The world is the world but it's all how you see it

Our beliefs and actions are the only thing we can control, and we need to be thinking and acting positively as much as we can, especially in a world with increasingly regressive and negative actions taking hold.

Just getting back to the work desk for the year, and it’s been both a fruitful and challenging start to the year for my work in social impact in many ways. It’s been fantastic over the past few two weeks to be doing more physical and embodied work in disability transport and book-ending my day in the mornings and late afternoons helping kids with cerebral palsy like my beautiful brother Matthew, long passed but always cherished.

Also on the hands on front, really excited to be venue managing at a community performing arts centre close to home. I’m anticipating it will bring me a lot of joy to connect with creativity and theatre programs from around Australia, as well as showcasing a fair bit of home-grown talent.

Now I’m at my desk Monday to Friday besides, focusing on what I can do to broadly shift the lever for the better through my Future Shakers event series and my deep-tech startup, Field to Foundry.

In the background it’s hard to ignore all of the local and global stress and strife around us: staring down the barrel of global horrors, climate chaos and disasters, another three years of Donald Trump, and a growing breakdown of progressive values and backlash against liberty and equity. Many of the positive gains hard-won over the last 10–15 years are being eroded by reactionary forces clinging misguidedly to their last grip on power, dragging us backwards and undoing a lot of crucial social progress.

But now is a crucial time to act and nurture positive change initiatives in the midst of this storm. It’s easy to go along with a social change bandwagon when the tide is turning in that direction, but it’s so much more important to keep contributing to the positive shifts we want to see in the world when the world seems to be largely heading the opposite way.

Those of us with the freedom to do so must speak out against the inequities spreading around the world like the pandemic we are recovering from. We must not take advantage of these waves of backwards thinking for our own temporary safety, financial gain or influence. Those of us who can support better ways of working in the world must invest in them - invest in mutual aid and solidarity, invest in communities of practice, invest in spreading ideas, and cross-pollinate them to keep them alive amidst the storm around us.

At the same time, we must lean into gratitude for and connection with the parts of the world that are resoundingly positive. We must engage hearts and minds rather than waging culture wars of moral superiority, calling people in more than we’re calling them out. We must create change that brings everyone along with it, while standing up bravely against horrors, inequities, and injustices. We must double down on our efforts towards making a better world a reality, and we must also take time to rest, replenish ourselves, and step away from the demands of depletion, extraction, and exploitation of labour that capitalism and dominator culture have indoctrinated us with. We must walk in the world as examples of how we want to be and what we want to create – living and breathing the kind of world we want to live in.

Like Kae Tempest sang:

“It's true if you believe it. The world is the world but it's all how you see it. One man's flash of lightning ripping through the air Is another's passing glare, hardly there.”

We can’t get lost in apathy, overwhelm and self interest. We have to believe in good, and act from those beliefs. For me, it’s the only way to live that has meaning.