And so we are witness to the great break down. The wheels have come off and we are stuck in a ditch. The ditch is getting deeper every minute. It seems as if we were living in some kind of dreamer’s paradise. It wasn’t really real. Now we’ve got to face the consequences of our faulty thinking.

The question is :

how do we influence the debate about what our future is going to look like?

By ‘we’ who do I mean? ‘We’ means everyone, ‘we’ are society. I don’t see anyone out there who looks like they’ve really got a handle on this. From the top to the bottom, we humans are bewildered: the tiger is out of the cage, and is grown far beyond our ability to control it. Whether we were zoo keepers or simple visitors, we’ve got an uncontainable energy on our hands and if we try to hang on too tightly, it’s likely to break us with a snap of its powerful spine.

Coping strategies

A first thought is to just let go. It’s over. Let it die. Let the whole thing fall and hit the ground and lie there rotting for a while. Then let us see. At the moment, like true addicts, we are wrapped up in our ever increasingly frantic coping strategies, desperately willing it to just come together again in some familiar way. It’s time to admit that we haven’t a clue what to do next. It’s time to throw up our hands and admit that we actually cannot fix this. The coping strategies are getting in the way of the necessary death that must come.

Of course, out of death comes life. They are equal and necessary forces in our world. So perhaps the question above might be re-framed :

how do we begin to sense and prepare to receive the future that is waiting to be born out of the ashes of the present?