This is going to have to be spiritual

Thoughts from a cafe in Sifnos - chapter 5 in my Book Serialisation

Hello! You’ve landed on a chapter of my book about how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world. You’re new here? You can also choose to start at the beginning or go and check out the rest of the book using this Table of Contents.

Quick recap: We have set things up by acknowledging truth, not hope, will best serve us, and we’ve gone neck-deep into what collapse actually is. Now, we move through into some more sublime thinking…

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SPIRITUAL

I’m in a café on the island of Sifnos and an old, rich guy I met the night before - I was hitchhiking home from a party; he picked me up on his motorbike - pulls up a chair next to me. “It’s you,” he says.

Anthony (his name is Anthony) is from London and he and his second wife have houses for each season scattered around the world. He has a late summer bungalow here in Greece. Apropros not much, he tells me, “I think I have to sell my rib. I love my rib. But it’s a climate catastrophe.”

Old rich guys love ribs. It surfaces a generosity in them. When you own a large boat you have to invite others to join you on them.

Anthony swings his arm out to the world. “But I’ll do it, I’ll do the right thing, and all the other rich people won’t do anything,” he tells me. “That is the problem!”

That’s what stops you from selling the boat, from doing bold things for the planet, I ask. “Yes! Exactly!” Anthony looks out to the gridlock of buses and mopeds in the hot sun and his expression drops.

“I mean, what’s the point of doing anything? Ever?”

Ooooh, that’s such a great question, I say. Me, I think we do things - the work, the sacrifice, the small and large gestures even when no one else is doing them - to be the person we actually want to be in this lifetime. I put it to Anthony: In final wash-ups, when we’re stripped bare (as we are likely to be pretty soon) how do you want to go down, what sort of person do you want to be looking at in the mirror?

Anthony nods at my question and eats the biscotti that came with my coffee.

I answer for him. I think the person we want to be is kind. Because kindness is the substance that keeps our sense of self vertical. We ultimately ache to downgrade our own self-importance and to release our inward obsession with finding our own happiness, and to instead give to others. Because it’s in relationship, in the giving outward, that we find sustaining joy. Our happiness, our sense of the point of it all, is an outward-moving thing (not a clutching outwards, but a giving outwards). We recycle, we pay the donation to the climate or refugee charity when no one’s watching, because being part of this productive, aligned momentum onwards and outwards - and forwards - to each other is congruent with the flow of life. And we get a hormonal (dopamine? oxytocin?) hit of belonging every time we do it.

I interviewed Brown University neuroscientist Dr Jud Brewer who has studied the way kindness works in the brain. Kindness opens up certain neural pathways in the prefontal cortex that creates an expansiveness that we experience as a profound sense of peace and belonging. Studies show even watching other people perform acts of kindness can produce this neural sensation.

The philosopher and psychotherapist Erich Fromm arrived at the same place writing about “the point of it all” in the face of nuclear threat in the 1960s. “What is left if we lose it all?” he asked. What brings us calm and meaning? It’s a question I have taken to asking guests on my podcast. Invariably the answer I get back from them is a version of being of service to others, of dropping our addiction to ourselves. Fromm says he ultimately chooses to make his life a “study in work and love”. By work he means, contributions that best serve humanity. The Sweden-based systems thinker Nora Bateson frames things similarly. When she’s asked questions like, how long do we have and what will the world look like in ten years, she says the only question to be asking right now is, “Who will I be in this dynamic for others?”.

Martin Luther was famously asked what he would do if he knew the world was going to end tomorrow (which, for an apocalypse-aware leader of the Reformation, was not merely a hypothetical). He said he’d plant a tree. This answer lands so beautifully for many of us. I think it’s because it poetically bypasses the bullshitty stuff we get distracted by. It takes us to our inherent desire to give outwards.

I also love what Indigenous complexity theorist Tyson Yunkaporta once told me: “Young cultures” always ask the same three questions: Why are we here? How do we live? And, what happens when we die? Yankaporta notes that his culture answered these long ago and that they just don’t arise among a people fully aware of their custodial role in the ecosystem. The answer is simply known.

I explain a bunch of this to Anthony. He turns to look at me. And says, sadly, “It’s going to have to be spiritual, isn’t it.”

*

I had a thought, a consoling one that lifted my heart. It came to me sitting there with Anthony as he wrestled with how to best respond to what he referred to as “the apocalypse”.

What if all those spirituality insights that we’ve been flirting with for years – those mindful wisdoms in the books that sit on our bedside tables and those a-ha aphorisms that hit us over the head at our yoga retreats…

What if they are no longer mere wafts of peaceful “feels”, but instead are precisely how we will have to live now ? To cope. To fathom.

To handle it.

What if spiritual awakening is no longer a curiosity that we toy with, but where we will be taken?