Whatever your beliefs or walks in life, there can be little doubt that we are living in unprecedented times. Many are calling for unprecedented levels of change and innovation. The phrase ‘if you do what you’ve always done, you get what you’ve always got’ goes round my head a lot these days.
If we want to change our future in ways (and at speeds) that we’ve never had to before, then it would follow that we probably need to go about that change in less familiar ways too (like Community Assemblies for example)
You might see three simple phases to the difference: seeing, being and doing; Seeing differently, Being differently and Doing differently (like Community Assemblies for example.
How might we ‘see differently’?
The part of society that GwyrddNi is working in is community. Could it even be the most important part of society? After all, it was through communities that society developed into what it is today.
And somehow, community, and that connection between us all, has been overlooked and undervalued. And I count myself guilty here too. Somehow, along the way, we’ve been divided.
So what if we started seeing differently the ‘space between us’? Our community. What it is to be here (in Bro Ffestiniog in my case). What if we stepped into that space, and saw everything and everyone differently?
We recently held an online event called GwyrddNi: Ar Agor, to launch GwyrddNi in Bro Ffestiniog. It was a chance to talk for two minutes about ‘what’s getting under your skin?’. This is a tried and tested ‘testimony’ technique in People’s Assemblies and is about giving an equal voice to everyone in the group. It takes some getting used to for sure. But the principle is to open up a space where everybody’s opinion and experience are equally valid.
We talked about a bunch of stuff; funny, silly, serious and concerning.
Litter and dog foul seems to almost always come up in community meetings. So let’s jump into that for a moment and try to see differently. Litter and dog foul actually sit in the literal space between us. Could it also be a symbol of what gets in the way of us connecting with each other in this place? There are those who find it incomprehensible and infuriating. And those that don’t. This is impossible positional thinking in our very town, dictating our relationships, or lack thereof. It’s as if two tribes of the same human species are separated by a raging river, both set in the impossibility of a shared existence.
(I mean – look at the faces on these guys! What could happen next?)
Maybe that raging river wasn’t engineered by the two tribes, but grew there through inequality, a huge patchwork of traumas, gaps in opportunities, lack of positive experience and connection with everything.
Perhaps we could see differently, the invisible or less clear stuff: the litter and dog foul that actually gets picked up or wasn’t thrown in the first place. People that pick up the foul of others. Even to have a think about how we might be contributing to air quality and emissions and the ecology around us in less visible and in ways that are not as east to clean up.
And there perhaps is our shared need. The reason to build bridges in the space between us all: the survival of our community. Because our inter-connections to each other could fix all this. Because then the next bit could start: Being differently and Doing differently. Whatever you imagine could be done. Just…differently.
Community Assemblies: Bro Ffestiniog – https://bit.ly/GwyrddNiFfestiniog – sign up for a chance to help shape the future together.