Roz Savage's Blog, page 8

There is a saying that FEAR is False Expectations Appearing Real. Clichéd as it is, in common with most clichés it has much truth to it – at least in my experience.

So I’d like to round off this series of blog posts on fear by writing about the stories we tell ourselves, and how they empower us, or keep us stuck in fear.

To me, it’s fairly self-evident that the stories we hold to be true have a fundamental influence on our lives.

There is a vast array of information available to us at any one moment, but our conscious minds can only process a tiny subset of it, so our past experiences and cultural conditioning largely determine how we subconsciously choose to allocate our narrow beam of attention.

To put this another way, our brain is less of an organ of perception, more of an organ of prediction, and the predictions that our brain deems most useful depend on what has been either most rewarding or most threatening in our past.

And if the brain has to choose between rewards and threats, it will focus on threats. The brain’s job is to keep us alive, so it is especially primed to pay attention to what might kill us – or at least cause distress, harm, or humiliation. You can imagine how evolutionary biology selected for humans who pay attention to risks, and this has become wired into us as negativity bias.

Given our tendency to focus on the negative, and the brain’s predictive capabilities, it’s a short step to seeing how the brain can become overzealous at its job and predict negatives that are unlikely to ever come true.

Rational fears can be useful, letting us know that we need to pay attention to a risk or threat. But irrational fears can be limiting, even destructive, holding us back from living life fully. Our worry-wart of a brain can let its imagination run away with it, making up stories about what might happen and then allowing that story to get in our way – maybe even becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When I trained as a coach, we were taught to notice when a client is going into story – be that about a fear, a relationship, or something else that is causing them stress – and to bring it to their attention. We often don’t notice when we’re telling ourselves a story, because it seems really real. Yet it actually exists only in our imagination, and confirmation bias has emphasised the evidence that supports our story, while editing out any counter-evidence.

When I was on my rowboat, I noticed that when it really was all hitting the fan, I was too focused on doing what needed to be done to have time to be afraid. As the sailor’s saying goes, life’s easier in the storms. The fear mostly took hold when I was lying in my cabin at night, trying to sleep, imagining all the bad things that might happen.

Clearly, when alone on a boat in the middle of an ocean, it’s good to think ahead and to prepare accordingly.

But there’s a clear difference between sensible planning and senseless worrying. Over the years that I spent at sea, I learned to tell the difference between the two.

So now I spend most of my time on dry land, I try to recall this skill when I notice I’m feeling anxious. What story am I telling myself? Do I have evidence for that story? Is there another, equally or more likely story, that would be more supportive?

We all live in story, to a greater extent than we usually notice – the stories that are told to us by our culture, the media, our friends, our subconscious. Even massive social structures like the economy, or democracy, law, religion, or the scientific method, are stories that have no objective reality outside of human minds.

What are your stories? And what are your subconscious stories? Are they true? Are they really true? Could another story be more true – and more helpful?

 

Photo by Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash

“I’m coming out of the spiritual closet.”

I was talking with a good friend, a coach and spiritual channel, who as far as I had seen had never been particularly inside the closet. But there were apparently other realms of her life where she had to rein back, edit herself, be less than fully frank about her capacities. She was feeling out of integrity, and was resolving to bring her full self to all aspects of her life and work.

A few days later, I was talking with another friend, who is fully vaccinated, but had a seriously painful health issue that started within 24 hours of the second vaccine and lasted for many months. She is in favour of the freedom to choose in relation to the Covid jab, but noticed that she was hesitating about coming out of the vaccine closet to say this publicly.

I’m going to hazard a guess and say that we all have some beliefs, habits, or other aspects of ourselves that we conceal – out of shame, fear of judgement, fear of not being liked, fear of the social media storm we might provoke.

I know I do.

This can be especially troublesome if we believe something that goes to the core of the tribe we identify with – be that a political tribe, social tribe, corporate tribe, cultural tribe or family tribe.

I admire the courage of those who come out of their closets, like Russell Brand on his addictions, Charles Eisenstein on the vaccine, whistleblowers, gay or other gender-nonconforming people, and political dissidents. It goes against the evolutionary grain to risk expulsion from our tribe for holding a different view.

I recommend Ash Beckham’s TEDx talk about closets. As she says:

“At some point in our lives, we all live in closets, and they may feel safe, or at least safer than what lies on the other side of that door. But I am here to tell you, no matter what your walls are made of, a closet is no place for a person to live.”

Maybe sometimes the reaction to our de-closeting is every bit as bad as we imagine. Often, it won’t be.

How much importance do we want to place on what other people think of us, compared with how we feel when we look in the mirror and know that we are not in integrity? The calculus will be different for everybody. Some will stay in the closet forever. Others will decide that they need to alleviate the discomfort of dishonesty.

Only a sociopath doesn’t care at all what others think of them. But maybe we sometimes care too much about the opinions of people who aren’t really important. As Dr Seuss says:

“Those that mind don’t matter, and those that matter don’t mind.”

