I Know How To Save The World
I know how to save the world.
And you’re not going to like it.
The neurologist Donald Calne said:
The essential difference between emotion and reason is that reason leads to conclusions, while emotion leads to action.
Every day we are get broadcasts telling us how the earth is dying. I know that buying that bottle of water means that bottle is probably going to end up in landfill; further choking an already asthmatic planet. I know that every flight I go on, every bite of a beef burger that I take is driving not just our race to extinction but is accelerating a course of events that is already irreversible. I know that if it doesn’t fall on my sons Finn and Tommy it will be their sons and daughters that bear the brunt of the ignorance and ego of this and previous generations.
I know all this. In my head.
But.
I don’t feel it.
My contention is this: if I felt how the earth was feeling. If I could feel the heat, the feeling of being choked, the feeling of losing vital nutrients from the earth. If me, Rob Grundel, woke up tomorrow with this worldfeel then I would instantly change how I act. Knowing is important but, as Calne lays out in the quote above, this is not enough to change our behaviour; we need to feel.
Wherever you are right now, take a moment and sit in that.
Take a breath.
Consider yourself as a speck on this planet. As a part of the ecology. Think of yourself as a nerve cell of this planet. Get a sense of that worldfeel.
If you find this hard, here’s a starting point: learn to feel your own pain.
In the last year I’ve gone on a journey of learning to sit with emotions that I find difficult. I’ve long avoided accepting love from people (for the last 25 years) believing that I don’t deserve it; in fact, my belief has been that all I deserve is to martyr myself for others. That I have to give, support, take on the load, but never the other way. The origins of why this is we’ll leave for another day but I’m sure you could place some solid bets.
So why go through this process? Because, for me, all that I want to achieve in this world can only be achieved through relationships. I want to go into deep meaningful partnerships with courageous people to create our future; in education, in arts, in how we live. I can’t do that by always feeling that I need to shoulder the load. I need to be able to accept love.
Let me tell you, from my perspective, what accepting love feels like. The other day someone did something for me. Something that I really wanted but didn’t believe that I deserved. Someone asked me to step into a recording booth and record my voice. This is someone who I’ve given a lot to support their artistry. And now this person was turning the tables. “You go, your voice is worth hearing”. It was 10pm at night in a East London studio and we’d laid down all the main parts and we were getting to the vocals. She said “step into the booth”. And I was SO angry. How DARE she do that to me! And at the same time it was exactly what what I wanted to be given. That booth was the only place I wanted to be. It was humbling. To accept. To let go. To just say thank you.
This has happened a few times since then: people giving love and me, for perhaps for the first time in a long time, just saying “thank you”.
And your pain might be different to mine. Mine is around accepting love. Yours might be around releasing an anger that you didn’t believe your were allowed to have. It might be a grief that you’ve been told you should have got over a long time ago. It might be accepting that, despite what your parents said, you might just be an artist.
And it hurts. It’s like a torn muscle. Every time it happens it stretches, the scar tissue remoulds around the deep wound. It sucks. I’d much rather avoid it — deflect, turn to my phone, dive into a Netflix series, create a mountain of work for myself to bury myself again in my martyrdom which is so much more comfortable but, like our and the earth’s death, in the long term will be so much more painful.
Here’s what happens when I sit in that pain. I think about the years I’ve wasted. I feel the embarrassment of how I’ve rejected the love of my family. I feel the loss of the depths I could have had built with my wife by now. I think of all the loads I’ve carried where people around me have said “when’s he going to ask for help?”. Even now as I write this I get mad. It sucks. It’s a deep pain. And I promise you; that if you sit in it. If you sit in it for long enough something will shift. Through that loss, that grief, that embarrassment a glint emerges. That glint is called grace. And, believe me, I don’t want to see the glint; I try and avoid it almost more than I avoid the pain. Because it asks me to be courageous and act from the place of pain; to build a new muscle that is more enlightened, one more connected with the present, one that truly serves myself and others.
How can we feel the world’s pain if we can’t feel our own? From this place we can connect with others and start feeling a larger pain that is in our communities, in our organisations, in our teams, in our families, in our churches. Connected from that place, feeling together we have a chance and the motivation to act. In doing that we sit with the culpability of the actions we’ve done to each other and to our planet. From there we get a sense of the greater thing that we’re connected to. How wide can that feeling expand? I think it can encompass the entire planet: worldfeel.
Will you then, with me, be courageous and learn to sit with your own pain? Sit with the thing that you find the most difficult?
It isn’t fun.
But it’s so important.
