Three cheers for messy transition!

 Your localization, your transition to  a lower energy use future is unlikely to be a smooooth trip to a pastoral utopia. No, more likely it has a messy side, the celebration of which is subject of this post.

Richard Heinberg`s phrase  "the end of growth" (also this title of his outstanding book) is the shortest possible description of what`s coming. As you likely know, the change that will result from the end of growth will change pretty much everything about pretty much everything. It'll shake-up on how we live, work, travel, and eat. It will challenge our very identity.

One side of the transition to no growth will likely be messy. Messy, messy, messy! I don’t mean that it can`t or won`t be fun and beautiful too  - I think it will be (more about that later). But it can`t help but mess up the neat categories we’ve had and wanted to have for how we imagine our future.

Let me share some of my own messy story.

Radical Relocalization started out very primly and properly on a flush of success and enthusiasm. I moved to the country for a new relationship, started a monthly group there and a newspaper column based on sharing skills for self-sufficient living. Over time, for good reasons, each of these faltered. My partner and I split up, the place I bounced to was difficult. The column ran out of people to interview in our sparsely populated area. And the monthly group chose to be leaderless after a year and a half – I'd been the leader - and people stopped attending.

And at times since I've felt uncomfortable speaking out for relocalization, when my own wasn’t looking so good.

But that`s not the whole story of course. A turnaround came when I created a couple of local places to put out there how it was going for me, and to hear others with their own transition story. It was a safe space for the highs and lows of how we were actually doing. We called it a listening circle (in a nearby town I called it a Learning Circle). From the start this lightened things up, was fun and engaging and a place where new ideas naturally emerged.

The listening circle is a place where we`re hearing more of how it really is for each other, the triumphs and challenges of working our way through transition. It’s not a place for political diatribes, blaming somebody out there for what's not working. The group is safe and respectful, and paradoxically helpful, even though it makes no attempt to fix. Being with a group of people who are transparent with their own `transition` normalizes our own. When it’s safe to be screwed up when screwed up we are, it becomes clear that we’re really not unique in our relocalization challenges. It becomes evident that much of the time we’re invested in stopping something from happening – in putting the brakes on a transition under way. 

The group also demonstrates and important truth, that transition happens partly in a “we” space; it's a collective phenomenon. Part of it happens in an “I” space, too as we rise to meet the challenge with who we uniquely are. Transition is both an Ì`and a `we` phenomenon. Both / and, just like it's messy as well as creative.

Coming out of the listening circle are a number of other projects. At the root of them all is wanting to engage with more people in more ways around transition. I want this for myself for selfish reasons but also because I believe that our very best chance lies in a bigger more inclusive transition story, one that involves my local community more deeply, and more communities of communities.

The best chance of all would be to have a tipping point of people creatively involved in transitioning to a local, sustainable, just world as if their lives depended on it. Which of course, in a real way it does.

That's what I want and the story I'm learning to live in. It's a story that makes room for the mess, embraces the full catastrophe, but steps up to imagine a world that can work for all. A bigger story.

What I want too is more engagement with other transitioners and relocalizers of all stripes.

I'd be very happy if you'd drop a line with anything that's up in your own messy and marvelous transition.

Co-heartedly,
Andrew

P.S. If you're on twitter, I'm @Relocalizer