How can I read the News without Cracking Up?
How can I see the Opportunities Instead of the Obstacles?
How can I keep my mouth shut when I want to say something “realistic” but which is actually just negative?
How can really enjoy life inn Spite of the Evidence that life as we know it is probably doomed?
As you can see from the three sub-titles above I have not quite figured out how to phrase my objective, probably because it is a simple idea but one with many tentacles. For next few hundred words expect to read variation on this a theme of a challenge that I, and probably many of you, have:
How can I remain informed about the destruction of the natural world without becoming a pessimist?
Here is an example of what I mean. This morning I got a news feed from a group called Planet Critical [in references] which provides interviews with experts about global issues. The most recent chat with an oil expert from Scotland named Alister Hamilton. He basically said that while we have lots of oil it is needing more and more energy to extract and process. He claimed that the North Sea oil off Scotland was going to be net energy negative by, at the latest, 2031. That means, you get less energy out of the fields than you put in. He then says that the same thing will happen to all the other oil fields around the world but does not have good data on them to make a prediction as to when that will happen elsewhere. 2031 is very soon and if true, this will have dramatic impacts in how we live. While we must get off oil, if we don’t take facts like this into account in our planning the transition is sure to be very, very ‘bumpy’ [eg. painful].
Here is a second example. I was on a climate march in Montreal years ago and happened to walk along side a person who had been trying for years to convince others that the climate disaster is just that – a disaster; one that will make our lives harsh and miserable if we don’t both prepare and work hard to eliminate net emissions asap. Did anybody really listen? Did anybody really change their energy habits? NO. She was very, very depressed. She had given up hope. Her mental health was gone.
Third and final example. I get regular feeds from a Roger Hallam of the UK, the founder of Extinction Rebellion and the group The End of Oil. He is a shaker and mover but boy is he angry. Here is a bit of a recent email:
“What I call the macro delusion and the information delusion. What they are saying is so dumb it makes me want to throw myself over a cliff. All they are doing is creating even more despair and thus passivity. Don’t get me wrong, no doubt about it, they are nice and moral people but, as Gary says, we are facing fascism. And that is going to really fucking hurt. I mean physically. People will get beaten up, get shot, get no help at the hospital, and die an early miserable death. That’s what’s going to happen to you reading this. Add that onto the climate crisis, and this time round it’s going to go on forever and then everyone is going to die – hundreds of miles of rotting corpses. What do you think extinction is going to look like? It’s not a video game.”
Now while all of the above have a part of “the truth” as to what we are doing to the world they miss the important bit: the desecration of Nature is not “just happening”. People are causing it – so guess what, people can fix it. Although this is obvious, it seems that most people think they cannot fix it; they feel like passive agents who have no power at all to change the future. Why is that? Well, that’s too big a question for me to even consider answering today but I can tell you secret ingredient in the soup needed to move away from our current destructive way of life: JOY.
Yes, plain and simple JOY. Yes, a smile. Yes, laughter. Corny right? Yes. Overly optimistic and unrealistic? NO! When we are joyful, which is like happiness but independent of external events, we don’t give up on life because we are so vibrating with life that despair and depression and negativity are not even an option. When we are joyful we infect others with optimism and the desire to truly live and not merely exist. To be joyful in today’s world means you must have some sort of belief system that see ‘reality” as not merely a physical thing but as having emotional and intellectual and other “transcendent” realities that allow you to step past the striving for mere “happiness” to JOY. Always remember, JOY is not optimism, JOY sees the pain and suffers with it – but also sees that pain ends and that life can return and be renewed.
