An invitation, from my heart to yours
It’s been several years since I woke up to the fact that we live our lives at the nexus of the personal, political and planetary. By this I mean that our individual lives are enmeshed in and shaped by the collective experience around us, and the wider backdrop of the physical environment in which we live.
This may seem obvious, but when it comes to thinking about our lives, very often we tend to place all our emphasis on the personal story, giving only the barest of nods to the role of the political and planetary systems that are, whether or not we acknowledge it, the scaffolding that enables (and sometimes constrains) our individual possibilities.
Suddenly, in the post-COVID world, many more people are coming to understand the essential role played by the political and planetary in our personal lives. The importance of health, in the personal, political and planetary sense, is now foremost in the minds of almost all of us, it seems. We see clearly how impossible it is to be healthy as individuals if our political systems are corrupt and our environment is diseased.
The invitation of this dire year, 2020, is to dig deep into the question made famous by David Byrne: How did I get here?
His answer: Letting the days go by….
To some extent, all of us have drifted heedlessly to this watershed moment, letting the days go by, letting the political system rot, letting the generals, finance wizards and corporate masters rule, letting the racism and bigotry go on, letting our planet be poisoned and our fellow Earth beings go extinct, letting ourselves be carried in the fierce undertow of the 20th century to finally hit up against the stark realization that this cannot go on.
The despair that allows us to tap into and express this deep, heartfelt insight is also the potent seedbed of the vision that comes next, of the world that could be, if we begin to align the personal, political and planetary in ways that are healthy for all.
If you are fortunate enough to have the time and space for reflection now—as the wildfires and floods rage, as the political and economic systems crack, as the winds of collective and planetary change sweep over us all—then I invite you to inquire into how you, as an individual, got to this particularly fraught moment in time.
This inquiry is not about guilt or regret; it’s not about blame or anger, although aspects of these strong emotions may show up as your excavation deepens.
It’s about seeing how the threads of your personal experience are woven tightly into the tapestry of the larger collective social and environmental reality in which you have lived. It’s about taking stock of how your experience has been shaped by the circumstances into which you were born and in which your individual life played out. And about how you, in turn, contributed to the warp and woof of that larger tapestry of collective experience.
Once we are able to see the past clearly, we can begin to understand the present more fully. And from this place of understanding, we can move into the future more intentionally, more responsibly, with greater awareness of the power each of us has, as an individual, to make choices that affect the collective experience not only of other humans, but of the entire world system in which we live.
There is much we cannot control about our world. But we can choose where to put our focus each day. We can choose to focus on the positive that continues to resound in our experience: the beautiful colors of the sunrise and sunset, the stubborn persistence of the weeds that flower in the sidewalk cracks, the cool touch of wind and rain after a long hot day.
This is not a matter of denying the horrors and injustices of our time. It is a matter of tuning our own awareness to a positive, harmonious, resonant pitch that gives us the strength to stand up and fight, each in our own way, for a better world.
This is what I call “aligning the personal, political and planetary for a thriving future.” Once we understand how we got here, on all levels, we can take the next step of envisioning the brighter future we want to live into, and roll up our sleeves to work actively towards bringing that bright vision into reality.
I invite you to join me on this journey of introspection, embarking on the inner, personal work that leads to action in the outer, political and planetary world.
You don’t have to be interested in writing a memoir to enjoy and benefit from this contemplative practice.
This inquiry is for anyone who wants to understand how we got here. It’s for anyone who wants to stop drifting, letting the days go by. It’s for everyone who is ready to start working actively to align the personal, political and planetary in service to the thriving future we all so deeply desire.
This invitation is for you; from my heart to yours.
Namaste.
Transition Times 
Gerry
/ October 9, 2020It’s a nice invitation, thank you. Not simple to do, by any means. Worthwhile if I can do it.
I have not been ignorant or apathetic about some of the problems we face. But I think I have been mostly ineffective in dealing with them. Why? I don’t know. other than poor social skills. Why haven’t I pulled myself out of the rut I am in? Some inertia, maybe? Other? I think it is hard to know when one is in denial at some level.
Yes, maybe spending more time on the positive would help. It’s just hard to do when there is a constant string of bad news. My wife says I should spend less time paying attention to the news, it is not helpful. She may have a point.
I could get into political issues, but this is not the place and time for it.
I know one problem I have is a strong tendency to focus on the urgent, not the important. Need to find a way around that.
Another problem I have is a tendency towards procrastination. I read somewhere that it is due to desire for short term gratification at the expense of long term gratification. Which is funny because I complain that the world is not thinking about the long term about climate change aka climate catastrophe.
Enough.
Again, thanks for the invitation.
Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D.
/ October 10, 2020Thank you for these thoughtful comments, Gerry. You are outlining tendencies so many of us have…and collectively this is how we “let the days go by” without standing up for what we believe in strongly enough to make a difference. We can take small steps…what is one thing you could do today, or one small shift you could make in your thinking today, that would indicate an increment of positive change? Sending love–Jennifer