Courage - Week 5
Where I reflect on First Aid, humour, risk, and the value of getting things done.
Stoic wisdom invites us to distinguish what is in our power to achieve, what is not, and focus our efforts on the first. Yet in practice, how can we manage this?
I begin the week reaping the rewards of a past Courage Week. I spend a day at St John’s ambulance to train in First Aid. There, I learn a piece of ambo wisdom. When you’re administering CPR, you should not think ‘it’s in my power to keep this person alive’. Better think of them as already dead – but maybe, if I do CPR, they’ll come back. This makes a lot of emotional sense. Most of the time, people do not survive. Better not carry the burden of responsibility for what was never going to make a difference. Until you pause to think of the necrophiliac implication. This approach to care demands that we do mouth-to-mouth with a corpse.
As time passes, I have embraced an attitude to life that I call responsible fatalism. This is what I share with a friend over dinner. I’ve learned to think of the world, social and physical, as a complex adaptive system, not a static backdrop against which my life unfolds. My actions, every one of them, are woven into the fabric of the whole, with potential to cause disproportionate ripples. My plans, every one of them, are at the mercy of structural chaos beyond my control. And of coure, in a world globalised for better and worse, the same applies times eight billion or so.
Right now, the complex adaptive system we call civilisation is on the brink of a catastrophic phase change, as we continue pushing against planetary boundaries, and all sorts of oppression and injustice. Better think of it as already dead – but maybe, we can keep it on life support until a shock strong enough defibs it, resetting the heart of our world to beat a healthier rhythm. If that fails, and collapse happens anyway, this fatalist effort might ripple into whatever world comes next, in the form of a blessing, a benevolent ghost, a caring pulse. Of course, this means accepting that our civilisation is dead, and our day-to-day efforts are about blowing air into the lungs of a corpse, and pushing blood around. It’s also trusting that the twisted movements we feel are the signs of lingering electric activity, not the jerks of a newborn vampire, or zombie.
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Hospicing modernity lists humour alongside stamina among the qualities needed to work on systems change, allow the present civilisation to pass with dignity, and evolve into something healthier. Why humour, I reflect with a friend from Enspiral on the train back from a gathering? What does humour actually do? Well for one, it makes idiocy visible, and builds human connection around this shared weakness, rather than hiding it to avoid shame.
Most of us are stupid most of the time. We’re full of grand visions, righteous emotions, earnest adherence to vague principles. We forget that the peaks of our intelligence are typically shrouded in brain-fog, evaporated ideas from the cesspool of commonplace, and a drizzle of yesterday’s headlines. Humour acknowledges this, and laughs. By doing that, it reclaims freedom against everything in us that is mechanic. It creates a moment of pause to consider what we say, what we do, what we feel, and assess it. It looks for the mindless in what pretends to be mindful, the dead in what seems alive, the void in what looks like substance, and plants a little sharp needle to test it. Hear the balloon deflate as air comes out in peals of laughter, bringing us back to size, and common ground.
Changing a system requires first accepting that we’re part of it, that its patterns and mechanics act and ripple in us. I never trust a detached critic, an earnest missionary type, or anyone who comes shouting for change, if they don’t start by laughing at themselves. I trust humour as connection to the real: that we all wish for great things, beauty, love, truth, justice – then a deranged mechanic plays out inside of us, and we find ourselves in a long-winded argument about labels, titles and coins.
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Looking risk in the eye and doing it anyway, that should be true courage. Except, when we look risk in the eye, it’s unclear what we’re looking at. Most of us are untrained at thinking about it, let alone discussing it. We confuse incidents and their rippling consequences. We blend together what could trigger unstoppable catastrophe, what adds enormous stress to a strained system, what would give our accountant a headache, and what would give us a mere ‘pass’ mark on our compliance sheet.
Back when I worked in global catastrophic risks, a bunch of scenarios came down to the same end point. Dust rises in the atmosphere, and blocks off the sun for a period of years. No crops grow. People starve. Nuclear war, asteroid impact, geoengineering or supervolcanic eruptions were all potential triggers. The pathway was the same. This simple realisation shifted my perception of risk, and the usual analysis of it as probability times impact. Are we talking of the probability that any nuclear bomb is launched? That one would lead to one hundred? That they do raise dust in the air? That the dust does stay up for years? That we can find no food source to palliate for crop failure?