Do we do a disservice to society when we don’t take a stand? When we do claim our truth, might we liberate others to come into their own integrity?

And one day, might we reap the whirlwind of our complicity in silence?

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_t...…)

 

Featured Photo by Drew Dizzy Graham on Unsplash

 

It’s easy to blame others for all that’s wrong in the world. It’s much harder to take responsibility, to see where we’ve played a part in creating or perpetuating the situation that we dislike.

And yet it’s only when we position ourselves inside the problem that we have any hope of finding a solution.

I’ll explain.

There is a particular dynamic that has been on the rise for a number of years now. It underlies Brexit, the Capitol riot, resistance to the jab, the freedom convoy in Ottawa, and many more instances besides. It has also shown up in much environmental messaging.

Identify problemIdentify culprit(s)Attempt to force culprit(s) to stop creating problem through activism, legislation, or other forms of coercion

And how’s that working out for us?

I would suggest… not so well. There may be times when it is right and appropriate to take this approach, but when there are significant numbers on both sides of the debate, we need a different way.

While a problem is something “out there” and the culprit is “other”, we don’t get to the root of why the problem arose in the first place. Any attempt to end the problem comes from a place of blindness and judgement rather understanding and empathy.

How can you solve a problem that you don’t understand? And how can you understand a problem from the outside? You have to get inside. You have to understand where your supposed opponents are coming from. What are they seeing that you’re not seeing? Why does their position make sense to them? How is the system reinforcing their attitudes?

Yet what we largely see is quite the opposite – crackdown, suppression, and cancelling – which only exacerbates frustration, opposition, and disenfranchisement. Positions become entrenched and polarised.

Attempts to “solve” the problem through command and control are doomed to fail. They might suppress the symptoms for a while, but ultimately lead to a futile game of whack-a-mole.

What would it be like to shift from blaming specific groups or individuals, to looking at the paradigm that created the situation? If a mother is driven to stealing food to feed her family, is that her fault, or the fault of the social security system that failed to provide them with the means of sustenance? If people are susceptible to incitement and rioting, what made them volatile? If people are suspicious of authority, what can authority do to regain their trust?

Systems generate results, and narratives produce consequences. When systems are dysfunctional, allowing narratives to diverge, a society can only paper over the cracks for so long before it implodes.

Just to be clear, I’m not blaming the people who blame. Obviously that would be entirely self-contradictory and counter-productive. We all do it. It’s a natural response. Even the wonderful and wise Brené Brown confesses to being a blamer in this fantastic 3-min video from London’s RSA.

Rather than blaming, wouldn’t it be more effective to find common ground? We need to move from an attitude of domination to one of partnership. Adam Kahane and Reos Partners have worked in the most challenging situations in the world, from post-apartheid South Africa to post-civil war Guatemala, using their methodology of Transformative Scenario Planning: bring together warring factions around a table to work together to define potential future outcomes.

Chances are, when the factions shift from blaming each other for the current situation to focusing on the future they want to create, they will broadly agree that they want peace and prosperity. Understanding grows, divisions soften, alliances form. From there, they’re in a much better position to design a bridge from present to future – a bridge that everybody will want to cross.

We can start this right here, right now. I’m doing my best to pay attention to where I’m blaming others, rather than taking responsibility for my role in creating this reality. I’m asking where I perpetuate systems that produce results I don’t want. I’m challenging myself to check whether my actions are in alignment with the future I want to create.

By blaming others, we ultimately disempower ourselves, and drive peaceful resolution ever further way. This is on all of us to heal division, starting in our own closest relationships and building outwards from here.

 

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

To what extent are our lives determined by our beliefs around death? I’m curious. And (it won’t surprise you to hear) I have some thoughts…

In my upcoming book, The Ocean in a Drop, I write about the implications of attitudes to death on our consumer habits. Research (here and here) suggests that fear of death makes us less happy and more materialistic.

So it follows that adopting a different belief around death could enable us to opt out of what I call the existential death spiral, in which climate change (or any other existential threat) makes us anxious, so to divert ourselves and/or to create a reassuring external representation of permanence and immortality we go shopping, which exacerbates the very problem that made us anxious in the first place, leading to still greater anxiety, and more retail therapy, and so on.

As philosopher Bernardo Kastrup points out, a materialistic philosophy – in the sense that matter is primary – leads to materialistic behaviours, in the sense that we value material wealth:

“…the implications of materialism lie directly behind the Western love affair with things. It is our often-’subconscious’ belief that only matter truly exists that drives our urge to achieve material success. After all, if there is only matter, what other goal can there conceivably be in life other than the accumulation of material goods?”

If death lost its sting, in other words, we might be more chilled out, feel less compulsion to buy stuff we don’t need, and improve the long-term prospects of our species.

But, the more scientifically-oriented of you might be thinking, I simply don’t believe in life after death.

