The Power of Communities in Uncertain Times — Part 1
By: Sahana Chattopadhyay
Tags: Systems Change, Emergence, Complexity, Regenerative, Communities

Regenerative Future

The Power of Communities in Uncertain Times — Part 1

When systems fail, people rise…

A tiny, invisible, and obscure virus has thrown the world into chaos. It has flummoxed and baffled nations, countries, politicians, scientists, doctors, presidents, principals, parents, students, in short, everyone. The gears of the post-Industrial world have ground to a juddering halt for the first time in history. A great pause button has been pressed. What multiple calamities over the last decade couldn’t achieve has been accomplished by an invisible virus.

Do we see this as Armageddon or a chance to re-imagine a “world that works for all”? Can we appreciate the grand design?

We are witnessing unfathomable and profound suffering, particularly of the marginalized and the deprived, in a world that was horribly unprepared for a global calamity of this nature. Many are likening this period to the 1918 Spanish Flu, which swept across the world killing between 17 million and 100 million people worldwide. We don’t yet know what the death toll of Covid19 will be as the virus rampages across nations made fragile by inequity. What to me seems sad and surprising is the abject failure of high tech, big data, and big pharma in coming up with anything remotely groundbreaking in the face of this apocalypse.

Yet, in the midst of it all, can we hold our fear and uncertainty with compassion? Can we abide in this in-between space and listen to its messages?

Unfortunately, while the situation calls for “collective coherence,” we are experiencing divisive and disruptive politics; segregation of humanity based on religion, race, caste, class, creed, and gender; acrimonious and hostile behavior toward the marginalized and the minorities almost everywhere. These unfolding patterns reveal and underscore the emotional and spiritual schisms, estrangement, and hollowness afflicting societies today. The pandemic, on the other hand, is emphasizing a lesson that is the exact opposite of this sense of separation; it is repeatedly accentuating the deeply intertwined and inter-related nature of all life on this planet.

Are we truly sensing and listening? Do we feel it in our bones that none of us can be happy, healthy, and healed unless all of us are?

Sadly, we have become attuned to the Story of Separation where each one must fend for themselves, defeat the “enemies,” demolish the weak. We are used to waging wars. We can bomb, blast, bulldoze, battle, and build walls to keep the enemy at bay. Unfortunately, the coronavirus does not yield to guns or grenades. Hence, while we seek to “wage a war” against the virus — the language most nations are using — we are failing. Sadly, it also says something about our world that we are more prepared for war than to deal with global health, hunger, and humanitarian crises. No wonder, many governments are trying to handle this like a war. It exonerates them for being singularly unprepared.

The narrative of war is used as a legitimizing discourse. Wars inevitably have casualties. Wars require sacrifice. The narrative of war heroes is used to justify putting health workers at risk. Not only is the analogy of war misplaced on factual grounds; it also misses the possibility to cultivate an imagination that builds on narratives of peace, solidarity and social justice — and to foster a more acute understanding of how we are all fundamentally dependent on one another as inhabitants of a shared planet.

~Stop Narrating the Pandemic as a Story of War

How would a resilient, responsive, and anti-fragile world have responded to the crisis? What can we collectively do to co-create such a world?

What is becoming evident is that in the face of this apocalypse, it is not high tech and military prowess but high touch and compassion that is saving the day — doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, grocery storekeepers, teachers, journalists, civilians, NGOs. Communities of citizens are coming together to distribute food to the hungry, make masks for hospitals, help stranded migrant workers in India reach home, and much more.

I wonder, when we come out of this crisis, how will our priorities change? How will we honor what truly makes us human? What choices will we make as individuals and collectives to envision and reinvent a resilient and regenerative future?

For a long time, the world has been teetering on the brink of collapse, and now Covid19 has pitched us headfirst into the center of it. The fissures and fractures in our societies and nations, the rifts and ruptures in our politics and policies, and the crudely papered-over sordid and squalid brokenness of the systems stand brutally exposed. We suddenly find ourselves floundering in a liminal space of uncertainty, ambiguity, and unknowing. Lost and adrift emotionally, spiritually, and even physically, we are scrambling to make sense of a world that has fallen apart, whose center proved too weak to hold and sustain. And as the center collapses, we can see the edges rising.

Are we noticing the rise of ordinary citizens? What will it take for this sense of inter-connectedness to persist even after the crisis is past? How can we continue to act from this place of Interbeing?

Despite the superficial gloss and glitz of the 21st century life, we have failed to build resilient societies. We have collectively made choices over decades that have brought us to this point of a global crisis in our civilization’s trajectory. We have ignored signs and warnings of ecological crisis, social turmoil, and political perfidy. We have long forgotten that we are inextricably and indelibly connected to all human and more-than-human life on this planet. I believe that Covid19 is giving us an opening to pause, reflect, and reimagine a different world — a world of greater equity, justice, well-being, and security for all sentient beings.

What does a more integrated, thrivable, and regenerative world look like? How do we align with our inner source of being? How do we befriend our future emergent selves?

It is asking us to go beyond our current selves, befriend our emergent selves, and co-create a more beautiful world from this liminal space that we are currently in. Perhaps no other writer or poet has captured the essence of it like David Whyte in his poem, Just Beyond Yourself …

Just beyond

yourself. It’s where

you need

to be. Half a step

into

self-forgetting

and the rest

restored

by what

you’ll meet.

I see hope arising even in the midst of anxiety and anguish. Our forgotten humanity — submerged in the false busyness of our days — is rising to the surface. I am seeing myriad groups of individuals going beyond their selves and coming together to serve the desperate and the deprived even as governments, strategists, and policymakers flounder and resort to denial, de-sensing, and destroying every little possibility out of avarice, dishonesty, and egotism. But the “movement of movements” is refusing to be subdued. As Otto Scharmer rightly said, As Systems Collapse, People Rise.

How can we come together as evolutionary communities to heal the planet? How can we bring our gifts in service of a regenerative future?

Paul Hawken described this “movement of movements” beautifully…

I believe that we are part of a movement that is greater, and deeper,

and broader than we ourselves know, or can know.

It flies under the radar of the media, by and large.

It is non-violent. It is grassroots.

It has no cluster bars, no armies and no helicopters.

It has no central ideology.

A male vertebrate is not in charge.

And it is this power of communities that I want to write about. I have been urging organizations to reinvent themselves as communities and ecosystems in my articles, some of which can be found here, here, and here. I believe that the power of communities — people coming together around a shared vision, passion, and purpose — can transform the world and take us toward a thrivable and regenerative future.

How can communities of diverse and committed individuals co-create and reinvent the metaphors, narratives, and structures for a regenerative future?