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ОглавлениеRESILIENCE: WHAT IS IT, EXACTLY?
The main theme of this book is that resilience is the key to prosperity. We like this word because it covers a lot of territory, but it can mean a lot of different things to different people depending on their age, location, wealth, or health. So it’s worth taking a moment to define what we mean by ‘resilience’ in order to make sure we share a common understanding.
The Oxford dictionary definition offers a good place to start:
re·sil·ience
noun
1. the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
2. the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
We all know people who are able to bounce back quickly from illness and others who aren’t. This is an example of resilience in health. But resilience also applies to nearly every aspect of our lives: to an investment portfolio, a home, a garden, a career, or a personal relationship.
Each of these things is said to be more resilient if it is able to weather stormy times (literally or figuratively) well.
To the textbook definition we can also add the concept of redundancy. Nature teaches us that resilience means having multiple ways of meeting any particular need.
Laying several eggs in a nest instead of just one is an example of resilience through redundancy. So is the demonstrated ability of Central Park squirrels to eat anything from acorns to cheese popcorn to hot dogs as compared to the giant panda which can only eat one food type, bamboo. Squirrels breed rapidly, pandas rarely. You might have noticed, there are a lot more squirrels than pandas in the world.
Similarly, wetlands can absorb a lot more water than a concrete ditch because wetlands have untold crevices and layers of spongy material. They act as a natural backup water storage system for storing the rains when they come.
Extending nature’s cue to our home, we note that having several methods and systems involved in heating and cooling your house makes you more resilient because you’re able to switch across energy fuel types if one becomes scarce or expensive. As an example, you could heat with gas, wood, and passive solar design, and cool with A/C and better window shades. Even better, reduce your need for heating and cooling by investing in thicker insulation throughout your home. With a hybrid system like this, you’ll spend less over the long haul and be able to more easily meet your family’s needs compared to someone who hasn’t made these investments.
So to the dictionary definition of resilience, we add:
3. Having multiple, redundant means of meeting one’s needs; having buffers and stored resources; and the ability to switch easily between different potential solutions.
This means that resilience cuts against our current so-called ‘modern’ or ‘superior’ way of life because so much of the developed world lifestyle revolves around micro-specialization, lean inventories, and just-in-time fulfillment. While dazzlingly cost efficient when everything goes as planned, these approaches are vulnerable to unexpected disruptions. Did you know that most cities only have between three and five days worth of food on hand in their grocery stores? If for any reason the constant stream of trucks resupplying those stores should halt, as happened to coastal New Jersey when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, then shortages, hunger, and social unrest can quickly follow.
Take a moment to ask yourself what items in your life you’re counting on being there in the future, especially in times of need. What would happen to you if they weren’t? How resilient are you?
THE 8 PRINCIPAL FORMS OF RESILIENCE
If your answer is Not as resilient as I’d like to be, don’t worry. Nearly everyone else on the planet is in the same boat. What matters more, what’s truly going to decide your fate, are the steps you take from here on out.
Which is why we’ve created this book. It provides tangible, practical guidance on exactly how to build greater resilience into your life.
But first, you need a more detailed, concrete understanding of the principal component parts of resilience.
We’re going to use a framework inspired by the work of AppleSeed Permaculture’s Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua (http://www.regenterprise.com), as well as the work of coaching pioneer Thomas Leonard, which we’ve modified to fit the purposes of this book. The framework is based on the observation that, for humans, resilience is attained through the build up of resources and capabilities—referred to in aggregate as capital – across 8 discrete categories of life. This capital has real value, and the capital in one category can usually be exchanged for capital in another. We’ll explain this idea further in a moment, just note for now that it’s an important feature.
Thinking of these components as capital to be earned, exchanged and invested is a very helpful—and ultimately very accurate—way to mentally understand the larger concept of resilience.
Financial capital is the one with which most people are most intuitively familiar. It’s our money, our stock and bond portfolios, the income we receive from our jobs, and our expenses and debts.
Social capital involves our private and public relationships. These are the relationships that nourish and guide us, the less intimate relationships we have with people with whom we exchange favors, and the connections that we can draw upon to meet our needs and offer our goods and services.
Living capital is the land, the trees, the water, the soil, and the animals around us. It’s our bodies as well – our health, fitness level, and physical abilities.
Material capital refers to tangible possessions such as homes, bridges, building materials, tools, stored food, computers, solar arrays, and cars.
Knowledge capital includes the things that we know and our expertise in applying that knowledge.
Emotional and spiritual capital is measured by our personal capacity to roll with the punches, to weather inner storms and outer dramas while remaining calm and centered.
Cultural capital is defined by the stories, songs, and habits of the local population we live among. Some communities react well to adversity and some do not. The difference is a measure of the cultural capital of each.