And that’s fine. You’re entitled to believe whatever you want to believe, so long as it doesn’t impinge on my freedom to believe what I want to believe. But here are a couple of ideas I’d like to run past you.

 

A False Dichotomy

First, in the Venn diagram of “scientific” and “spiritual”, many people feel they have to choose one or the other. This is a false dichotomy, and it’s unfortunate.

Spirituality is often used as a bucket term for what we don’t understand yet, the god of the gaps. But research into the brain and the so-called hard problem of consciousness is starting to tiptoe into what used to be regarded as spirituality, or at least metaphysics.

We find what we expect to find, and we don’t find what we’re not looking for, so while science dismisses disembodied consciousness as a superstitious impossibility, it confirms its own bias by failing to research what it has already decided doesn’t exist.

Yet good science should aim to explore and explain the anomalies. Anomalies lead to breakthroughs, which lead to paradigm shifts. Ignoring anomalies keeps us trapped where we are. There are just enough anecdotes about people knowing stuff they have no right to know, including young children able to speak far-distant languages and recount in detail stories of other civilisations, that we should keep an open mind. (See An End to Upside Down Thinking, by Mark Gober, for an extensive collection of anecdotal evidence.)

It would be great to see credible experiments and appropriate measuring devices to further explore the fundamental substrate of reality.

 

A Thinning of the Veil

Secondly – and this is more personal – last Sunday was a crazy and mind-blowing day for me, with several conversations and correspondences that thinned the veil between the living and the dead. I’d regarded life and death as being a pretty binary situation, and in relation to the physical body, I still do.

But in relation to the individual consciousness that we call a human being, it now seems to me that the line between the living and the dead is more blurred than I had thought. In two quite separate conversations, two friends appeared to be connecting with Barry’s essence (Barry being my dear friend and neighbour who took his life last week) in a way that made him feel very present. A third acquaintance reported a conversation that she had with him on the other side of the veil. I knew she had this ability, and had asked her if she could check in with him. What she shared with me helped me make more sense of his suicide.

Again, the sceptical among you may say that I am just believing what I want to believe.

Yup. I am. And your problem is…?

In the absence of a convincing scientific explanation of the relationship between the physical body and our subjective awareness of being alive, we still get to choose what we believe. I would rather choose a supportive story than one that makes me sad. I would rather believe that Barry is in a more peaceful place, and that he knows how much he is loved and missed. You are welcome to believe whatever works for you – and I think there are compelling reasons for adopting a belief in an eternal essence.

 

If, as cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman suggests in The Case Against Reality, death is no more than stepping out of the earthly interface or, as the Dalai Lama has put it, simply a change of clothes, this would have major impacts on the story that most non-religious people tell themselves about the finality of death, with all the anxiety that brings.

We have bought into the story of our own smallness, our vulnerability, our mortality, our individualism, our aloneness in the universe. What if we believed there is no such thing as death – only transformation?

“Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

 

 

P.S. Gloria wrote to me via my website contact form last week to ask if she could share my post. I tried to reply to say yes, absolutely, but my reply bounced back due to an incorrect email address. Gloria, I hope you see this, and do please share away! Happy for you to pass my words along to anybody who would find them helpful. 

Featured photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Two days ago, I lost a dear friend and neighbour to suicide. Please DO NOT write to tell me you’re sorry for my loss. That won’t bring Barry back, and it won’t particularly help me.

Instead, take the few moments it would have taken to write to me, and write to someone you know to let them know why you appreciate having them in your life, how much you cherish them, and that they can always count on your love and support. Extra points if you write to someone in a suicide risk category – male, young or middle-aged, living alone, financially struggling, and/or gay.

You never know when a few thoughtfully-chosen words might make the difference between life and death.

The sadness comes in waves. Aged 41, Barry still had so much to offer, and so much to receive. I can’t help wishing he had reached out for support from any of us here who loved him, or just waited a few minutes, hours, days or months for the emotional crisis to pass. I wish we could have a do-over of Tuesday, a remake of the story in which somebody finds him before the pills take effect. I wish that when was at my cottage for supper last week I’d asked different questions, listened more deeply.

But maybe one day I will accept that this is exactly as it is meant to be, that Barry the self-professed drama queen got the dramatic exit he wished for. He made his choice, and now age shall not wither him.

What am I learning from this? Three lessons:

First, one person can make an enormous difference in a short space of time.

Barry and his boyfriend (now ex) moved from London to this small village 15 months ago. I arrived 3 months later, by which time he was already energetically involved in helping transform from a village into a community. He and an energetic committee renovated the old schoolroom and turned it into a community hub hosting coffee mornings, choir rehearsals, and a wildly successful pop-up pub. If he had any concerns about a conservative, rural village accepting a gay man, he certainly didn’t let them slow him down. He didn’t hang around waiting for an invitation or permission – he just jumped right in and made a huge positive difference.

Second, the sense of community that Barry helped to create is enabling us to cope with losing him.

