How to muddle along, threading beads...
An essay on activism, self-sustenance and changing the world, one bead at a time.
Spending New Year’s Eve alone and waking without a hangover are not ‘life wins’ I had imagined for myself as a young person. And yet, quiet time without distraction, is exactly what my soul needs to reflect upon whatever the hell is going on in ‘the big picture’.
It’s been a year (plus) of global and local struggles between power and oppression, amplified by our very loud voices expressing our very vehement opinions on what could/should make things better. The list of conflicts is way too long and complex to summarily catalogue, but those that have most impacted my work and daily life are rooted in constructs (often sexed and gendered) that are codified by ongoing colonising drives to destabilise and eliminate whatever is ‘other’.
Meanwhile, people who care (often members of marginalised queer, disabled, BIPOC communities ourselves) join campaigns and protest movements to assert ‘our’ perspectives over ‘theirs’ - the oppressors, the colonisers, the state etc.
Sometimes we lash out horizontally at people and/or organisations that are tackling the problems from a different perspective to our own.
Regardless of bipolar political alignment, we ALL assume we are on the ‘right’ side of history. Whether we shed literal or metaphysical blood and tears, and whether we’re punching up, down or sideways, it seems to me our efforts sometimes perpetuate our trauma and sometimes make it worse.
What is the meaning of this busy, painful life and was the year past really bigger, busier or worse than those before that? Or is it simply that we’re predisposed to focus on recent traumas more than those that we survived before? And what about strategy – is there a better way to work towards more peaceful lives, and a world where difference is accepted? And, more immediately, why should you invest energy in reading this treatise or listening to me?
No doubt this body that I walk around in, and the mind that (sometimes) accompany it, afford me certain privileges, affording reflection. Firstly, I have time off work (aka I have a job that keeps me, and the kids fed, with a roof over our heads). That also means I have time to write today, without needing to hustle to survive.
I’m also old(er), meaning I have a great number of journeys around the sun to reflect upon. Well into my second half, I reckon I can claim that age buys some (qualified) wisdom. I’ve lived in several different identities (queer, filmmaker, parent, trans, academic, NFP CEO) and alongside white privilege and the social capital wrought by higher education, I have some insight into stigma and being othered. I also have neurodivergent superpowers – including capacity for empathy, mixed with alexithymia. My recipe for muddling along also, unsurprisingly, involves indulging a few ‘special interests’.
So, these are my credentials… you’re free to ponder or dismiss my ten cents worth. I’ve been battered several times these last years by call outs and public shaming and IMHO nothing here is worth cancelling me over - but that’s no guarantee it won’t trigger a response. In any case, I live with an internal beast that nags me with ‘you should be better and/or different’ perpetually, so that pretty much goes without saying. I’ve learned the art of heartfelt apology when I get things wrong, and it’s easier if I can find some space for self-growth in whatever communication has gone awry. I can’t avoid the human need to connect, share - and risk backlash. As the proverb states: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Our strategies for ‘better’ are not helping
There have always been tensions between utopian ideals and pragmatism. Striving for the best that we can be (as individuals and global communities) versus working with what we’ve got; starting where we are (read the legendary Pema Chodron, 1994). Sometimes striving can be interpreted as serving capitalism, or unrealistic personal perfection; sometimes it can manifest as ‘burn the house down’. Pragmatism, and working for change within imperfect systems, can seem too slow, especially in light of environmental destruction and forests on fire.
As a youth, I thought working with ‘as good as it gets’ was resignation, a sign of giving up hope. Now I see that, while there can always be ‘more’, and that things can/should be better, being present to the status quo also has great value. Taking time to reflect allows for the possibility that 'better' is sometimes just 'different'.
To be brutally honest, we don’t have any other option than starting from here because all we really have is right now. The present ‘just is’.
Of course, strategies for living that are constructed as binary oppositions – utopian/pragmatic, fast/slow, destroy the system/erode from within - can absolutely co-exist. For the last couple of years my mantra has been ‘both/and’ (see Deleuze, Kierkegaard and many others on non-duality in comparative philosophy). In terms of cultural change, I believe we need ALL of the strategies. If we consider an ecosystem in which both Molotov cocktails and volatile AGMs have value, we can leverage one disruption to advance another.
