Things Are Hotting Up!

Yesterday, I found myself at Lords Cricket Ground, watching the first day of the Test against India. During a tea break, I stood amidst all the privilege of the MCC, all the jackets and ties, as the wine flowed. I ended up in conversation with a mother, who began talking about her upcoming family holiday to Greece. She mentioned the wildfires currently raging and talked of her “waking up” to the fact that the world is now literally going up in flames before our very eyes, her “waking up” to the painful reality that we are in the midst of an unfolding climate catastrophe that is truly terrifying. 

We spoke together of our despair, our guilt, and our feelings of impotence, recognising as we did that our personal consumer decisions feel utterly pointless when faced with the insane greed of giant polluting corporations, the arms traders and oil barons, who continue to drive the destruction of mother earth in their endless empty search for yet more growth and profit.

On the one hand it felt strange chatting in such an authentic way about a topic of such magnitude in a setting that screamed of privilege, that screamed of an utter disconnection from reality. And yet, on the other hand, it felt a precious moment for just that reason, for we had both “turned up” as best we could in that unique, never to be repeated moment, for we had both engaged in a real, courageous, alive conversation.

Things are certainly hotting up! We are now well and truly in a VUCA world, a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Crisis after crisis awaits us. As the Zen teacher angel Kyodo williams reminds us:

As a society, we are in danger of needing larger and larger social wake-up calls and shocks to the system. At a socio-global scale, this translates into more strident demagogues, more desperate and deeply fundamentalist takeovers, massive cultural disruption and human displacement, more vicious, faceless wars, and literally larger openings in the earth to swallow us up.

In these times of crises, we all face an invitation to lean into the change and to wake up. In her brilliant article ‘Reinventing Your Career in the Time of Coronavirus’ Herminia Ibarra reminds us that threatening situations tend to prompt us to behave conservatively, even if this is exactly the opposite of what’s needed. She writes:

In the end, when it comes to reinventing your career in this time of crisis, remember the important point:

The time to get going is now - but don’t go it alone.

This time of Coronavirus may well be inspiring many of us to reinvent our careers, but the hotting up of our planet is a wake up call to us all, screaming at us that we all need to do so much more than change our careers if we are going to be able to pass on a liveable world to our children and grandchildren.

This present moment is clearly a crisis/opportunity for us all, a chance to start “turning up”, whether in the boardroom, church, pub, or just at home across the dinner table with our loved ones. It is a chance for us to start speaking up about our fears that keep us awake at night, to start owning up to our griefs and shames, to start prophesying our dreams and visions of totally different systems, systems where there are no longer billionaires, no longer national boundaries and militarised borders, no longer factories churning out plastic tat or mega farms torturing cattle and lathering the soil in toxic pesticides.

Things are definitely hotting up. The times they are a changing. And there are no passengers on this fragile yet beautiful planet earth.

Despite all our differences, we are, ultimately, in this together. So let’s start “turning up”, for ourselves and for one another! Let’s start having the conversations that are so desperately needed, the conversations that hold within them the promise of a more beautiful world.

In the end, when it comes to reimagining the world and growing more beautiful, connected, sustainable systems, remember the important point:

The time to get going is now - but don’t go it alone!