We have each other to lean on. The choir had a spontaneous wine-and-song evening on Tuesday night in his honour. Candles and flowers are piling up outside his house. Neighbours are inviting each other round, ostensibly for meals but really to swap favourite Barry stories and be there for each other. We hug, cry, and grieve, and it feels like this is how grief is supposed to be done. It makes me so sad for all those who were denied the opportunity for shared grieving during the pandemic.

Last, believing in a spiritual afterlife doesn’t help much when you lose somebody and you simply miss them like hell.

I can tell myself that he has gone into the light, that he’s at peace, that he is liberated from this vale of tears. But I’m still overwhelmingly sad, and not a little mad at him for evermore denying me the joy of his fabulous, funny, sweet, wise, cheeky self.

When we mourn a departed soul, what we’re really mourning is the loss of all the future experiences that now we won’t share. It’s not about them, it’s about us. When we mourn a suicide, we’re annoyed that they chose to leave us this way. We had an expectation that we were going to have an infinity of future opportunities to spend time together, and they have abruptly and unilaterally withdrawn that offer, without asking our permission. But that is their prerogative. That is now the irrevocable reality. We can curse them for it, or we can accept it, and be grateful for the time that we did have together.

Barry, we miss you. And thank you for having passed through our lives.

 

Featured photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

We live in interesting times, and the future has never before seemed so unpredictable. Whether it’s a changing climate, pandemics, AI, the internet of things, the internet of bodies, big data, war, political division, genetic engineering, mass extinction, economic volatility, or supply chain disruption, it can often feel like we’re caught in a maelstrom of cross-currents and great crashing waves of change.

The human brain doesn’t much like this. According to Anil Ananthaswamy:

“…many neuroscientists are pivoting to a view of the brain as a “prediction machine.” Through predictive processing, the brain uses its prior knowledge of the world to make inferences or generate hypotheses about the causes of incoming sensory information. Those hypotheses — and not the sensory inputs themselves — give rise to perceptions in our mind’s eye. The more ambiguous the input, the greater the reliance on prior knowledge.”

So, paradoxically, the more the world shifts from linear progression to quantum leaps, the more the brain tries to use history to navigate the future, exactly at the time when history is losing its value as a reliable guide. The self-protective ego freaks out when it can’t predict what is going to happen next, so it would prefer to create the illusion of predictability, even when that is increasingly at odds with reality.

The statement of the Hopi Elders offers a better strategy:

“There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate.”

Even while the ego-mind might be busy losing its cool, my experience has been that it becomes a lot easier to cope with uncertainty when you stop fighting it, and embrace it. If you can’t beat the flow of the river, join it. Change your story from “unpredictability is scary” to “unpredictability is exciting”. Abandon certainty in favour of curiosity.

If you can see personal evolution and growth as the point of living, then change and uncertainty lose their sting. In Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently, Beau Lotto writes about the importance of a diverse set of experiences to keep us flexible and creative, rather than being trammelled by the train tracks of convention. If we can let go of attachment to specific versions of the future, we open up vast new realms of possibility. If we can surf the waves of change, rather than being capsized by them, we can see further and navigate more strategically. When we interpret unpredictability as fuel, rather than fear, it becomes a catalyst for transformation.

It may not be true that life will never give you more than you can handle, but it’s a helpful narrative. By choosing to believe it, we develop faith in our own resilience and resourcefulness to cope with whatever comes.

I learned this on the Atlantic, when it seemed that I was clobbered by one challenge after another – tendinitis in my shoulders, saltwater sores on my bottom, all four oars breaking before I reached halfway, broken GPS, stereo, and camping stove, and finally losing all comms when my satphone stopped working – not to mention storms and high seas for much of the crossing. It was the epitome of unpredictability.

But as time went on, I noticed a pattern emerging. It felt like a gradual ramping up of the challenges. I would have just adapted to one reality when my situation would change again.  It was as if the ocean was setting me a well-designed crash course in personal development, calibrated to constantly stretch me but not break me.

So I now see life’s challenges as a series of lessons, stepping stones on the way to a more actualised version of myself. As with so many things, if you can’t change the outer reality, then change your inner story about it – it makes all the difference.

 

Featured Photo by Linus Nylund on Unsplash

The human brain tends to prefer coherence over truth. This is particularly true of the brain’s left hemisphere, which is characteristically reductionist, simplistic, and excessively confident in its own opinions. This quirk of our mental wiring can make it very difficult for us to change our minds, because if we change our mind about one thing, we may have to change our mind about a whole raft of other things too, or run slap bang into cognitive dissonance.

Our minds like consistency, and dislike ambiguity. This goes to the core of us, to our sense of identity. We tend to define ourselves by our opinions. Once we’ve made up our mind about who we are, it can be hard to change. Psychologists call this self-perception theory.