And finally we have time as a form of capital, which refers to the precious, ever-depleting commodity that we need to allocate wisely if we wish to inhabit a future filled with prosperity and abundance.
We like how this framework places equal emphasis on each of its eight components. It steers us away from the widely held and untrue belief that if you simply have a lot of money, or a well-stocked retreat property in the boondocks, you can handle anything that life may throw at you. To be truly resilient—to be prosperous—you need depth in all eight forms of capital.
So becoming more resilient may involve installing solar panels on your house, or spending time at an intensive spiritual retreat. Or it may involve an in-depth recalculation of your financial position or a new nutrition and exercise regime. For some it will mean acquiring new knowledge and skills, and others new tools to increase their emotional range and literacy, or perhaps a little bit of all of these. It all depends on your personal circumstances and goals.
To help you meet your goals, we’re going to employ the 8 Forms framework throughout the rest of the book. We’ll show how you can take a form of capital that you happen to have in relative abundance and exchange it for a form of capital that you lack. What might this look like? Perhaps using your professional expertise to create a second income stream, or trading money for compost. Again, your personal situation will define the specifics of the course you take.
To help you chart that course, we have dedicated a full chapter to each of the eight forms, filled with insights and best practices we’ve collected on how to build capital in each. All you need to do is follow the steps.
INSUFFICIENT BUT NECESSARY
When it comes to these steps, many of the individual ones you take will likely feel insufficient in and of themselves, yet it’s important to understand that they are necessary in aggregate.
For instance, swapping out the incandescent bulbs in your house for LED lights is completely insufficient to shift the larger trend of global warming. But, if all households do this, across many nations, a material impact will be made and therefore it’s necessary.
Likewise, storing extra food may be totally insufficient to feed your family for more than a few days or weeks. But it’s necessary that you do it anyways, because it might make all the difference in the wake of a natural disaster.
We’re going to recommend dozens of things, each of which may strike you as insufficient by themselves. Together, however, they’re completely necessary for prosperity, peace of mind, aligning your thoughts and actions effectively, and providing motivation to those who may look to you for guidance and leadership.
A JOURNEY, NOT A DESTINATION
We heartily recommend that you begin preparing as early as possible. The crises headed our way will be with us for a very long time, which means that becoming resilient is not a “one and done” objective.
The need to remain resilient will likely increase as the Three E trends arrive in force over next few decades, and the type of resilience required of us will likely shift as developments unfold.
In short: think of developing resilience as a journey rather than a destination.
In whichever areas of your life you choose to focus your efforts, ask yourself three basic questions:
1. What should I keep doing? Most of the things you already have in your life you are going to keep. Most of the things you already do, you are going to keep doing. Eating well, getting plenty of sleep, laughing and loving your family are all examples of things you are going to keep doing. It’s important to emphasize this because some people look at the changes coming and think we’re talking about having to drop everything and start a brand new, and less enjoyable life. In truth, 80% to 90% of the things that are already in your life will remain there.
2. What should I stop doing? Some things no longer make sense given the macro trends in play, and you should stop doing them right away because they no longer serve you or are increasing your expenditures and risks. Unearth the things you’re doing that you should stop. Stop eating foods that don’t nourish you. Stop wasting money, energy and other resources – especially time.
3. What new things should I start doing? Here’s where the magic begins. What are all the new things you need to do to align your actions with the new reality of the world around you? Depending on your circumstances and aspirations, you may start exercising more, or begin new practices of daily awareness and connection. Perhaps it’s time to get to know your neighbors better, or learn how to garden. We’ll help you figure out which ones to focus on first.
But keep in mind that your pursuit of all of these will be fluid. Some you’ll handle quickly; others may take years to get right. Just remember it’s a journey, and enjoy the progress you make while on it.
MIND THE GAP!
Taking these steps is also very important for emotional reasons.
If you ride the British tube, or subway, you’ll have heard the pleasant recording of a woman’s voice and/or noticed the signs telling you to ‘mind the gap.’ In this case the gap being referred to is a dangerous empty spot between the train and the platform.
Another anxiety-producing gap exists between what people value and what they do. The two are often not always aligned in our modern culture. In that gap between one’s thoughts and one’s actions is where anxiety and fear live and breed. Sometimes in debilitating, paralyzing amounts.
If you know that an earthquake is a distinct possibility where you live, and yet have done nothing to prepare, then you have a gap. Even if you don’t spend much time consciously dwelling on it, an uneasy situation has merely been suppressed and sits there, quietly gnawing at the edges of your consciousness, corroding your overall sense of well-being.
