I read and listen to a lot of other people’s points of view, but when it comes to expressing my own first-hand experiences and ideas, I’m often lost for words. They’re there somewhere at the back of my mind, swirling around muddily with an occasional flash of gold that tends to disappear back into the murk as I stir. This blog is partly about dredging up whatever lies concealed there and removing enough of the muck to be able to see what it is – perhaps even get it into working order.

It’s also about taking the time to reflect on and respond to what I read and hear. My experience and behaviour is inevitably filtered through a lot of other people’s theories, models and narratives – many no doubt so familiar as to be unconscious, others quite recently and deliberately adopted. I’m getting concerned about how many ideas I take on wholesale without questioning and find myself regurgitating as if they were my own opinion (though without conviction), simply because I haven’t taken the time to internally debate them. Through writing this I intend to begin redressing the balance between taking in others’ stories and formulating my own.

Although I want to take time here, to breathe deeper and look deeper, Between Worlds is born from a sense of urgency – a sense that knowing my own mind is not just nice, but crucial. That for too long I have stayed quiet and allowed bad things to happen by default, because I haven’t worked out what to say or do (or even what to think) about them. And allowed good things to go unappreciated and untended for the same reason.

The backdrop I see the little drama of my life playing out against – at least as I understand it at the moment – is the unfolding “triple crunch” of economy, energy and environment, and the attendant human tragedy and tragicomedy. And, simultaneously, the burgeoning information economy, in which more voices than ever are accessible (leading perhaps to an increased awareness of our individual ability to choose and shape our own stories) as well as more ways than ever to get your own voice heard. The urgency of articulating my own standpoint in this context was crystallised for me by this recent quote from Sharon Astyk:

“…as things begin getting difficult, more alternatives, many of them probably really bad, will start emerging. The reality is all of life is about how we tell our stories. The story of peak oil and climate change, of our financial crisis are already being told by a lot of people in a lot of different ways. Dominant narratives will emerge, and some of them will not be productive – in fact, some of them will be downright dangerous, as in Britain where far-rightists are already using peak oil as a justification for the implementation of policies. There is going to be a vast grab for explanations and visions of the future.”

I’m realising this is actually a specific instance of another quote that’s been a favourite for a while, an explanation of part of the creative process: “In tough situations, multiple behaviours compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviours and ideas” (Robert Epstein). I have an abiding fascination with what I think of as “the evolution of ideas” (really more than ideas – also the behaviours, structures and cultures that perhaps grow in a relationship of mutual influence with ideas). But in the scenario described by Astyk above, the “tough situation” isn’t just a fertile opportunity for creativity and innovation as Epstein’s quote implies, but also a precarious interlude when failure to connect the dots of a positive potential future allows a competing negative one to constellate.

I also feel there’s a longer game playing out here than what’s usually considered to be the timeframe of the “crunch”. The longer game is summarized in this from Richard Tarnas’ “The Passion of the Western Mind” (which I’ll quote at length as it’s such an apt description of issues I’ve struggled with daily throughout adult life…)

“Looked at as a whole, the extreme fluidity and multiplicity of the contemporary intellectual scene can scarcely be exaggerated. Not only is the postmodern mind itself a maelstrom of unresolved diversity, but virtually every important element of the Western intellectual past is now present and active in one form or another…

“The postmodern era is… without consensus on the nature of reality, but it is blessed with an unprecedented wealth of perspectives with which to engage the great issues that confront it. Still… the practical benefits of its pluralism are repeatedly undercut by stubborn conceptual disjunctions. Despite frequent congruence of purpose, there is little effective cohesion… Certainly such a context provides less hindrance to the free play of intellectual creativity than would the existence of a monolithic cultural paradigm. Yet fragmentation and incoherence are not without their own inhibiting consequences. The culture suffers both psychologically and pragmatically from the philosophical anomie that pervades it. In the absence of any viable, embracing cultural vision, old assumptions remain blunderingly in force, providing an increasingly unworkable and dangerous blueprint for human thought and activity.”

It was that last sentence that inspired me to title this blog Between Worlds. I’m involved in a number of projects (to do with Transition Towns, complementary and open currencies, sustainable design, community engagement, social enterprise and the informal economy) which – in conjunction with several other persistent themes that have taken up residence in my head, to be explored here at a later date – hint at an underlying coherence yet to fully emerge… a kind of network of interdependence which means that, roughly speaking, each element would be strengthened if the others were stronger, but while they remain weak a kind of catch-22 situation is in place. I’m finding that “old assumptions” do indeed “remain blunderingly in force” in many blatant and subtle ways in myself and others, and fear that if the principles of the emerging coherence aren’t articulated and consistently practiced, too many efforts could be sidetracked into superficially similar but actually outmoded forms of action, and / or the whole coherence could be killed off by attempting to fit within “unworkable and dangerous” old frameworks of thought and behaviour.

So the “worlds” I find myself between are on the one hand a frustratingly dysfunctional old one – which I mainly experience in the form of bureaucracies, distrust and aggression, misleading and limiting language, money shortages, restrictive social norms, and other self-imposed or collectively imposed barriers to progress (Blake’s phrase “mind-forg’d manacles” comes to mind) – and on the other a hopeful, but dimly delineated, future one in which… dare I imagine… our minds have perhaps forged a file to cut through the manacles, and our full potential is released?

Between Worlds is also a shorthand for various other dualities. Firstly, the struggle to find coherence between my personal experience and the various models of the world I absorb and invent, the jarring of which is often painful. Other pairings I’ll explore here may include such classics as form and flux, masculine and feminine, map and territory, money and value, love and fear. I’ll also focus on utopian and dystopian futures (with a preference for those on either side that look reasonably likely) and attempt to help bring into being a viable and enjoyable one.