How do you and I do that? There are many ways – all of which involve some form of Art or the appreciation and immersion in the beauty of Nature or “spiritual” striving. [by spiritual I simply mean the non-physical – in this regard striving for understanding “truth” as a Scientist does is a “spiritual” activity]. Perhaps your way to JOY is to find great poetry, like that shown here from Mary Oliver. She wrote poetry to help heal herself from the trauma when she was young and used poetry to help heal herself. That is what all Art and immersion in Nature or spiritual striving for truth/transcendence does – it heals, and the outward expression of that healing is JOY. In the case of Mary Oliver her poetry combines darkness and intense introspection with celebration and joyous release – a love of life that transports the reader to want to see that life is to be lived to its fullest.
Messenger
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird— equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever. + Mary Oliver
We do this by choosing which wolf we feed. It’s the old Cherokee story:
THE TWO WOLVES
A young boy came to his Grandfather, filled with anger at another boy who had done him an injustice.
The old Grandfather said to his grandson, “Let me tell you a story. I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But hate
wears you down, and hate does not hurt your enemy. Hate is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times.”
“It is as if there are two wolves inside me; one wolf is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him and does not take offence when no offence was intended. He will only
fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way. But the other wolf, is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper.” “He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot
think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger, because his anger will change nothing. Sometimes it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, because both of
the wolves try to dominate my spirit.” The boy looked intently into his Grandfather’s eyes and asked,
“Which wolf will win, Grandfather?”
The Grandfather smiled and said, “The one I feed.”
These are the ways I feed my “good” wolf. I play piano and go wilderness canoeing and ride my bicycle through the country lanes where I live and do Yoga & daily prayer/medition dailyt: all this “feeding” allows me to face the ruin of the world that the famous Great Acceleration graphs make clear . With this good wolf fed I can then read daily one or two – BUT NOT MORE [see article link Media overload is hurting our mental health] – articles like this without either falling into denial or despair and live a life filled with JOY.
Deadly humid heatwaves to spread rapidly as climate warms
Small rise in global temperatures would affect hundreds of millions of people and could cause a sharp rise in deaths. [the guardian]
I think it’s time to feed “the rational wolf” for those scientific types reading this. In some ways what I am talking about is a change in our ‘cognitive bias”. I am challenging all of us not to over emphasize the bad news in such a way that prevents us from taking action or changing our value systems. Simultaneously, I am proposing that JOY is different than Happiness in that it avoids the mistake of denial and being unable to face the harsh and brutal realities out there because it is not contigent upon the external physical world – JOY is your internal choice. It is your “internal bias”. To read more on this topic and how “group think” almost always ensures disaster [think of the many stupid German choices on the Eastern front in WWII or the Challenger explosion] try the link to the article “Influence of Cognitive Biases in Distorting Decision Making and Leading to Critical Unfavorable Incidents” in the references.
After all is said and done all I know is that JOY is like light dispelling the darkness – it is something real. I imagine that it is real as light is real. Darkness is not “something” – it is the absence of light. Cold is not ‘something’ – it is the absence of heat. Weightlessness is not “something” – it is the absence of gravity. Similarly despair and denial are not “something” – they are the absence of the JOY.
References
https://www.planetcritical.com/p/global-oil-depletion?utm_source=podcast-email%2Csubstack&publication_id=265792&post_id=142327184&utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&utm_medium=email&r=3yq0c&triedRedirect=true
movie https://www.theoilmachine.org/
The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration by Will Steffen et al. 2015 Media overload is hurting our mental health https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/11/strain-media-overload
Influence of Cognitive Biases in Distorting Decision Making … – https://www.mdpi.com/2313-576X/1/1/44
Appendix
A great example of a person who used JOY to enable the spread of his ideas was St. Francis. He was famous for always being joyful, no matter the external circumstances. In fact, a key part of the life anybody choosing the Franciscan path is JOY. For example, in the Principles of the Anglican Third Order to which I belong, this is stated:
We are to show in our lives the grace and beauty of divine joy. This joy is a divine gift. It is there even in times of darkness and difficulty, giving courage in the face of disappointment and an inward serenity through suffering. Those who possess it can rejoice in weakness, insults, and hardships.
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