As I think about the terrible devastation wrought upon our climate, the natural habitats of the Earth and the catastrophic decline in so many species, I, like so many, wonder what ‘on Earth’ I can do to make any difference.

At first I thought that I was too small and insignificant to make any difference. What can just one person do? I am an ordinary woman with a privileged Western lifestyle that I probably don’t even notice until it’s threatened. Isn’t it the extraordinary, heroic, unusual people that step up and do amazing things?

Now I’m beginning to think differently about this and about many related issues.

I’ve become interested in the idea of Systems – how things are connected together and how they influence each other. And there are two aspects of this idea that especially excite me.

One is that Systems occur at all levels of scale, from the swirling spiral galaxies, through planetary systems, social systems, families, the internal workings of the human body, the interactions of plants and animals in an ecosystem (that word again) right down to the molecular level and beyond. Whatever scale you look at, you find an organised system.

It seems that Reality, whatever that is, is in one of its expressions, fractal – ‘the same’ kinds of patterns repeating with tiny variations on every scale. This is well illustrated by the remarkable animations we can see of the Mandelbrot Set – a mathematical entity generated by a simple repeating equation, now made visible by our modern computing power. Here’s a good example – but hold onto your chair! https://youtu.be/0jGaio87u3A

The second thought that excites me is that although we do see systems at every scale, when a system reaches a certain level of complexity there is a tipping point, and new characteristics emerge that could not be predicted from examining the parts that made it up. Perhaps the human body is a good example of this – we can measure the amount of simple substances in the body and even stack them all up together, so much water, so much iron, some potassium, sodium, a dash of chromium and lots of other elements. Yet it is the relationships between them in the living body that gives the miracle of a human being, with all its life, creativity and unexpectedness.

So coming back to the thought of how can I, as a tiny individual, make any difference? Now that I appreciate how connected all things are, I feel a kind of equality – I am part of this grand system just as much as any star or microbe, and I do affect it. It’s simply true that everything I do , or don’t do, is ‘noted’. So it matters what I think, what I do, and I don’t need to know the measure of it.

There is a sort of ‘surrender’ here, in the sense that the spiritual traditions understand this word; not as a giving up in a kind of despair and not caring what happens, but more a sense of giving to – an agreement that my energies may take their place in the unfolding of this great system of life on earth. In my own tradition this feels like ‘Thy Kingdom Come’, and perhaps a Buddhist would say something like, ‘May all beings be happy’.

This is a different feeling to getting out there and FIXING things. Certainly in terms of climate we do need to do things differently but there is a risk that this becomes mere mitigation – tweaking the system we are already in and thus perpetuating and protecting it. This kind of change within the current system is certainly essential – necessary, but not, I feel, sufficient. Is there a sense in which we can surrender to an emerging level of complexity that’s really different?



This may seem very vague talk, and it’s true, I don’t know where this is leading; but I was reassured to read about Theory U from the Presencing Institute, where the first stage is ‘holding the space’ and listening to what you are being called to do. In that space we do not know, and do not have to know. It feels to me that what’s required is to be open to what is emerging, and then to do what seems right within it.