 

Foot in the Door

Consider the Foot in the Door technique (FITD), which even has its own Wikipedia page, which says:

“A common example undertaken in research studies uses this foot-in-the-door technique: two groups are asked to place a large, very unsightly sign in their front yard reading “Drive Carefully”. The members of one group have previously been approached to put a small sign in their front window reading “Be a Safe Driver”, and almost all agreed. In one study, in response to the “Drive Carefully” request 76 percent of those who were initially asked to display the small sign complied, in comparison with only 17 percent of those in the other group not exposed to the earlier, less onerous, request.”

76% versus 17% is a dramatic difference. The point is that the people who accepted the small sign now identify as public-spirited, so it’s less of a stretch to accept the big ugly sign. I’d like to know how far the researchers managed to push this. Just how big and/or ugly a sign were people willing to accept? Once the thin end of the wedge was in their front garden, how far in would the wedge go?

 

Membership of the Tribe

The Yale Panel on Climate Change Communication recognised that people tend to buy into a raft of associated beliefs, rather than considering each one on its own merits. The Six Americas report is now unfortunately based on only 4 questions. Earlier versions of the survey had 36 questions, which I found much more interesting. (Maybe a victim of simplistic left-brain reductionism?)

They found that there is not a continuous spectrum of attitudes to global warming, but rather, 6 discreet populations, and that there was a strong correlation between attitude and news media preferences, which implies also a correlation with political perspectives, which in turn implies correlation with views on gun control, abortion, healthcare, and gay rights.

It seems that the tribe we identify with will determine a great deal of what we believe. We want to appear consistent and we don’t want to appear self-contradictory – even though there may be no logical connection between how we feel about gay marriage and our opinion on a woman’s right to choose. We especially don’t want to jeopardise acceptance within our chosen tribe.

 

The Two-Step Test

In Liminal Thinking, Dave Gray suggests that we subconsciously go through a two-step test when confronted with new information (see this previous blog post for more about Liminal Thinking, which I recommend). The test is:

Is this new data consistent with what I already “know” about the world?If this data does happen to be true, does the world make more sense?

Unfortunately, we rarely get to Step 2 if the incoming data doesn’t get through Step 1. Consistency is valued over truth. Most people seem to have an innate inability to hold two seemingly contradictory beliefs at the same time, holding them in ambiguous juxtaposition pending further information.

 

Ideas as Identity

In our conversation for my podcast last year, Rich Bartlett – in my view – nailed why we are so reluctant to abandon our opinions, once formed.

“It is the fear of death that keeps people from changing their mind a lot of time. If you’re so attached to your identity, if your identity is so strongly fused to your ideas, of course, you’re not going to change your ideas, because it feels like dying.”

He highlighted what we sacrifice by being unwilling to consider opposing views:

“Sometimes it’s necessary to draw a boundary and say, this is right and this is wrong. But it’s not always the right thing to do when a polarity comes along. Sometimes there’s a lot of insight to be gained from considering, from really visiting each side of the polarity and inquiring with open-hearted compassion, what value is there? what have I got to learn? And usually what you find is there’s value on both sides.”

Unfortunately social media can often be the enemy of nuanced thinking:

“On social media, you’ll see that everyone is mostly just patrolling the boundaries of their tribe, and pretending to have an argument about facts, pretending to talk about the vaccine or the latest political scandal. But really, what we’re doing is just saying, are you in or are you out? Are you on Team Red? Or Team Blue? Are you on my team, or not? Are you us or are you them? And a lot of the emotional intensity that you always see on social media, is because people’s sense of collective identity is being threatened… it’s because their belonging is at stake. So I’ve had that lens for the last few years – I just assume that basically, that micro-nationalistic sort of tribalism is what is motivating most people’s participation in social media. And then I intentionally seek out many tribes and to always notice: which tribe am I in?”

Many of the big current questions facing the world may require us to hold apparently contradictory beliefs if we are to make wise, ethical and responsible decisions. Rather than this belief OR that belief, we may need to hold this AND that. For example, we can believe that technology is generally a good thing, while also recognising that too much or the wrong sort of a good thing becomes a bad thing. At some point it is appropriate to draw a line and say that’s enough. Let’s maybe not technologise every aspect of our lives. Walking in a virtual forest (hello, Metaverse) is not going to give us the same sense of connection and nourishment as walking in a real forest.

 

The Billboard Blocking our own View

Circling back to the sign on the front lawn in FITD, I can easily imagine the point at which the sign becomes simply too big, a huge billboard that proclaims to the world what we believe in, but at the same time blocking out the entire view, overshadowing the house, overshadowing our lives.

Today’s meditation from the wonderful Richard Rohr relates this to his own Christian faith, quoting minister and activist William Sloane Coffin Jr. (1924–2006), who urges readers to rely on the integrity of love rather than our own limited and limiting judgments:

“[There] are those who prefer certainty to truth, those in church who put the purity of dogma ahead of the integrity of love. And what a distortion of the gospel it is to have limited sympathies and unlimited certainties, when the very reverse, to have limited certainties but unlimited sympathies, is not only more tolerant but far more Christian.”

