Heroes Not Zombies

I haven’t been on a plane for a long time. However, here’s a photo I took a few years back. I looked out of the window just before dawn and what struck me was how solid the clouds looked. They look like a landscape on the surface of the The Earth. There even seems to be a deep ravine as if there is a river flowing far below, down in the dark depths of that gap.

Of course, I know that these clouds are simply water and that if I were to try to step on them I’d fall straight through. And I know that the surface of the Earth is not like that. I know that when I stand in my garden, for instance, I am standing on solid ground.

But this last year of extreme weather events in a wide variety of places in the world has shown us that this sense of solidity is based on somewhat shaky foundations. We are witnessing the Earth reshaping itself….glaciers shrinking, ice mountains falling into the ocean, volcanoes covering the land with lava, overflowing rivers sweeping away hillsides, roads and houses in a few minutes, fires razing forests and whole townships to the ground.

Then along comes a pandemic and the entire world is faced with the certainty that nothing is certain. Day after day “experts” make predictions about what’s going to happen next, then something else transpires instead. We’ve even become a bit obsessed with the future….juggling fears, anxieties, plans and “what ifs”.

Maybe we are being forced to learn to live outside of our shared delusions – the delusion that human beings can control Nature, the delusion that Nature is something outside of us, something apart from us, the delusion that we exploit and consume without limits, (add your own favourite delusions here).

Maybe we are going to have to learn new skills, learn that we live in a complex inter-connected world, learn to emphasise adaptation over control, learn to rate relationships more highly than consumable goods, learn to co-operate and collaborate more than we compete.

Maybe if we do respond to these challenges by seeing the world anew, by taking the view “from above” as the old philosophers taught, then a new, bright, dawn lies just over the horizon.

I hope so.