Nine positive ways to use your lockdown time

The lockdown has given most of us a gift of more time. You may need no help in filling it with worries or distractions, so here are my ideas about the positive possibilities.

Radiate love: My experience of the lockdown is that simply sending out love is one of the most helpful steps we can all take. The lack of material activity (car traffic etc) can enable us to feel the atmosphere in our society more clearly, and I perceive it as having a lot of anxiety, fear, uncertainty, mixed with love and generosity. Send out your love to your neighbourhood, and to stress points like hospitals and refugee camps.
Reach out and help others: in these very uncertain times, strengthening local communities and supporting others further afield are both vital. By helping others, you do this, and nourish your own wellbeing too.
Record and value the recent past: I suggest you write a retrospective journal to help you remember all the freedoms and experiences you enjoyed in the months before lockdown, because you may not enjoy them again for a while. When at last we emerge, we will need to recall what we value in what we lost, so we can press for its restoration.
Be very thankful for the present: gratitude fuels our resilience, so focus on all the good aspects of your life right now, savour and enjoy them to the hilt.
Nourish your positive hopes for the future: Like Thomas Berry, I believe that creating and affirming your vision, dream, new story for life beyond lockdown will raise the chances of them happening. Probably we’ve all read convincing stories of a negative future (Big Brother state and more), but we can offset this as individuals and groups, by envisioning and speaking up for positive change.
Overhaul your views on mortality: Yuval Noah Harari in the April 25 Guardian Review comments that the medieval response to plague or other lethal epidemics was resignation: whereas now, we see them as a technical problem which could have been resolved by more resources. The pandemic plunges us into an era where our own death looks nearer, and where others’ deaths are on the news every day. This could be a chance to consider a third view of death: as a transformation which has positive as well as scary aspects. To explore this a bit, see my blog on the book Testimony of Light. The intense but short-lived beauty of bluebells and other spring flowers may be an aid to your pondering.
Reconsider your response to climate change: Jem Bendell’s recent blog tallies with other experts’ view that Covid-19 has arisen because of climate-related habitat disruption. Try imagining that a severe ramping-up of climate impacts has now begun and will probably continue, without the significant periods of ‘return to normality’ which we expect between crises. And then imagine that there is plenty we can all do, as individuals and communities, to raise our resilience and our adaptive capacities to face this scenario. Bob Doppelt’s book, Transformative Resilience, is a valuable guide for this journey.
Stay grounded in Nature: you’ve probably found, as I have, that there’s now a deluge of good material on the internet, online seminars and so forth. As a counterbalance, keep actively engaged with Nature, see yourself as part of it, and enjoy it intensely with all your five senses.
Find a new guiding metaphor for our times: our political leaders talk of waging war on the pandemic, but it’s a misleading metaphor. Wars usually have a clear ending, a peace treaty, closure. Coronavirus, like climate change is likely to continue with no clear ending: more likely, we will have to learn to adapt and live with it. So, it’s a good time to see what guiding metaphor helps you to make sense and respond to the current situation. I find that concepts like transformative unravelling, or adaptive uncertainty, help to orient me.

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Current Events

Men’s Elderhood Retreat | May 10-12

Our venue: Trwyn Tal in the Llanthony Valley, Wales A men’s peer group This weekend offers a shared space to explore as a peer group how we harvest the fruits, enjoy the blessings and adjust to the downsides of getting older: a chance to look afresh and consider the future we’d like to help create. How can we serve as elders in these troubled times, and be good ancestors to those who come after us? What’s the balance, in later life, between inner contemplation and outer action? This retreat is intended as a supportive circle for questions like these, or whatever we choose as a group. Dates: May 10-12 Location: Llanthony Valley, Black Mountains, Wales Bookings: For more info or bookings, please contact Simon Chinnery: .

Featured Blog

How can we raise community resilience?