[William Sloane Coffin, “Liberty to the Captives and Good Tidings to the Afflicted,” in Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions of Conscience for the Churches, ed. Walter Wink (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 106–107.]

 

I’m taking these questions with me today: where is my sympathy too small? Where is my certainty too great? Where do I opt for simplistic opinion over subtle fact? Where am I so busy proclaiming my opinions that I stop listening to those of others, especially those who disagree with me?

 

Featured photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

When I posted the link to last week’s blog about Fear of Change on Facebook, the first response I got was:

“What about fear of not being able to pay the bills and becoming homeless?”

It’s a very valid fear. My response?

“I’m very familiar with that fear. I’ve been there many times over the years of being self-employed. It’s not nice. And yet, I haven’t starved to death yet.

“I can only speak from personal experience, and can’t offer guarantees to anybody else, but my fears have always been worse than what actually happens. And also, I’m really good at rolling up my sleeves and getting resourceful when need be.”

I’m lucky in many ways. I’ve been in financial fear enough times – and got out of it enough times – to know that it’s survivable.

The first time I faced this fear I was young (at least compared with where I am now) – in my early thirties and recently separated. Pending a divorce settlement, I had next to no money, and lived wherever I could. Homes included an unoccupied office awaiting redevelopment, a Dickensian unheated flat over an antiques shop, a camper van, and a cabin measuring 6 x 6 x 6 feet on a dutch barge. I’ve faced the bureaucratic problems caused by having no fixed address. I’ve looked at leftover food left on a stranger’s plate in a coffee shop and wondered if anyone would notice if I ate it. I’ve scraped the mould off leftover takeout and eaten it anyway.

And it wasn’t just that one phase of my life. There have been others too – probably seven or eight times over the years when I really didn’t know how I was going to get through.

And yes, I will also acknowledge my privilege. There are also factors in my favour. I have the benefit of a good education (thankfully paid for entirely by the state), I’m in the racial majority in my country, and supposedly I live in a democracy where there is some kind of safety net (although recent experience would suggest it is now a very flimsy safety net, with many holes in it). I have wonderful friends who I know would not let me starve. I also don’t have dependents counting on me to put bread on the table.

So I’m lucky, but I’m also not a complete stranger to financial scarcity, and the kind of gut-wrenching fear it can evoke. I know that awful feeling, and I know it can undermine even the fiercest resolve to make a change.

But now that I’ve had these experiences, here’s what I want you to know: I believe that money moves in mysterious ways. This may sound mystical – even irresponsible – but in my experience-validated worldview, resources do show up when we follow our calling. Maybe not when we want, maybe not as much as we want, maybe not in the form that we want, but as the saying goes, life gives us not what we want, but what we need.

I can’t explain how or why this happens, but it does, and I’ve seen many friends of mine who are on the path of purpose also manage to keep body and soul together while apparently living on thin air.

Of course, you can’t just sit on the sofa waiting for resources to show up. While everything might come to she who waits, it comes faster to she who gets off her backside and makes things happen. You have to throw yourself in the way of good fortune by getting out there, creating, connecting, contributing.

The main point is that we don’t know if we don’t try. Fear of financial insecurity keeps so many people trapped where they are, because they dread a future poverty that exists entirely in their own imagination. It’s not the actual lack of money that keeps you trapped – it’s the fear of it.

By all means, create a safety net before you take the leap if that feels better to you – although then you never get to find out if you can fly. If you have the safety net, you will for sure use the safety net, because you’ve already prepared for failure. Are you willing to trust and have faith, or not?

Einstein said: “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”

I would say that the second most important decision we ever make is whether we’re willing to bet on ourselves – are we willing to take a risk, trusting that (as Marie Forleo would say) everything is figureoutable?

Yes, I know the system is rigged against certain groups of people. For example, if you’re in the US and your dream is to set up your own business, it’s definitely better to be male, white, and from Ivy League, MIT or Stanford. According to a 2019 study of venture capital investment by RateMyInvestor and DiversityVC:

77.1 percent of founders were white—regardless of gender and education.Just one percent of venture-backed founders were black.Women-funded startups received only 9 percent of investments.Latino founders made up 1.8 percent of those receiving funding, while Middle Easterners totaled 2.8 percent.Asians were the second most-backed group, making up 17.7 percent of venture-backed founders.

But the Universe is bigger than the system, and self-belief is more powerful than discrimination. How will you show how broken the system is if you don’t prove it wrong? Or conversely, do you become complicit in the system if you allow it to be right?

This is the real danger of fear: that it defeats our hopes and dreams before we even try.

Don’t let fear keep you small. Don’t let fear make you be anything less than you came here to be.

 

Featured Photo by Joe Beck on Unsplash

Fear of change is what keeps us stuck in dead-end jobs, relationships, or towns. It’s understandable that many err on the side of caution, but being understandable isn’t the same as being good. If fear of change is coming between you and a life of joy, freedom, and fulfilment, this blog post is for you.