But all too often we’re trapped in the paradigm or expectation that one approach is better than the other. When we yell at people who are walking an alternate path we not only sap our own energies, we contribute to our collective trauma. There’s a Buddhist teaching about holding on to anger, evoked through throwing hot coals and getting burned.
When I look around my trans and queer communities at the intersections of race, class, disability, and trauma, I see dire need of a salve, salvage, and salvation.
Hopefully I’ve made a convincing case for accepting a variety of approaches to ‘being better’ in pursuit of social change… so how can we enact that, in our bodies and our brains? How do we tweak our worthy pursuits to do less harm, to engage with greater compassion?
Why do we keep struggling? In the end we die.
Dear reader, allow me a slight change of direction now, with a provocation: is it futile to fight for change; to seek particular experiences, or aspire to specific emotions, in past, present or future?
At our moment of death, if indeed we are cognisant of it, we’re alone. Only we get to decide whether it was all worth it. We hope our loved ones make judgement and stories of our lives, that align with our own, but we can’t control that.
Perhaps it is in recognition of our limited control, that in life, we grasp at every available opportunity to make meaning. We want proof that this life has merit, and is valuable to others. Perhaps in an effort to increase our own merit, we sit in judgment of others, even deriding the ubiquity of common repeating patterns. Further, we invest in principles (like justice and knowledge) and systems (like law and education) that give our judgements structure (like prisons and schools) to plump up and reinforce the significance of our lives. Isn’t this ultimately a lot of ‘busy’ business? What difference do our labours improving these principles, systems and structures really make, especially if the struggle to so is so painful?
Gathering beads of ‘right now’ experience
Imagine your life as a necklace, strung together from beads of treasured memories. As we thread the cotton we might dream of pretty patterns and the best possible future finished piece of neck decoration.
Wikipedia tells me that: ‘Necklaces often serve ceremonial, religious, magical, or funerary purposes and are also used as symbols of wealth and status, given that they are commonly made of precious metals and stones.’
I reckon it’s the string of ‘right now’ beads that make the necklaces of life.
I don’t think there are ‘right moments’ to accrue, or ‘right words’ to describe them… just ways of being IN experience. Joy, sadness, stress and anxiety, like the experiences that provoke them, are transitory, but we accrue these; each fleeting bubble is a bead.
Perhaps we can attempt to arrange our necklaces with narratives that bring more or less pleasure or pain? Psychoanalysis holds that analysis and de-construction of suppressed memories can untangle threads, and beads can be restrung into more appealing patterns… but we can’t deny the existence of the beads and the thread..
While the necklace is BOTH linear AND a series of fragments, there is a beginning middle and end tracing our journey from birth to death and in the end we die, and our necklaces could end up in a market bazaar or a precious collection in a museum. No difference.
So how do we keep living, trying for improvement that may or may not be successful let alone permanent, alongside suspicion of our meaninglessness, in sight of our failures, our wasted efforts, our futility?
My recipe for muddling along
When someone asks how I’m going, I often respond with ‘muddling along’. It’s an acknowledgment that I’m not perfect, or a perfect powerhouse of productivity but I’m generally invested in giving things my best, having a crack even when I risk failure. It’s the only antidote I’ve found to support ‘doing the [exhausting] work’ of social change, over and over again.
I'm hoping that the pattern I’m creating in my necklace, has resonance with other patterns, reflecting a narrative of community care and shared hope.
I regularly spend one day per week at my ‘brave retreat’ – an old caravan in my friends’ back paddock an hour out of the city. In 2023 I spent the best part of a year building a shelter for the caravan and a stash of tools and wood. I’ve tried to keep plants alive but the wind, baking sun, lack of water, rabbits, sheep or kangaroos have bettered me. This land that is not mine, it is unceded by the Wadawurrung people, and currently plagued by African boxthorn, blanket weed, artichoke thistle, and serrated tussock.
At the end of last year, while I was having a mild nervous breakdown, I paid a local farmer to dig a hole with his digger so I could start work on a natural or ‘organic’ pool. I dream of an off-grid oasis with a deep middle pool where I can swim on the spot, with ankles tethered to a jetty. The shallow perimeter is surrounded by plants and their roots filter the water, while the sun powers air bubbles, keeping the water moving. It will attract frogs, bugs, birds (and snakes, algae, leaks) and is simultaneously hopeful and unhinged. It’s a low budget science project that distracts me when work or the world or family are hard… and is wrought with risks of failure.
