The clock is ticking
Life is getting meaningfully clear that it is approaching the time for my transition out of the old world and into a new one. As the time nears, I realise that I’ve known this moment was coming all my life. This knowing feels odd, it feels alien and familiar at once. A time of rupture.
Without giving too much power to the forces that seek to dominate my life, these forces do a pretty useful job of defining what no longer matters through what they want to prohibit for those who’d prefer wild immunity over pharmed.
Some of the things slated to go are:
No more pubs, clubs, restaurants and bars. Replace this with gatherings of friends locally, with home grown rituals, with the constant thrum of community contact and connection, the neighbour dropping by for a cuppa or a piece of communal labour.
No more concerts, big sporting events, gatherings. Replace this with music and sport and festival performed locally. By, with and for community members. Neither bought nor sold but gifted.
No more travel far and wide on airplanes. No more travel interstate. This one will hurt. It will hurt to no longer be able to see interstate family and friends in person. Attempt to replace this with more in depth communication by letter, by email, by phone call. With slow communication. And probably also a few cheeky road trips that circumvent borders on “underground railroads” that just might spring up alongside the officially mandated and controlled air travel.
No more shopping malls, hardware stores, etc etc etc. Replace this with quality goods purchased infrequently, online if necessary.
No more supermarkets. If it comes to this, grow food, barter food via collectives, get long-lasting foods delivered infrequently.
No more job. Become a vocation, a steadily unfurling demonstration of what matters by taking on the projects that resonate, the causes that make the heart sing. This one is real. On pretty much all versions of the current trajectory, it will happen soon.
No more fast food, fast culture, fast politics, fast news etc etc etc. Need I comment…
I could go on, and these are just my first thoughts. No doubt they will develop some nuance over time, however the general gist is that the old world pushes us into the new world we’ve been hoping would come to pass. A world of greater simplicity, of greater connection with each other, of leaving the machine and reclaiming our humanity. Of abandoning the corporation and the elites who drive it, and recreating the village and the homely.
This is why the clock ticking does not have me scared, but rather has me excited. Maybe excited scared. Sure, it is a huge shift, but a shift I am strangely well prepared for. Not only have I thought about this, but I’ve lived many elements of the transition. Just never in the one place, at the one time, with the dragon bearing down.
The new emerges by following disparate threads
I don’t know where the new world comes into being, what it looks like. However, I have an inkling that a few threads are important:
Purpose. This must always take precedence. Purpose and living your Truth. With fellow travellers, because the road is otherwise a long and lonely one.
Transition, as in the Transition Towns movement. Prepping for a post-fossil fuel age, but without the paranoia because this transition is to be ridden, not resisted.
Radical simplicity. Living off-grid or close to it, what was once called “self-sufficiency”
Crypto. The ability to escape centralisation, perhaps even escape banks and government attempts to control us through banked money.
DAO. Distributed Autonomous Organisations, the new version of a startup. I’ve done a startup once, loved it, hated it, took a while to recover and heal
Nonseparation, as beautifully described by Charles Eisenstein. Living in a state where we are no longer separate from the planet that nurtures us, but a part of it. A fertile humus rather than a ravaging plague.
Love. Love like there’s no tomorrow. With wild, rain streaked hair abandon, with tender, belly shown skyward vulnerability.
And so we weave
We weave the threads together. Skipping, stepping, learning and dancing the dance of not knowing, which is really just the dance of life, of Life. Of a life curious, wondrous, impetuous.
And, dare I say it in this time of trouble, a life lived free.