I’ve written and spoken a lot about courage in the past, but not so much about fear. This was because I like to focus on the positive side – what do we want more of? – rather than the negative side – what do we hope to avoid? As Garth Stein writes in his wonderful book, The Art of Racing in the Rain, your car goes where your eyes go. In other words, put your attention on what you want, rather than what you don’t want.

However, there seems to be a lot of fear in the world right now, of various kinds, so I thought I would write a mini-series of blogs about fear, starting with fear of change. I’ll suggest some possible causes, and attempt to offer a solution.

So what causes fear of change? There are many factors, no doubt. Here are three:

 

Evolutionary Biology

Fear of change is very natural. Evolutionary biology would seem likely to select for not doing things you haven’t done before, and especially not doing things that nobody has done before.

“I wonder if this mushroom is good to eat?”

“What lives in this hole?”

“What is on the other side of that ocean?”

It’s easy to see how questions like this could prove dangerous, even fatal. If there is a gene for adventurousness, I can imagine it might have died out quite quickly as its carriers removed themselves from the gene pool before getting the chance to pass it on. After the thousands of generations of human existence, is it possible that we have bred ourselves to become progressively more risk-averse?

 

Culture and Structure

Imagine you’re thinking of changing your job. What you do is okay, but doesn’t really fulfil you. You’d like to do something more meaningful.

But when you look around at new opportunities, you see that you’d have to take a pay cut because you’d be coming in with no relevant experience. You’d struggle to pay the mortgage on the lower salary. If you’re American, maybe that role in an exciting startup doesn’t come with healthcare.

You could just about make it work, but it would be a financial sacrifice, a risk. You sigh and shut your laptop, resigning yourself to staying put.

Our financial and corporate structures may not have been specifically designed to keep you where you are, but they tend to have that effect. Financial commitments, long notice periods, and worries about how it might look on your CV if you chop and change your career – they lock you in.

 

Psychology

Human minds have many quirks, biases and fallacies, and the status quo bias is one of the most powerful. We tend to prefer the devil we know to the devil we don’t, even if the devil we don’t seems likely to be a significant improvement, and/or we have long outgrown the devil we know.

My interpretation of this is that when we are contemplating a change, our algorithm is based on comparing the potential new situation with the one we are in. But it’s an unfair comparison. We are intimately acquainted with the situation we’re in, and can only imagine the situation we wish to be in.

Optimism bias might help us imagine a rosy future, but for the less optimistic among us, we may prefer the security of sticking with what we know – especially if our evolutionary biology dictates a cautious approach. It seems to take more than a 50/50 balance to overcome the inertia of the status quo – more like 70/20 or 80/20 in favour of making a change before we finally reach the tipping point and take the plunge.

 

A Possible Workaround

As with so many things – just about everything, actually – it’s a matter of perspective. The same objective reality can take on a very different hue when you change your subjective viewpoint. If you’re feeling the fear of change, ask yourself:

What am I optimising for? What do I believe life is about?

If you believe that life is for playing it safe, optimising security over life satisfaction, then you will always feel the fear of change.

But if you’re feeling stifled by sameness, then try imagining how different your life would be if you optimised for personal growth and freedom. From this perspective, it doesn’t matter what happens to you – failure, financial hardship, an odd-looking resumé – so long as it helps you grow as a human being. Things you might formerly have regarded as an unmitigated disaster turn instead into a supercharged opportunity for learning, unlocking capacities for courage and resourcefulness you didn’t know you had.

In 2015, David Brooks wrote an excellent op-ed in the New York Times, called The Moral Bucket List, adapted from his book The Road to Character. I recommend the op-ed, and I’m sure I would recommend the book too, if I’d read it. However, for now, here is an excerpt:

“It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

“We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.

“But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.”

This, surely, is the point of being blessed with free will – to be aware of our genetic inheritance, cognitive biases, and cultural conditioning, and yet consciously decide to do the thing that challenges and stretches us. As the saying goes, the magic happens outside your comfort zone.

 

Featured photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

 

I’ve been feeling some cognitive dissonance about wishing people a Happy New Year this time around. I’ve been feeling a bit off-kilter ever since New Year’s Eve – watching London’s firework display on TV, I found myself missing the usual (in the old world) lairy, half-drunk but carefree crowds waving and trying to get into camera shot, and was disconcerted by the drone display, which at the same time as being very cool, also felt uncanny, even a little sinister.

Of course, I hope 2022 will be happy, and healthy, and exciting in the good ways and not the bad ways. But somehow I doubt it.

Sorry to be the buzzkill party-pooper, but I think this year is going to be interesting, rather than happy. So I’m looking forward to it, because I’m all for an interesting life, but I suspect it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

But what do I know? I just know that I have a lot, an awful lot, of questions about what’s going on in the world, and I very much hope to see some of them resolved in 2022. I find unsolved mysteries, especially important ones, quite vexing.

