It feels like a new job

 Great writing retreat with colleagues.  Two days of solid writing.  Day walks, chats, decaf tea, sleep and getting lost when jogging.  

Emotionally pleased with myself, also drained.  I wrote in two days what would normally take me a few weeks.  Nature and routine together helped.  My creativity was there since the beginning I think.  Preparing notes, writing them.  It emerged bit more strongly with new stories to tell on the last few minutes of the last session.  Arriving at home I kept writing notes until my brain just shot down and I had a good night's sleep. Thank you creativity for visiting !

Talking to colleagues during the retreat, I realised this feels like a new job despite being at the same university and somehow feeling part of the furniture.  New members of staff, soon to have new line managers and paradoxically we are to return to teach the 'old ways'.  We keep thinking we have not changed either individually or collectively.  The only things that seem to remain standing are those old and well maintained buildings.

Perhaps life sometimes is about staying where you are while other things revolve around.  We sit and wait, we stand up, we walk, we return, and then get visited by creativity.  And when we do so, we somehow have changed.  

Impermanence as the Buddhists would say. 

Inevitably there were times to check email and get frustrated or annoyed.  The world out there kept moving and not in the directions I expected.  That perhaps is also part of retreats.  Back at home now it feels as if it was ok to have gone and come back.  Life is what it is.   What I wrote is just a tiny bit of what life writes in us all, day by day. 

Thank you for a great retreat.  

Where have I been? Well, I honestly don't remember

6 months ago I wrote my last blog post.  It was a reflection of how 2021 fared.  Some hope was also mentioned for this year of 2022.

Fast forward and this new year has gone very quickly so far.  Lots of teaching and dealing with new situations.  Students have not returned as expected.  Hybrid strategies and models of working have emerged.  And institutional rules have remained.  We still have deadlines, meetings to attend, panels to run to better understand how academic work has been done.  

This has generated some brain fog.  Not only me but peers who also feel that we seem to be busier than ever, as if we had to restart a heavy machinery to catch up with production.  Fortunately there are days in which this machinery stops again.  Or maybe it is our brains that do so.  Sleep and rest, rest and sleep, only to begin again with enthusiasm until the next break.  

There are glimmers of new hope for this year.  Many of us are able to go back again to our offices, have coffee, doing writing, walking or just enjoying a nice morning. Lock-down situations seem to be a thing of the past.  We need to temper these glimmers of hope with what is going on elsewhere.  Wars and conflicts are still there.  They affect us indirectly.  Our restarting of lives is cautious.  No need to fully go back to what we did, who we were or where we have been.  

We have ourselves, we have others to join in new journeys.  We still have the rest of 2022 to create how we want to live it.  For myself I am now accepting that summer is going to be busy.  The hope it is there that there will be new things and people ahead, on the roads or paths of new walks.  

So if you ask me where I have been, I do not remember much, but does it really matter?  Maybe it is more important where I plan to be, hopefully with you.  

Messages of and about eco-anxiety

The Cop26 meeting is now about to finish.  There are many important lessons that all of us as individuals could grasp, some of them clearer than others.  What follows is my own take on what has happened. I present my own messages of and about eco-anxiety.

At work, we have been encouraged to present what we have been doing (teaching, research, engagement with the community) to better understand the complexities of climate change.  During this summer me and some students decided to explore how our campus is currently dealing with food waste.   We were fortunate to be supported by other academics and a manager of an anaerobic digestion company.  It has been a very helpful exercise for learning to talk to them and also to interact with campus managers in different areas like accommodation services and food production.  

As a result, students prepared and delivered a great presentation where a key message was that we need to better recycle food as well as prevent its potential waste.  How we carry this out could then be divided into two aspects:  

• Increase the value that we attribute to food recycling via better messaging, support processes and awareness
• Adopt new technologies like anaerobic digestion or AD.  

Tackling both of the above requires working on promoting a cultural if not behavioural change in our attitudes to waste and specifically to food.  

During the presentation the audience was very receptive and open to the ideas we were presenting.  One aspect that surfaced to be further considered is that how feedback about the need to generate cultural and behavioural awareness needs to be continuous and at all levels of academic and administrative activity in our campus.  Technologies like AD or those to better support better food waste monitoring (weighting, data analytics) as well as recycling are already available.  Why is it that only a few university campuses in countries like the UK are doing something about food?  

It seems to me that the higher level resolutions and agreements of Cop26 by governments need to be both reflected and challenged by local actions from universities, councils and private companies working together.  This is something that again requires a cultural mind shift from management of these organisations.  

Perhaps more importantly we all need to acknowledge that so far the desire to do something about climate change and doing it now is generating more anxiety than awareness.  Myself I had to slow down in my work and let students and the company manager carry on because I was feeling overwhelmed with so many messages from the media.  

Eco-anxiety is not only an individual but also a collective 'illness'.  During summer of 2021 I started to feel that any change about climate change is going to be slow and has to be concerted: it is difficult to mediate between parties that have different views about what needs to be done.  Every step has to be reflected upon and negotiated.  

This despite what many organisations have already in their strategic plans of achieving net-zero by a certain date.  It is also true that some actions are going to produce more impacts than others (i.e. not flying is more impactful than buying or using electric transport).  So perhaps it would be more important to assess and agree on these actions collectively.  And to establish ways of incorporating our conversations about such actions into strategic plans.  This could also help us all to deal with our own eco-anxieties.  

Navigating through a climate change field

 Our world is now witnessing a global summit to talk about climate change.  Some of us have also decided to contribute to it by organising and running local activities.  At my workplace, we have a full agenda that involves students and businesses.  

