If control is a delusion, and it’s pursuit is ultimately futile, what would be a better strategy? Given the complexity of human, social and global life, accurate predictions are not feasible. The grander the scale of the prediction, the more likely it will turn out to be wrong.
However, at a personal level, we need some degree of predictability in life, some sense that not all of life is random or chaotic. Maybe a better strategy is to expect the typical but be prepared to cope with the atypical. You can apply this idea at any level – personal, political, economic, or environmental.
What we need in order to cope better with the unpredictability of reality is resilience.
But what is resilience?
Resilience involves a number of different factors and characteristics. Let’s examine some of them briefly, just to lay out a map for further exploration.
Take a look at these photos of bamboo.
Bamboo has two essential qualities which make it so resilient. Strength and flexibility.
At first glance, these can seem like two mutually opposite qualities. How can something be both flexible and strong? How can something bend and resist? How can you change and not change?
Resilience involves many factors but let’s first examine these two apparently contradictory ones. Both are needed, and neither can be considered either superior to the other, or more essential than the other.
The ability change or adapt.
Flexibility is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances or environments. We may have to change our behaviour if we find ourselves in changed situations. If we can only behave in one particular way, then that lack of flexibility, that inability to change what we do, reduces our capacity to adapt, and therefore our resilience. We are less able to cope with change when we ourselves are unable to change.
Along with flexibility, we need spontaneity. An inability to be spontaneous will restrict our options, reduce our choices and our strategies for successful coping. Spontaneity involves not only a change in behaviour, but new behaviour. In biological and physical terms such new behaviour has been termed “emergence”. Emergence is the capacity of a system to exhibit previously unseen behaviours. This is a core creative process. Creativity is the ability to make, or see, things anew. It’s the ability to make changes, to make a difference. Creativity, of course, is highly dependent on imagination. Without imagination, how can we move to somewhere we’ve never been before? A change of behaviour is not, of course, always about brand new actions. It can be a change to a previously learned strategy, one which worked before in similar circumstances. In other words, the flexible aspect of resilience also involves the ability to learn, and that entails both memory and communication (after all one of our greatest strengths as a species is our ability to learn from others – our ability to communicate over space and time)
The other side of resilience is the ability to resist change. There’s something about the coherence and integrity of a system that requires strength, stamina and the determination to pursue a particular path. If I try to change to fit in with every change of everyone around me, I’ll begin to lose my sense of self. To be resilient I need energy, strength, the ability to persist in the face of adversity. I need the capacity to conserve my life, my health, the capacity to sustain and to persist to a significant degree.
So there’s the paradox at the heart of resilience – flexibility and sustainability. The ability to change and the ability to persist.
I think this is our agenda for the future at all levels. Changing our focus from control to resilience. We need a new politics, a new economics and a new way of living based on resilience, not illusory control.
