How To Eat An Elephant (one small thing)

Oh dear. It’s another long one (though you’re used to that from me by now). It's a bit different from my usual postcard from the landscape of grief.

This is a post about skills for transition times. I’ve been asked what I mean by this phrase, quite a bit lately. It’s a good question, so if you’re up for a little journey, I’ll have a wee ramble. (And if it all sounds obnoxiously preachy just let me know in the comments and I’ll blush and delete.)

OK. To answer, I need to dive a bit into some of the stuff I’ve trained in and also teach. Primitive, ancestral skills of survival, hunter gatherer style.

Basically; if we were a mobile tribe moving through the landscape, hunting and gathering what we needed, making our tools; how would that look? What would we need to know?

The classic order taught in survival schools in the lineages I work with is this:
Shelter
Water
Fire
Food

Lack of shelter will kill us fastest, then water, fire, and lastly food. So if, say, I fell down a big mountain, got turned around and had to survive until I got myself out or was rescued, first I would make sure I had shelter, then find potable water, then sort out fire, then worry about food.

However, in my experience, in my observations of living things, I’d add something to this, an overarching tenet… that the actual number one rule of survival is this:

Conservation of energy.

Whether that energy comes from ingested calories or from the sun, it is the fuel for all movement, is a precious resource, and is the framework for all life’s myriad behaviours. Living things conserve energy because if they waste it they have to find more, somehow, and risk death or injury in the process. Living things only do things that work. There is no unnecessary action. Tom Brown says that an animal is an instrument played by the landscape, a quote I love.

We are the only living things I have observed that do not follow this rule, because since we first broke ground and planted crops and had surplus, we have had the ability to store that surplus, therefore have riches, and haven’t needed to follow this first law of conservation of energy. (There’s a whole side thread on haves and have nots and I’m going to leave that for now)

Humans splurge energy, and this one basic action has contributed hugely to the pickle we are now in.

We haven’t had to respect the environment to get our needs met because we have calories in the bank, and we change the environment to meet our needs to maintain those banks of calories.

We haven’t had to hold onto the skills of hunting and gathering, up close and personal, respecting the lives that we take because WE take the life, there is no remove, and it is like taking the life of a friend.

We have food stored. Someone else can get our calories for us.

We haven’t had to listen to the weather, preserve our oceans and forests, make friends with every living thing as a node on the web of life, where every action affects every other thing.

We haven’t needed to spend our energy maintaining these relationships and skills, so we’ve let them slide, cutting ourselves more and more off from the natural world until so much knowledge and wisdom has been lost, now we have forgotten those old ways, cannot survive this way; we simply don’t have the skill. Not until we reawaken, relearn, remember the wisdom in our DNA.

The thing I love about biological systems on this big beautiful jewel of a planet, is that there are feedback mechanisms that keep everything in balance. If a population of grasshoppers eats all the food in an area, and they cannot move somewhere else, they die, releasing the pressure from the area and the area regenerates. Simple, elegant.

Those times when the pressure in a system is highest, when things are moving from one state or phase to another, these are what I am referring to as transition times.

What feels true to me is that we are in transition times. I don’t know about you, but I feel it in my belly. It’s not about the scientific evidence or the deniers, it’s not about the handy sound bytes and social media memes… it’s slower than that in me. There is a deep wisdom in the animal centre of me, my lizard brainstem, the part of my wolf awareness that notices the changes in atmospheric pressure, counts the length of the days, tracks the dryness of the leaves, feels the silence of the hunting hawk. My senses are still active, even if I no longer have the sensitivity or handed-down teachings in stories and songs to put my finger on exactly what the information is telling me.

My intellectual self may hunt endlessly for evidence, but my instincts have a clear message, loud as a shout. They tell me that we are in transition times, when everything is about to change. A storm is coming. Is here.

Transitions take energy. When we move from one place or state to another, we have to rouse, to shift, to generate momentum away from the place where we have comfortable settled. Transitions are scary, because we are moving from the known, no matter how crappy it is, into the unknown, and humans don’t tend to like the unknown. We are pleasure seeking, pain avoiding, meaning making machines. We like to be able to plan the day, the week, the year and bundle it all up into a nice logical package that makes sense so we can understand it and therefore predict its trajectory.

Transitions are when we can no longer predict behaviours, because systems are moving into strange new forms. Terrain changes. Weather distorts. Landscape shifts. Rhythms stutter.

Now we get scared. And this is when our fault-lines reveal themselves.

Do I go into obfuscation and denial, stick my fingers in my ears, cover my eyes with my hands, lalalalala, it’s not happening? Like the little kid playing hide and seek who stands in the middle of the room with her eyes covered, thinking nobody can see her.

Do I go into rage and blame… it’s somebody’s fault, and they should fix it?

