Encapsulating thoughts for the day.  I struggle to get across what it means if you accept you cannot determine your future.  What it means to build resilience.  How does this make life different?  How does it change our focus in life?  What do we seek to build as means to an end if you can never be certain of those ends?

The inherent uncertainty and uncontrollability doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have an end, an outcome we consider good. Though I would say that any outcomes ought to be well
considered.  Having a goal of a tasteless McMansion or to be as rich as Croesus is about as shallow as saying we want a red bicycle. To what end?  So we can look good? What, are we suffering from status anxiety?  So the house is merely a means – and we have no greater sense of being?

Dig deep inside ourselves.  What do we want in life?  What purpose?  What is that ‘good life’?  What do we want to feel in those last days?

And then ask how to best get there, knowing that nothing is certain. We can never know where and what our child will be in 20 years time. We cannot know. There is no model that will tell us.  I’m talking about the absence of mathematical predictability within complex, interconnected and continually adapting space.  Also known as ‘life’.

Life in the land, the economy, in our communities and the places with which we identify is a lot more like raising a child than building a machine with mechanical certainty.

Faced with the uncertainty, some choose to control, to command, to establish hierarchies and order, to have only room in life for one thing and to be ‘efficient’ in that, to live within the delusion that they can eliminate surprises.  Within their imagination, they build a brittle castle around themselves, convinced of its iron strength.  Deluded by the paper bulwark they build against the tidal shift.

Some desire such mechanical certainty as their goal.  This is their ‘good life’.  This is their delusion.

Let them have their faith.  But not at the expense of me and mine, of the people and the place I care about.  Let them *not* have the power to build their dystopia on the bones of others.  Theirs is no good life.  It reduces others – people and place – to mere means and objects, ‘resources’ and cogs, parts for the mills, or grist for the grinding, all to appease a self-appointed and immoral king.  We live within this delusion today.  Know malevolent power.  Call it for what it is.

Those same principles we build in our children – of building capacities and abilities – ought to be the focus of what we build in our land, communities and economies.

This is resilience thinking; building capacities to bend and mend but never break.

Because there will be surprises, and we need people, communities, land, and economies that can foresee, cope and adapt. Societies with vision, and people who belong.

Our choice.  Build resilience and the capacity to realise potential and adapt, or continue with a mechanical rigidity that suppresses the soul and puts Beethoven on the assembly line?