People often tell me that the broad range of series is a lot for me to take on at this early stage. “Why don’t you just focus on one to start with?”.
I get it. They’re probably right to a large extent.
If you’re one of those people (perhaps everyone is) who’s generally interested in just one or two of the series then I am good with that. And I’m enormously grateful that you’ve decided to follow along on that basis.
But I simply couldn’t do this business without doing all of them.
For myself it would just be missing the point entirely.
I get excited by each and every facet of the topics, and appreciate the details. But what really gets me going is when the perspective zooms out. There’s something about becoming aware of the connections, the links, the entire web that weaves through all of these various aspects of our lives. It takes the whole scope of our problems and transforms them from an overwhelm of information, to an extraordinarily simple and optimistic solution to all.
I can’t quite find the words to explain it to you yet, but I know as we explore the series together it’s going to begin to become more clear.
It’s a vision of a society that works symbiotically with nature and with one another. Not controlling or depleting, but supporting and benefiting in all directions.
When ‘The Symbiotic Town’ meets ‘The Waste Chase’, you don’t get conflicting interests or distinctly separate topics. They come together as something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. They merge, and the problem from one becomes a solution within the another.
Add in ‘Made With Passion’, ‘The Productive Gardener’ or ‘Starting With Me’. It doesn’t matter which combination you explore, because the overlaps just add to the clarity, and somehow, the simplicity too.
It’s a very different way of reporting on things, and to some extent requires us to qualify information in a new way. A way which is more in touch with our instincts and our responsibility of judgement. As a society we’re generally quite used to being presented with information as solid and hard facts, on the basis that it’s been scrutinised for so long under such specialist conditions, that it must be right.
But the world is changing so rapidly now that I don’t think our ‘facts’ can keep up.
And there’s always been a problem that comes from investigating the detail any how, because right from the get go there’s a huge amount of information that’s already slipped out of the net.
I’m not sure we can ever qualify ‘fact’ as ‘fact’, no matter how long or who has studied it. Experience continues to teach us after the fact, which is why we have planets that are no longer planets, wide spread insulation materials which are now considered deadly, and deeply conflicting ‘facts’ about what makes up a healthy diet.
We could scorn the ‘experts’ for making errors (or even for presenting deliberate misinformation).
We could try to find better ones. Experts who are more thorough, more qualified, more dependable. Experts who don’t make mistakes or oversights.
Or we could just start accepting what it is to be human. To be wrong. To keep learning. To keep improving.
Information should be like putty in our hands, squidgy and full of the potential to guide our creations.
But ‘fact’ is just a short word that we use to say ‘take responsibility for me’. When I get it wrong, it can’t be my fault because I followed the ‘facts’. Blame the ‘facts’ not me.
‘Facts’ are the scapegoats of governments and organisations.
Depending upon ‘facts’ can prevent us from moving forward.
Now don’t let me get carried away, I’m not trying to discredit everything that we know.
Not at all. I just think we should soften the whole ‘hard, fact, expert thing’.
But it takes responsible individuals to make that possible. And it’s something that we can only do one little step at a time. When we move in to new territory there’s no guaranteed outcome. But we can judge, take a tiny risk, see what that outcome is, and gain some confidence.
Doing things differently is daunting but it can also be thrilling. Especially when you realise that you’re learnt something new, not because you read it or got told, but because you experienced it first hand and it worked.
Bear this all in mind as we explore the Winglewood Series.
We’re going to be looking at things a little differently. Weaving the bigger picture with the details… and blurring all of the edges.
It may sound complicated, but I’m feeling confident that it’s the route to something beautifully simple in the end.