For me this was going well until I started to feel what some people call eco-anxiety.  I do not like big gatherings or feeling that I am out of place.  Talking about how we need to do something now and urgently to save our planet got to me in a bad way.  Because to my mind I have been doing things.

From buying and using an electric bike to changing our old family car to one that does not emit too much carbon dioxide to refurbishing our house loft with foam insulation to reducing my car travelling to eating less meat to working with students on looking at how campus food can be better managed, I now feel that somehow this is not 'enough'.  My perfectionist self has kicked again on the face of so much information.  

Perhaps a better way of framing what I feel and think is to say that climate change is a very complex thing and that we are still learning how to do things.  It would be better to be more aware that we are also part of complex systems whose direction(s) are the result of many individual actions.  At the moment, there are some parts of such systems which I find difficult to navigate with, possibly because they are entrenched in their own and radical views about what needs to be done now.  

We need to gain more awareness and continue doing things.  But for me I need to take a small break from all this talk on climate change and breathe.  Maybe take a back seat and let things unfold.    It would be good to listen to what goes on and share what we have learned or what we could be doing differently in our lives or work.  

But not at my own expense.  

Rituals for moving on, others are hard to let go of

My book writing is progressing, slowly.  Today I am mixing it up with writing this blog post.  

Summer time is now spent with family and preparing for more returns to 'normality'.  

One of my bosses recently said that the world has moved and cannot wait for us to take a breath or slow down.  In the food chain of education, other institutions or governments decide what needs to happen, and we follow suit.  Not much of this has really changed, except perhaps that we are bit more allowed to work remotely. 

Yes, it is time to move on, but also it is hard to let go of other things, I am finding.  

Human beings need some sort of structure, I heard recently.  We had to set up routines during lock-downs, and we had to start giving them meaning.  Some of them have become rituals.  Things to keep us afloat, to help us navigate the world. Myself, I am now doing some Pilates and short running.  I also have gone back to my cafe writing.  And I have planted new flowers in my garden.  

If you ask me why I do these things, well, they help me keep a good mood.  And the more I do them, the less I need to explain or justify them to myself or other people.  I am preparing for the winter.  

Finding hard to let go of driving to work, to email people to express my worries, to become silent or isolated when not feeling very well.  My ritual of self-berating or catastrophic thinking is still here: it does not have much more meaning anymore, but I grew up using it to cope with my circumstances.  Why is it hard to let go of?  

Maybe it is because I fear that if I let it go, I will not be appreciated, I will not succeed, I will not be loved.  A hard thought I think, A thought that allowed me to survive and to 'move on', a thought that can fuel many of our desires to act, or to live.

But then I will have to disagree with my boss.  I do not need to move on, not at least based on fear of approval.  My morning ritual has started to include gratitude for just being alive, and for reassuring myself that whatever life throws at us, we will be OK.  

The return of coffee mornings

 So here I am again in one of my favourite cafes.  

Sitting, typing, listening to what goes on.  Trying to fight the desire to write the right sentences or paragraphs for a new book project.  

Many people including me are now practising the language of 'coffeeing'.  We order exciting if not exotic things.  And we do it in a louder voice.  

It is inevitable not to draw comparisons between how we used to come here.  Before the world pandemic, myself I rushed to type things that were already on my notes.  I could spend hours here.  I felt there was not much outside I wanted to do.  

Today, I am longing to finish this, to walk around, to breathe, or maybe sit outside and type in a more relaxed manner.  

People are louder, things are flourishing again, and so am I.  

As if nothing has happened

End of February 2021 in the UK.  Spring is at the doorstep and vaccinations are taking place in several countries.  There is a general feeling that we are soon getting back to normal.  My twins’ school is about to reopen and I am looking forward to this, I also want to have some space to myself! 

It would be easy to forget what has happened in the last year and to focus on ‘catching up’ with family, friends, work, holidays or anything else.  Myself,  have been doing some reading and writing for what I think is going to be my next book.  I have tried hard also to seek alternative hobbies or career possibilities.  I have now exhausted myself.  Luckily I have people around me that keep telling me to slow down. There is no need for the rush. I was supposed to go easy on myself during this new lockdown!

Anyway, I think that part of my problem is that I somehow want to forget about 2020 and to carry on as if nothing had happened.  This is a normal reaction to adverse events.  Only that if we take another look at what went on, we could also rescue some positives.  And then accept that we are to move on, with this awareness.

Some of us would want to cling to helpful habits that we have acquired.  Paradoxically in my case, I have learned to do some things slowly.  Waking up and having breakfast, getting ready for the day whilst having a nice chat with my wife has been really good.  We talk about science fiction or comics, the mangas that she is reading, novelties about our twins or my ideas about how crazy and un predictable creativity is.  We also vent out our frustrations and worries.  And then we start working or homeschooling.  For me it has become a realisation that it is not possible to do everything on a single day, or do it very well.  My praise to my twins teachers, they do an amazing job, all things considered.  

I would love to get back to my office on campus,  with a view to enjoy the physical surroundings.  I would love to do less there.  I used to spend a great deal of time there, wandering between the office and the cafes or the shop, feeling that I needed to be there and with a fear of wasting my time.  Now, I think can still do my work and would love to stop on the way for a coffee in nearby towns, or strolling for a walk as I used to do some times.  

We just have to be grateful to be alive, to have some energy to carry out during our days, to have loved ones.  Yes, we are now living differently and more carefully.  But we can still live.  Slowly but surely.  Who wouldn’t want to do that?