands of sanity. Spaces where people can be thoroughly themselves in socially safe environments, where meaningful connection with others is cultivated slowly, and where our integration with the natural environment is not an added extra. Oases of connection do not exist so we can withdraw as recluses, but as sanctuaries of authenticity and mindfulness to strengthen us for our contributions, whatever that looks like.