Some thoughts on change

And a list that wasn't meant to be one

Sunset from my window

I wake from a disturbing dream at 5AM. I am anxious again. It hasn’t come for a while, but it is here now. It sits in the air around me, like low mist. It feels like a frustrated waiting, like there is something I must do but I don’t see yet what it is.

I sometimes tell myself that it is my creativity, desperate to be released, unleashed. Other times it is the tension I now have a name for - ‘cognitive dissonance’ - the feeling when what you’re being told and what you feel are two different things.

Perhaps it is a collective grief I am tuning into. I watched ‘Steve’ last night on Netflix, it’s a film from a book (by Max Porter , a poet and writer from the soul) about a man pouring his heart and faith into lost boys, showing us their sweetness and humanity.

While we wrap ourselves in trying to secure our life, there are people who cannot even breathe for drowning in it. My father believed anyone with privilege owed something to those without it. For him it was like a penance, and while I think there’s a deeper story to his reasoning, it sort of makes sense.

‘There’s always someone somewhere worse off than you’ - one of his mantras.

Charity isn’t enough. We have to want to make things better. We have to want to see more balance. And I suppose the truth of the economics of it is that the have nots can’t have more unless the haves are prepared to have less.

I am a fixer of things and people. Not my intention, I just got made that way. I release myself from the grip of it by making art. This can be seen as a self-indulgent thing. But it’s my oxygen mask, and I’m no use to anyone without it.

There are many possible avenues that lead to things being better. It is circular, not linear, but I can’t make a circle on this page so you’ll have to imagine it.

:: The haves can pay their taxes properly. This is how you contribute to the system that is there to support those less fortunate.

:: If you don’t trust those who are governing you, vote for those you do. Democracy is not dead, but you have to engage to make it work.

:: What you think you need and what you really need are two different things.

:: We are hypnotised by the light bouncing off the shiny new things. It is blinding us to the beauty of the simplicity of the world. And to the edge of the cliff we are about to drive off.

:: Community. Intimacy. Connection. Vulnerability. Nature. Being human. These things matter. Perhaps they are the only things.

:: Check your privilege. Check your worldview. Check whose story you are dutifully repeating. We who live like kings must not, do not have the right to, raise the drawbridge. The world belongs to us all.

:: If your work turns you inward to serve only you, you will soon reach a dead end. The path to meaning is carved with service to others - what are you here to do?

Ranting does not work. Stories that cannot be reached are just fantasy. Being and doing is real. Walking our talk is real.

Nothing changes unless we all do.