Kindness without Boundaries

Pragmatic idealism in an age of transformation

Remember how inspiring she was as Prime Minister of New Zealand during the pandemic? Well, Jacinda Ardern continues to inspire us with Field Fellowship, a new program hosted by Global Progress that supports and connects political leaders who embody kindness and empathy. These are leaders who “speak to people with hope and optimism rather than fear and blame, working to unite, rather than divide, as we solve the challenges ahead.” She calls it pragmatic idealism. (Thanks to my friend Sohail Inayatullah, chair of UNESCO Future Studies, for sharing her post today on Facebook.)

Another person who is inspiring me recently is Nafeez Ahmed. Dr. Ahmed is the director of the Futures Lab and founder of the System Shift Lab and the Age of Transformation platform “to empower us to create a new system and a new paradigm for the coming post-carbon era.” In reading and listening to him, I am inspired by his message of hopeful actions that we can take in the midst of a time of collapse and transformation.

Four days ago he wrote: “2024 is going to be an inflection point for humanity. But it is also going to be a major test not just of liberal democracy as a political system, but for human civilisation as a whole. . . Over 80 countries – more than half the world's population – are holding elections this year that could be pivotal for the future of democracy.” (I wrote about this in my recent Substack essay “The Biggest Election Year in History.”)

Nafeez ends with:

We are now standing at a fundamental bifurcation point – as the old system declines, we face possibilities of both breakdown and renewal. The challenge ahead then is to identify and empower the emerging shoots of renewal and reorganisation, to rapidly remake our cultural-organisational paradigm. Whether we like it or not, this means calling into question many of the things we have taken for granted (the metric of GDP growth as the defining parameter of economic health;  the shareholder structure of companies; the total desacralisation of life and crude reductionist materialism underpinning mass consumerism).

It also means unleashing our cultural imagination and exploring a vast new space of possibilities that is opening up amidst the vacuum of today’s slowly collapsing incumbencies. But not in a random, eclectic way – in a way that can discern the new shoots of reorganisation that are emerging, so that they can be strengthened and designed according to a new paradigm for the new life-cycle.

A few of my thoughts on actions of kindness and possibility that you and I can take include:

• Voting and getting out the vote this year

• Avoiding demonizing political leaders and fellow citizens but rather focusing on caring for people and planet

• Supporting policies and programs of ecological regeneration, socio-economic justice, participatory democracy, racial, religious, age, and gender respect and equality, and peace and nonviolence

• Speaking with and about people with whom we disagree with kindness, and

• Understanding their suffering from fear, anger, hatred, or greed

• Envisioning and embodying a compassionate-ecological civilization arising in the midst of the collapse of a fossil fuel industrial tribal civilization

• Caring for our own body-mind with practices of mindfulness, patience, acceptance, and kindness

May it be so!

Blessings to you and yours!