We must now all be islands of sanity
Chapter 17, in which I borrow a phrase from Meg Wheatley and we begin to rise into our new way of being, being role models for a better way.
We’ve arrived at the penultimate section of the book. It’s been mostly an “ideas fest” up to this point. We set out with Part 1. What’s It All About (which pieced out all the different theories that explain what the hell is going on around us) then moved into Part 2. How Do We Live Now (in which we dismantled old ways of doing life and posed new ones). But now I’ve reached a point where I feel everything that can be said, is now said. We must move into who we need to be. We must now (Part 3.) create Islands of Sanity.
I’ve been reading the comments here closely and I feel everyone in the community, at least those who’ve been on the journey from the beginning, are feeling the same way. It’s now time to “be” the humans who will get through this. Below is a brief gee-up spiel to switch us into this new, heart-led gear. I’ll also launch into the first chapter for this section (chapter 17): Deep.
You’re new here? You can start at the beginning and navigate around using this Table of Contents if you like. The audio version is in the next post, available only to subscribers. Ditto the conversation in the comments section where we workshop things together.
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PART 3: Islands of Sanity
"Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times; but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."
- Lord of The Rings
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I borrow the title of this next section from Margaret Wheatley. In her book Who Do We Choose to Be?, Meg argues that for those who choose to awake to collapse, it becomes their duty to put their care and attention into creating spaces and communities of spiritual hope, stability and resilience. She calls these Islands of Sanity. In fact, Meg’s view is that surviving and spiritually thriving via localised and very consciously gathered communities is the only path now.
An Island of Sanity, she points out, is not a sanctuary; it is where we go to contribute. The contribution is quite specifically to help awaken others’ to their innate human goodness. Meg prescribes a methodology for setting up an Island of Sanity. I encourage everyone to go read her latest book Restoring Sanity to learn how to start one yourself. For now, I’m going to simply borrow the concept and the call to arms that comes with it. And then flesh out a way of being into this that I feel will resonate for everyone here.
Community note: I will also initiate a program for setting up Islands within this community in coming weeks.
You might recall that Meg and I connected when I first started writing this book. She recorded two podcast episodes with me and then offered to be my mentor for this project. In our first session, she advised I don’t go into the what and the why of collapse theory and instead cut straight to the spiritual reckoning required to lead on an island of sanity. I chose to go against her advice. As I wrote,
“Those of us feeling the dissonance, whose souls know the centre can no longer hold, who are losing friends and feeling awkward at barbeques, we absolutely need to understand what’s happening. We need the framing. We need to find our coordinates to see where our agency, our beingness, our humanity fits in. We need to pull apart what’s going on, even if “understanding” and neat maps and descriptors are part of the materialist (post-industrial, modernist) mindset that landed us in this mess in the first place (and will need to be replaced by a far more systems-orientated, spiritual vibe in due course).”
And…so here we are. At the juncture that Meg warned we would get to, where any more knowledge, experts, jargon and metacrisis word salad-ing just feels so tired. I think we can now see that the theorising and solution-selling economies, the endless podcasts and the (p)doom ratio-ing, are dangerous stalling tactics and distractions from our fear.
So, yes, Meg was right. But we had to get here in our time and in our own way. We straddle oddly liminal times where we have to use the cerebral, theory and solution-obsessed mindset of the “old world” to be able to understand and embody an emergence into the “new world”. It’s the only mode we’ve “known”. I personally have had to have one foot in the old ways to be able to feel my way through into the next one.
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This is a good pause point for reminding each other that the collapse of our global civilisation need not amount to human wipe-out. I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night lately, struck with the sense that I need to emphasise this more. What is ahead could (merely?) be the death of the old post-industrial world. And there are things we can do to give such a possibility the best chance of being a probability. I bring in that thread that’s been weaving in and out: Our predicament depends on the way we handle things, whether we lose a grip on our humanity or not.
We have to hold our shit together, as a collective. This is also why creating Islands of Sanity is the most important work we can be doing.
Writers note: I am doing another mentoring session with Meg today as it turns out and will update this preamble afterwards if it’s required. I’ll alert you to any changes that I make, if they are substantial enough to warrant it. Meantime you are super welcome to ping me questions in the comments that you’d like covered. I am going to record the session and post it for the community.
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It’s also a good juncture for me to share something very personal. I am writing this while enduring a reckoning so deep I’m doubting the four walls of my person can hold so much fear and pain. As I alluded to a few weeks ago, I started a relationship. It’s been six months and I’m at a crossroads, one I think many late-in-life relationships arrive at. It’s demanding I step up. If I stay in my old mindset, the relationship will die. If I keep treating the issues that are presenting themselves as “complicated” (as opposed to complex) problems that I must fix by mind-mapping and using I’m right v He’s wrong thinking, it will die.
It has become brutally, rudely, clear that I am being asked to step into the very shit I have been banging on about with you here. I have to enter the non-linear complexity of the dynamic and be in the radical discomfort of not knowing, of not being able to change or fix things. I have to get entangled. It’s very meta! But then everything is now. And it’s all speeding up.
I can hear the words of my late friend Tim: “Sarah do you want to be right or do you want love?”
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I agree with Meg. Creating Islands of Sanity is our only path now. And everyone here is in the advance party for this mission. We must find the sanity for ourselves. But we must also role-model the hell out of it for others, too. We might not feel we have the shoulders for the gig. Like Frodo we might wish none of this had landed on our laps. But, dear friends, we were born into these times and we find ourselves the adults in the room. We get to rise.
There is no longer any “right”. There is only love.
DEEP
“This is a grief, and I must bear it”
- Jeremiah 10:19
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I put quotes at the start of each chapter that sing to me. This one, above, is a chorus.
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The world is in despair. We are hurting at a species level. We exist in rage. We are triggered, bewildered and…heartbroken. We struggle to find a point to our days. We are reactively self-important and simultaneously disappointed with our immaturity. And the kids are diagnosed as divergent. But have they diverged? Is their response not just appropriate? I tend to trust kids’ responses. I remember reading about a psychologist who told the New York Times that previously when treating patients she was mostly helping them understand how much of their fear is internally produced and not rational. But today it’s a different challenge, she said, because patients’ despair is, in fact, rational and appropriate.
“Chronic exhaustion stems from the innate ability that we are nature. So when nature is collapsing, so are we. No matter the drugs or exercise or sleep, humans are nature and we are feeling the collapse on a deep level. I think the more people took the time to feel it, and recognise it for what it is, they would care more to do something about it.”
As the brutal truth of collapse and my impotence in fixing it settled for me, I despaired deep. I felt regret that I’d allowed myself to be lulled into false hope for so long. I felt betrayed by the emptiness of the post-industrial promise. I felt shame for the violence we’ve committed to nature. We watched it happening! We did! And I felt shame for the waste of it all. How did the miracle of humanity amount to this? A species that eats its own beautiful, generous home? It was all such a crying shame. Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto John Vervaeke, has written that as we become aware of what we have done to the world and each other, "We no longer believe in ourselves. We are strangers in our own world.”