Regenerative Future

“Choice” in a Post-Covid World

Time for awareness-based thoughtful action…

If we can change the basis of our global civilization from one that is wealth-affirming to one that is life-affirming, then we have a chance to create a flourishing future for humanity and the living Earth. ~Jeremy Lent

The ecological and social crises we face are caused by an economic system dependent on accelerating growth. This self-destructing political economy sets its goals and measures its performance in terms of ever-increasing corporate profits — in other words by how fast materials can be extracted from Earth and turned into consumer products, weapons, and waste. ~Joanna Macy

It seems we are massively entering a quarantine of consumption where we will learn how to be happy just with a simple dress, rediscovering old favourites we own, reading a forgotten book and cooking up a storm to make life beautiful. The impact of the virus will be cultural and crucial to building an alternative and profoundly different world. ~ Li Edelkoort, trend forecaster and fashion advisor

Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. ~Arundhati Roy

(Highlights are mine)

“Nothing could be worse than a return to normality,” said Arundhati Roy. History is being wrenched in a new direction. But we haven’t yet fully grasped the profundity of what is happening. We are numbed, trapped by old vocabulary and ways of thinking about the world. “So much will never be the same — but we have yet to have any idea about what from our recent past is permanently gone, what from this new reality will endure, and what will filter in that is unexpected but demanded by where we are and where [we] are going.” ~ @djrothkopf

By bringing our known existence to a juddering halt, the tiny, invisible virus has shown humanity that we are not as powerful as we would like to believe. In this era of hyper-technology, space travel, driver-less cars, robots, machine learning, 3D printing, AI, and more, humanity is bewildered by an invisible virus which is ripping across the globe at terrifying speed. Using humans as agents for its own proliferation, the virus has effectively wreaked unparalleled havoc.

With lock-downs in effect in major parts of the world, and with close to 300,000 dead and counting, it is demanding of us a level of fortitude and perseverance humanity has long forgotten. In a world primarily driven by instant gratification, consumerism, materialism, individualism, competition, and achievement, an unexpected and peremptory pause button has been pressed. We have been left with little choice but to comply. The tiny virus has proved to be mightier than any human-conceived and human-invented power.

So, where does that leave us? Will humanity be annihilated? Maybe not. But life as we knew it will no longer exist. Many articles have been written about how there is no going back, and all that we will very likely lose. I’d like to focus, instead, on the latent potential and promise hidden in this situation. The old world is gone, and the new is yet to be born. And in this in-between, liminal, mysterious space lies the opportunities for us to re-imagine and rewrite the narratives that will shape our lives. This enforced pause is a container, constraining us and yet holding the space for us to reflect upon our choices — individual and collective — that have brought us to this moment of reckoning in our civilization’s trajectory.

And maybe, just maybe, this time for contemplation will activate our inner compass guiding us to make awareness-based, life-affirming choices toward co-creating “a world that works for all,” that is not steeped in inequality and “othering,” — a world that is ready to move from a story of separation to a story of interbeing. It is difficult to envision a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible as we grapple with the virus that is taking thousands of lives every day. But if we don’t prepare ourselves to reinvent and actualize the world we would like to inhabit, then this calamity would be in vain. Lives would have been lost in vain.

Choice

We associate choice with freedom, autonomy, wants, desires, needs. The daily choices we make from the mundane to the profound have far-reaching impact that define and drive our lives, our communities, society, economics, and politics. Choices lie at the very root of our self-hood. Even the most underprivileged cling to the few choices they have — the right to work, to make a living no matter how meager, to spend time with friends and family, to enjoy leisure.

Covid has effectively rendered everyone choice-less with the deprived and disadvantaged disproportionately impacted in every country. The crumbling socio-economic and political constructs and structures are testimony to the hollowness that lay beneath the gloss and glitter of the post-modern, neoliberal, consumerist way of life. A way of life we have collectively chosen our way into — one micro choice at a time. As Otto Scharmer says, “We have collectively created results that nobody wants.”

Here we are with a large part of the world, including the strongest economies, under lock-down with choices limited to the bare essentials of living. Our world has shrunk to the size of our homes as we shelter in place. Our choices now revolve around maneuvering, managing, and maintaining some modicum of normal living in relation to this space. This pandemic has finally brought us face-to-face with the Great Turning that Joanna Macy spoke about in 2007. We have been evading the signs for years — caught up in our extractive, exploitative, and cavalier way of being on this planet.

Individual and collective choices intersect and intertwine to create the sociopolitical, economic and ecological realm we inhabit. Many of our choices are coming back to haunt us now — inadvertent and thoughtless choices that directly affect our ecosystem; biased choices that are now showing up as fault lines and cracks in our societies — from vanishing worker rights to crumbling healthcare, from disintegrating supply chains to starving millions — causing untold misery and deprivation for many; selfish choices that are now mockingly emphasizing our ineradicable and intricate inter-connectedness and interbeing.

Covid19 has effectively underscored all the fault lines of our current civilization — from appalling inequality to alarming political apathy to absolute disconnect from the reality of life. All the fissures and fractures of this fragmented world has converged under one umbrella triggered by an invisible virus. And the world has come to a juddering halt. Our choices have shrunk to maneuvering the mundane.

“We are our choices,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. We cannot abdicate the role our choices have played in bringing us to this moment of global reckoning in the form of a zoonotic virus. The signs of catastrophe have been all around us for the past few decades, with an exponential acceleration in calamities over the last few years from the Australian bushfires to the Amazon rainforest fires to the floods in Asia and other significant world events of 2019 — all of which portend some sort of disaster — social, political, economic, and ecological.