I got obsessed with organic pools during lockdown. I planned to recycle some elements of an above ground chlorinated pool I built back in the day at another haven, in Adelaide. Back then I learned from YouTube how to plumb water so that it flows upwards towards roof warmth and downwards towards hours of splashing, whirlpools, and family fun. The learning was painful but also brought great joy. This appears to be the way my neckless is threaded. I feel the fear and make the crazy dreams happen anyway.
Throughout 2024 I had sleepless nights wondering whether duck poo would overload the water with phosphorous, or whether evaporation was a bigger problem than leaks. Frankly these nightmares are preferred over endless re-hashing what I should have said to a colleague, or better phrasing for a press release. Some friends have pointed out that I might have a problem with switching off, and they might be right.
On the last day of the year, I had 13,000 litres of rainwater delivered and felt a surge of triumph. Over the next 24 hours the water level dropped slowly but steadily, and my gut clenched with the possibility of a leaky liner. I tried four different mechanisms to seal the liner around the jetty poles and know this is a weak point. My internal optimist hopes that the water is stretching out all the wrinkles in the liner and soaking in to the clay/sand/stone mix of the plant area. I head off to town to pick up the water plants I’d been growing in buckets at home for the last six months.
By New Year’s Eve the water had dropped to the join-point of jetty and liner. Meaning most of my perforated pipe and bubble water towers were marooned above water. What to do? Not exactly ‘nothing’ but… I shrugged and got on with distribution of plants. And test swim!
I have a video of me test recording my entry to the pool from the jetty. Is the camera at the right angle to see me jump off the pallet/jetty AND swim? Sadly, ready for swimming without glasses, I couldn’t really see the phone properly and didn’t press record. I stripped to boxers for inactive camera and jumped in. It was warm!
Today I swam naked and spent an hour rearranging plants and air-hoses at new positions in the deeper area.
I realise that this pool, like the last one, will never be ‘done’. I have conceived of another needy child, demanding ongoing maintenance and improvement against the possibility of it ever becoming a dusty dry or stagnant testament to failed dreams.
Often, I spend my 24 hour off-grid allocation cursing that there is no such thing as universal size of pipe, screw, glue, timber or sealant. I begrudge the endless alleys of hardware stores offering bewildering choice. But I have applied my PHD skill set astutely to preparatory online research, putting aside assumptions of discipline – plumbing, gardening, electrical - or aisle number with clear descriptions of objectives directed at carefully chosen well-informed advisor. I’ve also learned to enjoy ‘mate’ and more recently ‘champ’ when it gets thrown my way. It still makes me smile when I forget that I have a beard.
On New Year’s Day as I blissed out in my water gardening zone, I feel it is all worth it - the hard work at work and being distracted from work, healing from the past, stocking energy bars for future battles.
Here, in isolation, I’m present, in my body, at peace.
Sure, I could have saved the money towards a mortgage, or expanded the kids’ horizons with international travel and a REAL holiday… I could have invested some energy in scrolling the apps on a quest for sunset walks and romance, but to be brutal, after work, I have precious little energy remaining for precious friends and family let alone new beginnings.
Instead, I have this little brave retreat, humble, untidy and always a work in progress. I’ve made a place to be. And a space to share. The few friends who can be bothered with the drive and the four farm gates can connect with me at ‘my best’ here.
Will this recipe work for anyone?
I’m wary of the new year’s tendency to hold forth and advocate for personal and/or collective improvement. I am different to you. What works for me, probably won’t be exactly right for you. However, I am also not wholly ‘other’.
For my necklace to serve as allegory in this narrative, our individual life decorations also hang together to provide trace of our collective existence, documenting changes in shared patterns over time. They are evidence of cumulative experience, our histories of struggle and triumph.
My goal is to keep threading ‘happy enough’ beads while doing the work, hopefully leaving the earth just a bit better for my efforts. Whether that’s an imperfect experiment with an organic pool, slowly reclaiming space for indigenous flora, fauna, storytelling, and lived experience or making room in the census for documenting non-binary post-colonial gender. You may want something different, something more. Do you want a market bazaar or museum security for your neck decoration, postmortem? Do you know what, it doesn’t really matter because you probably won’t get to choose…
I wholly support whatever approach you take to threading your necklace and hope that we can risk failure and random unco-ordinated patterns together, comrades in arms, with compassion for our differences and affinities.
A flock of galahs try out the pool, and take flight when they see me.
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