Finding our centre.
A year ago a close friend of mine ran for public office.
I knew I would canvass for her but I was nervous about it.
I could see the vitriol online that politicians and candidates contend with and before I knocked on one door I was already worried whether I would be subjected to similar on the campaign trail.
Others were also well aware of this risk.
The number one question I got from friends and family about canvassing was,
Are people nice to you?
The reality was almost everyone we spoke to was.
In fact most people were interested and engaged in discussing the most pressing issues we face as a society.
Did they always agree with us?
Definitely not.
I heard many varying views,
Ideas and constructive criticism to feed back to my friend.
But what struck me most was that even when people didn't agree with us or had already made up their mind they treated us with such respect and courtesy.
The difference between what we see on social media and the reality could not have been more pronounced.
It reminded me of the importance of getting offline and of meeting people to debate and discuss our issues in real life.
The only exception was a lady who shouted at me and a fellow canvasser for 10 minutes one morning.
The irony was I was very aligned with her on the issue she was referring to.
It is a topic I am vocal about and have written about.
If she had taken a breath for two seconds I could have had a conversation with her about that and listened to her views.
She was not interested in that.
She needed an outlet for her anger and frustration and on that particular day I had the misfortune of that outlet being me.
In August guesting on a podcast I spoke about the need to separate online discourse from how we speak to people in real life.
Social media is intentionally inflammatory.
It stokes how we feel because the algorithms want that.
But every moment we spend online we are feeding the monster.
For that reason I am increasingly mindful of the amount of time I spend online and careful that online discourse doesn't impact how I deal with people on a day to day basis.
When we take the shouting and hate and transfer it to real life interactions with real people we are all in trouble.
Nobody wins in that situation.
We simply allow our local communities to become another place of division.
During the summer I was away for the weekend with another friend.
As often happens on these trips the conversation meandered between what is going on in your life to what is going on in the world.
Over a glass of wine one evening she asked me what I say when people ask me where I sit on the left right continuum.
I told her I don't.
I tell them those labels are too small for me.
They were constructed by someone else for the benefit of themselves in arguably simpler times.
I'm interested in new ideas,
New paradigms,
New ways of showing up.
Confirming my identity based on where I sit on that continuum is about holding others at a distance.
I'm interested in how I can be closer and more connected to others.
The reality is there is one world and all of us on it.
Confirming where we are different won't solve our problems.
Finding places we are similar will.
Labels and polarities exist not just to enable people to explain where they sit but to keep them explaining.
A power move by those committed to maintaining those polarities is to purposefully misunderstand you.
To keep you explaining who you are and where you sit so you are completely distracted from who you could be and what you could be contributing.
In this age of digital warfare this has become about power.
What a small number of political actors seem to have realised is that if they can divide us they can concentrate power towards themselves.
Unfortunately for all of us it appears to be working.
This last week I have felt afraid in a way I haven't before.
Everything feels increasingly chaotic and it's very hard to absorb the amount of news flow coming from around the world currently and very easy to feel overwhelmed.
In the first essay I wrote this year,
The Soft Power of Silence,
I talked about this.
Distraction is now the tactic of choice.
The volume and sensationalist stance of the choices and onslaught of information is not accidental.
Part of the tactic of inundating the market,
Airwaves and our minds is to ensure we cannot escape it.
When we are naturally drawn in we spend time shocked by it,
Discussing it and posting about it.
With our attention flooded our capacity to discern is diminished.
We are becoming a society drowning in information but increasingly starved of wisdom.
Just eight months later we are in the eye of the hurricane.
We are no longer in control of our attention or how we feel.
Whether we realise it or not we are becoming controlled by algorithms and anger.
It feels like we have hit peak division.
This is going to get worse before it gets better and for it to get better each of us will need to play a role.
In contemplative and meditation practices we talk about finding your centre,
A point of stillness inside you,
Your inner centre.
It is in this place you find equilibrium and a sense of congruence and it is from this place of calmness we make our wisest decisions.
We need to find our collective centre,
To start walking back towards each other.
That will only occur if each of us work to maintain our own centre.
We don't find that online,
We find it away from our devices in silence.
In the eye of the storm,
In service of our collective future,
Can you pause and find your centre?