 

A Quick Update

But before I get into my questions, a quick update on 2021. My blog posts and newsletters were a bit sparse because SEEDS, the regenerative complementary currency, took over my life for much of the early part of the year. I’m still involved with SEEDS, but temporarily from a distance while other projects (of which more in a moment) take centre stage.

So here’s a quick roundup of my news. I got my Doctorate of Professional Studies from the University of Middlesex, with a dissertation entitled The Ocean in a Drop, a critique of my environmental activism with a broader analysis of how conscious change happens – or all too often fails to.

I am now writing a book of the same title, loosely based on the dissertation, due to be published by Flint Books on 27th October this year. The book will be more of a call to action about how we are all creating the future with every decision we make – so let’s make them wise decisions.

I launched a podcast called Sowing the Seeds of Change, featuring many of the great and the good from the worlds of activism, literature, organisational change, and economics. We rounded off Season 1 just before Christmas with a fabulous conversation with the visionary sci fi writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future and many more. Season 2 of the podcast coming up later this year – subscribe now on Apple or Spotify to be notified of new episodes.

And a final update: I’m opening up a small number of slots for coaching clients to focus on 2022: Year of Life, Legacy, and Love I wish to support people who are succeeding by conventional metrics, but feel there is something missing.
Do you feel like you want to squeeze more juice out of life?
Like there’s a level of living – vivid, rich, fulfilling – that has so far eluded you?
Like you’re in danger of leaving this life without a legacy of which you can be proud?
Like there’s more to this life than you’ve been told?If that resonates, then please register your interest using this form. You’ll also find more details about commitment, costs, and timings. Deadline for initial expressions of interest is 10th January 2022. Please feel free to forward the message to anybody you feel would benefit from this opportunity.

 

So, on to my unresolved questions Some questions are for the world – which for now I’m asking rhetorically, but if you have insights or opinions, please share! And some are for myself, to challenge myself to think better and be better.

 

Questions for the World

Covid and the vaccine – why are people who present an alternative to the mainstream narrative being deplatformed, cancelled, shut down? What happened to free speech? While some theories are clearly whackadoodle, not all can simply be tossed unthinkingly into the cesspool of “conspiracy theories”. This 16 min video is one of the more balanced perspectives – I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s refreshing to find a relatively centrist view in the midst of so much extremity. Charles Eisenstein is also asking excellent questions.

I’m noticing that when I go to some media outlets I get one perspective on the pandemic, from other media outlets a completely incompatible perspective. Both cannot be true. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, and/or the data have been subtly massaged to support a biased view. So what news sources can I trust? When I follow the money, who has fingers in what pies and to what end?

One of the reasons that conspiracy theories are flourishing is because many people don’t trust the government, and they don’t trust big pharma. When I hear that pharmaceutical companies are making unprecedented profits, that (in the US at least) there is little or no oversight or quality control on clinical trials, and that pharma companies are mostly immune from prosecution, I wonder: how can the profit motive be reconciled with public safety?

Moving on from the pandemic (although still related), will the UK’s new policing bill and nationality and borders bill be signed into law? Is this the thin end of a very dangerous wedge? What emergency measures being put in place now will never be rolled back? Are we living out Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine?

When and why did the UK agree to be a testing ground for innovative technologies – the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution? I’m no Luddite, but given the consistent failure of humanity to predict undesirable side-effects, I’m not enthusiastic about deregulating innovation, and using the UK population as lab rats. Sure, let’s innovate, but let’s not remove important citizen protections.

Ghislaine Maxwell – what does she know? What will she reveal? Why wasn’t there a plea bargain? I met her three times – at her homes in London and New York, and at her old Oxford college, all in connection with her ocean nonprofit, the Terra Mar Project. I believe she was genuine. It’s a valuable reminder that nobody is completely evil.

And maybe no conspiracy theory is completely nuts.

 

Questions for myself:

There’s a chapter in my book about cognitive biases – confirmation bias, bystander effect, linear projection, personal exemption, status quo bias, availability heuristics, and so on. It’s notoriously difficult to overcome these biases, fallacies, and errors – even when we know about them. Believing that we can overcome them is in itself an error, called the G. I. Joe fallacy. But still, to the best of my ability, where can I avoid these traps?

Where am I opting for the safe, simplistic, convenient, expedient explanation? Where do I need to step outside the paradigm and ask more deeply searching questions? Can I manage to hold contradictory perspectives, pending the revelation of more information? Am I willing to admit it when I’ve been wrong?

Where am I “othering”? Charles Eisenstein and I talked about this in our podcast conversation. Do I catch myself saying “they”? Where am I coming from separation and judgement rather than connection and empathy?

 

Sigh. So many questions, so few answers. But I think answers will emerge – maybe not clear ones, and maybe not the answers we want, but I’d rather deal with uncomfortable truths than comfortable illusions.

All that said, I wish you a wonderful 2022 – no matter what it may bring.

 

Photo by Ana Municio on Unsplash