Add up enough of these gaps and you’ll end up more anxious and unsettled than you need to be. In our work, we often encounter people who are anxious or depressed without understanding why. Fortunately, in most cases the anxiety and stress can be relieved by simply closing the gap with a few simple actions—in our previous example, it might be as simple as putting together an earthquake response kit. Unfortunately, a lot of people won’t undertake even the simplest of steps.
Another example is that our just-in-time food delivery system could suffer a breakdown for any one of a dozen legitimate reasons. As mentioned, most cities and communities have only 3-4 days of food in the stores. A lot of people comfort themselves with the knowledge that the stores have never run dry before. Therefore a prolonged period without access to groceries seems far too remote a possibility to concern themselves with.
However we know that the fear of shortage lurks because every time there’s an approaching hurricane or big snow storm, people flock to the stores and load up “just in case.” Well, just in case of what? The answer is, on some level, everybody knows that losing access to food during a disaster is a possibility that can’t be entirely dismissed.
There that knowledge sits, just out of sight, like an unwanted guest until an approaching storm wakes it up and brings it to the surface. So what can we do about it? That’s easy; buy some extra long-term storage food that will last for 30 years without needing any additional attention and kick that worry right out of your brain. Your authors did exactly that a number of years ago, and the sense of peace it bought has paid itself back many times over compared to the relatively minor expense of the actual food.
Even better, there’s no way to lose. If we’ve concerned ourselves over a risk that never materializes (hopefully!) and we never have to actually use that stored food, then we’ll donate it to a food bank or other worthy outlet in three decades. We get to feel good about the donation and maybe even take a tax deduction in the process. No matter how you slice it, in terms of reduced anxiety, effort or money, it wasn’t wasted effort.
So our advice here is simple: if you want to reduce your fears, anxiety or concern about the future, don’t just sit there, do something!
SELFLESS NOT SELFISH
Another objection we hear to the prospect of preparing and becoming more resilient is that those actions could be seen as being selfish. Instead we see them as being selfless. Those who are not prepared when an emergency strikes are a drain on critical resources, while those who are prepared can be of assistance.
To be among those who can be in a position to render assistance, or at least need none of their own, means that your prior acts of preparation have selflessly removed you from the minus column and placed you on the plus side.
The first steps towards preparedness usually involve addressing your own needs or those of your loved ones, but many people then go beyond that and prepare for others who may not be able to do so, or have not done so, or maybe even will not do so.
But let us put an important qualifier on that; preparing before a crisis hits is responsible and selfless, but trying to accumulate necessary items during a crisis is an act of hoarding. We do not and never will advocate hoarding. Responsible preparations begin long before any trouble appears. Anything else stands a good chance of making things worse, not better.
The news has been full of stories of how people behave when scarcity strikes and they are generally not pretty. People in Boston fought over bottled water just hours after a water main broke in 2010. Nasty fights, too.
In Venezuela, as of the writing of this book, desperate people are attempting to buy anything and everything that might remain in the stores as their national currency devalues by the day. This is bringing forth all sorts of government-mandated counter measures that make it impossible for many families to buy essential items.
We mentioned earlier that time may well be your most valuable asset in becoming resilient. Be aware that many things that are easily available now may be difficult to obtain later. Now, before any big crises have hit, it’s very easy to pick up the phone, or click a mouse button, and have the big brown truck of happiness roll up to your doorstep a few days later. Everything you could ever want to buy is currently available and stores are abundantly stocked in most countries. However, we can imagine a large number of possible futures where such easy access to consumer goods and desired items is either much more difficult or impossible.
WHAT RESILIENCE IS NOT
In closing, it’s worth clarifying a few things that resilience is not.
Sometimes people think that our encouragement of becoming resilient is the same thing as being a “prepper” or survivalist. While we might recommend a few of the same items that you’d find in a prepper’s house, that’s where the similarity ends.
Our version of resilience and preparedness has nothing to do with living in fear, merely hoping to survive. It’s about thriving today—and tomorrow—whatever the future brings.
Being prepared, or resilient, is something that any prudent adult can and should aspire to. Like a boat captain who assures that his ship is properly equipped with a working radio, life vests, and life rafts, each of us can and should do the same for our own households.
And just as we’d never accuse a captain with proper safety equipment of being a pessimist or a crackpot hoping his boat will someday sink, it’s equally inappropriate to cast efforts towards resilience as somehow being unbalanced. To us, the exact opposite is true. Those who refuse to take even minimal efforts towards securing their own futures are exposing themselves and those around them to unnecessary risks.
Think of it like carrying fire insurance on a home. That’s socially acceptable, is considered prudent, and nobody ever implies that the owner of home who carries fire insurance is secretly hoping that their home burns down.
Now that we know what resilience is, and what it is not, let’s move deeper.