The Facing the 2020s report As the pressures on all of us keep rising, we can see mounting discord about best priorities and solutions. One of the few topics on which almost everyone agrees is that increasing the resilience of local communities is getting ever more vital. This has been a focus of my work since 2012, so I’m offering an overview of some of my insights. As part of a project called Facing the 2020s, in 2012 I commissioned a substantial piece of action research on UK community resilience by Reos Partners, which included over thirty diagnostic interviews, extensive desk research, and exploratory workshops in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff with potential stakeholders, including national and local government, NGOs and community organisations. This blog is a summary of the insights I gained from this research. The terms community and resilience are so heavily used that a short explanation of what I mean by community resilience may be wise: the collective capacity of a group of people to handle and grow through crises and challenges. I’ve set out below some of the main aspects of resilience in this context: part of this capacity could come from organisations, including local authority, public services and non-profit groups. Material: some capacity to respond locally to interruptions in food, energy supplies, especially for elderly and vulnerable people. Environmental: response to ecosystem damage, eg habitat loss, pollution and to extreme weather, eg floods, droughts.Wellbeing: for everyone’s emotional needs, especially those who have mental health or isolation issues.Inspirational: maintaining and renewing a sense of vision, cohesion and purpose in the community in the face of a crisis.Connective: good communication within the group, including the skills of hearing, voicing, reconciling strong differences in opinions and values. The main insights from the Facing the 2020s research are these: Reproducibility: On most aspects of community resilience, there are successful exemplar projects somewhere in the UK. For a concise, inspiring range of examples, see the book The New Road, by Alf and Ewan Young. Why have these not been widely reproduced? One reason is that many good community resilience initiatives have depended on a few superhuman people, who just kept going against impossible difficulties. How can such interventions be systematised so that regular humans could implement them in a bigger number of communities? Recording what was done in an accessible toolkit form would help a lot. Sustainable funding: Many good initiatives have also depended on funding that was not reproducible, e.g. a slab of one-off grant funding as part of a pilot programme by an NGO. Sustainable funding sources could include raising capital from local communities themselves, (eg crowdfunding), or a social enterprise model, or a couple of larger foundations offering a grant scheme plus support to use it. Professional services: Many community initiatives struggle to find professional support geared to their particular needs, in finance, legal, property, HR and other areas. The emergence of specialists for this sector would greatly assist reproductivity. Systemic catalysts: In my dream of raising UK community resilience, a focal role would be played by trained advocate-facilitators, who would go into a community to understand its needs and dynamics, help gather support and a project team and could provide access to reproducible role models, sustainable funding, professional services and more. Working with minority groups and communities of identity: Some communities will be more vulnerable to shocks than others, and history tells us that unresolved social tensions bubble up at times of stress. Resilient societies and communities rely heavily on social cohesion. The benefits of working on community resilience now include the opportunity to pre-empt more severe ruptures to social cohesion which are likely to arise from the major stresses ahead. It is important to involve minority communities in the resilience journey, and communities of identity such as LGBT, instead of focussing solely on geographic communities. Wider participation: Many places don’t have a strong sense of community, and in most of those that do, only a tiny percentage of people participate actively in community matters. How could larger numbers of communities, and larger numbers of people, have a motivation to participate in community resilience, including ethnic and low-income communities? This is a crucial issue, which will become more acute amid the pressures ahead: it would be great to see a couple of enlightened large NGOs fund pilot projects and gathering of best practice to move this forward. Engaging local authorities: As funding for services has moved from central government to local authorities, many local authorities have worked to further devolve decision-making and budgetary decisions to local communities. This means that in some parts of the country, local communities are strongly engaged with the local authority, and structures exist to support these partnerships. This move towards greater local control highlights the exciting potential to tackle many priorities (environmental, public service reform, etc.) by adopting a resilience approach and involving local people in community action and resilience building. In recent years, some local authorities have become real innovators in new forms of service delivery, partnership working and more. The replication issue applies here too. Is there currently an easy way to access best practice and role models in this area? Building national resilience: Most approaches towards community resilience take place at a geographic community level. However, examples from UK history and from other countries indicate real benefits in national-level approaches towards resilience. Some of the countries that are considered the most resilient, such as Japan, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, have a strong national resilience policy. If the UK had this too, it would make local initiatives more effective. Online resilience services: A massive opportunity for innovation! If I continue to dream, I imagine social entrepreneurs and progressive NGOs helping to create new apps and web services, alongside businesses.

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