Risk is a long chain, each link a matter of probability times impact. Hence the usual approach to risk – mitigate or avoid – applies not just to the start and end point, but every step. And with that, courage in the face of risk can take a broad range of forms. Jumping hero style into danger to prevent the first trigger, endless nights of research seeking a solution to mitigate the last point of impact – or anything in between that might avoid or mitigate any link in the chain.
Knowing the possible risk is not all: we must do something about it. For this, connecting with others and normalising safe steps is important. On the week-end, I copilot a table in Richmond for a session of The Adaptation Game. Friends developed this role-playing game I call ‘dungeons and dragons for climate’, engaging local communities with the direct consequences of climate change at the local level. Playing a version of yourself, TAG invites you to explore ways of adapting to extreme weather events and their very concrete impact on streets, parks, houses, and people you care about.
At our table, one of the participants shares a proposed adaptation: learn DIY skills, in anticipation of a more disrupted society. When a carpet must be changed after a flood, or a wall replastered, and tradies can’t come, she’ll be able to do that. In the debrief, participants reflect how good it felt to share not only concerns, but practical steps. ‘I’ve also wanted to learn trades,’ says another person, ‘but when I talk to people around me, and say that I want to learn this because of climate change, they look at me like I’m crazy. Now I feel like I might actually do it.’
We face all sorts of risk, all the time. There’s only so much we can do to reduce or mitigate them. When something feels crazy, we’re unlikely to do it. Leaving us all more vulnerable. Hosting serious conversations on risk is a way to prepare better, including by distributing efforts, ensuring we’ve covered in a broader range of scenarios. The first step is looking at reality with courage.
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Of course, thinking of what to do, preparing emotionally, that’s all very good, but not enough unless we learn to get things done. Hold on to our commitments. All sorts of distractions and pressures will come. Wisdom is learning when we should adapt, and when we should stick to the plan. Courage is building the muscle to stick with it indeed.
This is what I aim to train by what I call ‘doing difficult things’ every day on Courage Week. One evening, it’s 9h30, I’ve been dragged in long editorial sessions all day, and have not yet done anything that would qualify. I’ve also been planning to watch a Korean series on Netflix. Of course I could fake it. Or consider that watching Netflix instead of holding commitments is uncomfortable, hence difficult. I take a different route. I look through my list of things to learn. One is to learn the basics of the law. I won’t tick that off in one evening, but I do some research and break it down: torts law, criminal law, legal procedure. Then I look for foraging workshops, and buy a book from the good people at ‘Eat this weed’. That will do. It’s 10h30, there will be more Korean series to watch, and I can go to bed satisfied that I did not let myself down.
That same week, I have a dinner planned with a friend, but there’s a workshop the next day, and I have butcher’s paper sheets to prepare. I cancel, then I feel bad about it, so prep in the morning, and un-cancel. Come 6h30pm, I’m tired and ready to cancel again. I give myself a kick in the butt, and ride off to the friend. It’s a great ride, and dinner. I head back home nurtured, happy that I held to my commitment.
When mood gets in the way, courage is pushing through. The same applies to this writing project. As I reach the end of week five, I wonder. What I am trying to do here? What’s my legitimacy? Why bother? All insecurities come to the front. I sit with the discomfort, and push forward. I’m training myself in cardinal virtues, and sharing the journey for companionship, accountability, and as encouragement. This is not serious historical or philological work, I’m not aiming to teach anyone anything on Stoicism, Aristotelianism, or Catholic virtue ethics. Just fumbling around with a loose framework of four virtues that I believe are in our power – and duty – to develop. I wonder aloud, as I try to develop them, what happens. And hope that, in retrospect, some insights will emerge.
Hope is a gift, but courage is in my power to cultivate. So, even if it seems to be leading nowhere, I can continue to write a post this week, and look after next week when it comes.