Do I go into despair and collapse… we’re all fucked, everything’s fucked and there’s nothing I can do because it is all just too big, too hard, my heart hurts too much? Overwhelm turns to paralysis and apathy. I give up.

In my experience of 30 odd years sitting with people as they go through emotional process I see that all of these are stages of dealing with transition, and all are relevant, like the stages of grief, and grief is a huge part of this. The size of our grief is the size of our love for that which has been lost. We are losing a familiar way of life. We are losing animals and plants we have known our whole lives. We are watching destruction and devastation of life on this planet that is our mother, our home. Acknowledging and managing grief is a big part of transition. If we are to move through transition times, naming these stages and understanding that this is part of the human psyche coping (or not coping) with transition is the first step to accumulating skills to be with these emotions.

It’s simple. Our world is changing, we’re scared, and we’re acting out. Cool, good to know! There are resources to teach us how to move through all these things.
In my experience, if we work on certain skills of resilience, a fourth way reveals itself, that helps with all the others. It isn’t about big gestures, sweeping changes. It’s about small steps of individual action.

How can I feel what I feel and still respond in a way that is useful?

It can be summed up thus…
How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.

For me, transition times are exciting, once I get over the 'o shit, everything is about to change' panic. Transitions are when things get interesting. When I get called to step out of my comfort zone. There's huge power for me in the moment when I let go of the reflexive need for control and start to respond to what is in front of me. There's a freedom in that. Transitions are when we grow, learn, transform. Where we discard the chrysalis of our old stories and flex those shiny new wings. Yes, it's painful. Growing is. It's also, in my experience, worth it.

Transition times teach us how to eat an elephant. They call for us to break the overwhelming call for global action into the little things, the really little things, the mundane tiny movements that break us free from the claw of despair.

If we can all do just one small thing, every day, those tiny things add up to bigger things. And more than that, we have changed our trajectory, we have broken our habit of relying on external authority and now we are on stepping stones where we are learning new skills, taking responsibility for ourselves. We are doing what all life is programmed to do; adapt or die. Without judgement, without a story… just adapting to the changing conditions. Every living thing does it. So can we.

We are so geared to demanding that our environment adapt to suit us, we have lost touch with the reality of nature connection. Capital R reality says that there are forces of wind and wave and weather that are quite simply bigger than us, and that we are at the mercy of, that we can’t just magic into the shapes we want. We’ve run out of room to manoeuvre, which is an invitation to change our moves.

How do we skill up to be with these changes? How do we eat the elephant?
One bite at a time.

We look to the little things, and we find the ones that we can start to do right now, today. Whether they are skills of resilience and emotional well being, physical skills of self sufficiency, skills of real community building and tribal support, survival skills for moving through the environment, skills for processing our emotions so we stop blaming everyone and everything and take responsibility for the stuff we can change, embodiment practices to make sure we are grounded in the real world, making things with our hands… all the little things. Just pick one thing, and do it.

One Small Thing, this crazywonderful group that’s seemingly sprung out of thin air, is just one hub to support this movement. It gives light and air to the simple wisdom seeded in the little things.

I wonder, if we see enough people doing these little things, maybe we’ll today have the courage to take our own first wobbling steps, gather our bundles, let our hands remember that they are born to be clever, be kind to our neighbours because if our house blows down we may need them; teach each other from our own experience; try new skills, fail until we succeed, forgive our lack of perfection on the way; and above all help each other learn because in transition times we don’t operate from the top down, we grow from the ground up.

I’ll follow my own rules for the One Small Thing page, and offer a doorway to individual action, if you’re up for it. It’s simple.

Look at your hands. Your clever, wise, creative hands. Those cunning opposable thumbs. These hands that are the reason humans can create in the world, all the things we do; caress a lover, break that which no longer serves, carve a spoon, wield a sword, call music from clay and wood, make art from dirt and paint and clay, build a bridge, plant a seed, grind flour, bake bread, fix broken things, wipe a tear, hug a child, take a life, welcome another one into the world…

My invitation is this. If your hands are your passage through transition times, if you could try one small new task with them, what would that thing be? One tiny thing to teach yourself that there is hope, and it will come through these hands.

What is your bite of the elephant?

Mine was to buy a metal container to take with me when I go to a cafe for lunch, so there is one less takeaway container in the recycling. I’ve been meaning to do it for months. And today I did. I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I was when I saw my dumplings nestled in it. And then when I left the cafe, still in the glow of my small action, I picked up three bits of rubbish on the footpath. Such little things. Adding up to big things.

A friend, in the comments, just remarked that it’s got him thinking, about that One Small Thing. Like becoming vegan for a day, or going a day without using any additional plastic. Imagine if that became a movement of radical achievable action. Just One. Small. Thing.

So today, why not pick something.

One small, inconsequential thing.
And do it.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2673151546109678/