We’ve known for a long time that our civilization was heading toward catastrophe. Yet, most of us have chosen to carry on with “business as usual” in spite of dire warnings from scientists about the untold suffering we are heaping upon our planet. Apparently, even the coronavirus pandemic had been predicted. And perhaps, “Like a crucible, it has the potential to melt down the structures that currently exist, and reshape them, perhaps unrecognizably. What might the new shape of society look like?” ~Jeremy Lent

Inflection Point

We can choose to complain, moan, and netflix our way through this enforced pause in our lives. Or we can decide to step back and sense what is wanting to emerge through us. We can opt to feel free from the pernicious pressures of having to make endless choices about banal stuff that keep us distracted from exploring that “which truly matters”. Our propensity for action and predilection for distraction from unwanted feelings keep us hooked to a broken system and deluding patterns. We have often been caught up in the illusion of choice that mass consumerism thrust on us in lieu of true agency over life-defining circumstances.

I believe this pause is that inflection point — a portal — through which we can step fully into the void created by the loss of our everyday, often banal, routines toward making more awareness-based, thoughtful choices that arise from the core of our humanity. Because the choices we make today — in this moment of collective apocalypse — will define the world we co-create and step into once this pandemic is over. The pandemic will pass. How we choose to use this catastrophe is up to us. The outcome will hinge on the choices we make, the intentions we hold, and the future we collectively envisage.

The old “caterpillar body” of the universe is melting and dissolving. This loosening and thawing of failing and fumbling patterns, policies, and politics will stimulate and galvanize the next phase of the metamorphosis. Rebecca Solnit puts it eloquently when she says:

May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells — for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid — full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.

Can we accept this moment and its grand design? Can we sense into the dormant potential — the emerging future that is wanting to happen? Can we collectively become the “imaginal cells” and hold space for what is wanting to be born? How can we together create conditions for a thrivable future to come into being? What are the old beliefs, constructs, narratives, patterns, and structures we must let go off? What are the new stories waiting to be co-created? What stories can become compasses for a regenerative and thriving future? What choices do we have to make to midwife a regenerative future? How can we envision and actualize a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible? How can each one of us use our unique gifts in service to the emerging future? In Otto Scharmer’s words, “How do we move from an ego-system thinking to an eco-system thinking, not only at an individual level but also at a collective level?”

Can we summon our inner wherewithal, our faith in the true purpose of humanity, our sovereignty to seize this moment and reimagine and reinvent how we live on the planet? Can we, with great discipline, effort, and creativity rise again from our knees? But before we can rise, we need to become fully aware of and recognize the choices that have brought us to this point. We are experiencing the fallout of choices made from ego-centricism, from our blind spots and inadequacies, from succumbing to external pressures rather than from a compass of inner coherence, compassion, and wisdom.

If we are truly to “shift course away from our failing trajectory,” the new era must be defined, at its deepest level, not merely by the political or economic choices being made but by a revolution of consciousness. The vision, stories, and metaphors that led to the Industrial Revolution was that of the world as machine to be controlled and ruled by the humans. A regenerative future invites us to perceive the planet as a complex, fragile, living, and resilient entity of which we are a part. We are co-creative participants in a continuously transforming universe.

Hope

Could it be that the crucible of coronavirus will lead to a meltdown of neoliberal norms that ultimately reshapes the dominant structures of our global civilization? Could a mass collective reaction to the excesses of authoritarian overreach lead to a renaissance of humanitarian values? ~Jeremy Lent

Does coronavirus herald the end of neoliberalism? I don’t know. But it is definitely ringing its death knell. Of course, the grasp of neoliberalism will not loosen easily; we’ll experience untold atrocities and deception as neoliberalism and its associated socio-economic-political systems thrash in its dinosaurian death throes. But I do believe that we are seeing the end of the stories, structures, and systems that upheld the Industrial Growth Era.

The old narratives of extraction, exploitation, exclusion, and excess no longer make sense as the world they created come crashing down around us; new narratives encapsulating a regenerative future of interconnection, inclusion, dignity, and security for all sentient beings need to be collectively envisaged and articulated. And then we must choose our way into co-creating and actualizing the new stories of Interbeing.

How and what we choose then — as individuals, as collectives, as societies, as nations, as humanity — will have a decisive and profound bearing on the future we bring into being. The intentions — the inner source — from where our choices originate will have far-reaching influence on the future we co-create from the wrecks and rubble of this post-Covid world.

I believe three pathways are opening before us:

1. Going back to the old normal as soon as possible, playing by the old rulebooks, and hoping to piece back together as much of the wreckage as feasible

2. Autocratic and authoritarian leaders using the crisis as an opportunity to dial back in time, grab more power, and rule countries by decree

3. Rising from the ashes like the proverbial phoenix, reimagining and reinventing a new way of being on this planet that is regenerative for all

The choices we make today will take us on one of the three paths. Only the third will take us toward “a world that works for all.” Joanna Macy called for a Shift in Consciousness; Otto Scharmer talks about Awareness-Based Systems Change. Jon Kabat-Zinn warns us of the futility and danger of trying to get back to “what was” before dealing with “what is”, and urges us to reflect on, “What does it truly mean to be human?”

“We now have a choice to make! Either we move into a new phase in the evolution of consciousness and a new era of life on planet Earth, or we will witness the unraveling of the web of life and the immature end of our species and much of the community of life along with us. The time to make this choice is now! It starts with a fundamental shift in our dominant worldview. It is time to grow up!” wrote Daniel Christian Wahl

The choice is ours to make. Humanity and civilization itself hang in the balance. Every choice we make is a vote for the kind of world we wish to manifest.

We can no longer save the world by playing by the rules.

Because the rules have to be changed. We need a systems change, rather than individual change.

But you cannot have one without the other. And so I ask you to please wake up and make the changes required possible.

To do your best is no longer good enough. We must all do the seemingly impossible.

Everything needs to change. ~Greta Thunberg