The Gatekeepers/Agents are out in force right now - can you see them or do you see the woman in the red dress?

The most dangerous movie made - "You are a slave Neo!"

Have you taken the Red Pill?

Coping with the challenges of global climate disruption and the peaking of the rate of fossil fuel production will require behavioral change on a massive scale. There are many skills that will help individuals deal with this coming transition but none more central than the abilities to problem-solve creatively, plan and restrain behavior, and manage the emotions that result from the loss of an affluent lifestyle.

These abilities require a mental state called vitality.

Even in the best of circumstances, maintaining this state can be difficult and, to make matters worse, it seems that modern culture is conspiring to wear down this aspect of mental effectiveness. This article discusses mental vitality as being based upon the capacity to direct attention. Functioning effectively despite the distractions and challenges of an electrifying and changing world fatigues this capacity. Restoring one’s ability to direct attention is explained as a likely precondition to effective problem-solving, planning, and self-regulating, thus making such restoration essential for high levels of individual performance in general and for thoughtful coping in particular.

Fortunately, restoring mental vitality requires nothing more than commonplace activities in everyday environments. In fact, since everyday nature is sufficient, there may be no special advantage to time spent in spectacular environments. For instance, the simple activity of walking in natural settings, particularly walking mindfully, may be all that is needed for restoration. The article concludes with a series of specific prescriptions for enhancing our ability to cope with the coming transition, which can be summarized as simply to spend time walking outdoors, regularly, surrounded by and mindful of everyday nature.

I spent an hour today with Sophia, aged 18 months, wandering around our garden. She played with the cat. Pointed out the buds on the trees. Tripped on the gout weed shoots. Avoided Mildred's pile of poo. Rode in the wheel barrow. Ran up and down the ramp.

How do we prepare for what is to come? Get outside! Get a dog to walk. Come and sweep my leaves or mow my lawn!

New Skillset: Autonomy

I have observed over the years that a significant portion of the workforce has not been able to develop the skills to learn for themselves. What many lack are tools, methods and practices to learn and to take action. Autonomous learners face many barriers on the job, particularly the pervasive attitude that you must look busy or you’re not working.

We are trained early in life to look to authority for direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer or an expert with the right answer begins in our schools. John Taylor Gatto describes this in the seven-lesson schoolteacher.

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.

The message from many workplaces continues to be that good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do.

Harold nails the barrier that holds most people back today - we think that we need a lesson and a teacher. I recall the amazement that I felt as a 40 year old when I decided that I was going to teach myself physics. I found that I did not need anyone. That I did not need a lesson plan either. This was a revelation for me.

I also learned that the best approach was "play". I read what I liked and each book would point me to another. If I got stuck, I would try something else. I also found that time itself helped. That literally sleeping on stuff helped. Or even giving up for a while - maybe a year or two. I discovered the power of "processing".

But that is not what I or I bet you learned about learning.

If you have not tried to teach yourself some thing yet, I urge you to try. Pick something that you have always wanted to do but have told your self you could not. Robin has started to paint again aged nearly 60. From someone who has lived with Death as a close neighbor, she has found her desire to live grow stronger as a result.

I have found that when we become our own teacher and when we set out to learn what we want to that life returns in full flow.

Live to learn and learn to live.

Habit builds up energy over time. The repetition of any action–good or evil–generates power. Energy concentrates and accumulates. Bad habits become harder to break. But good habits do too.

If we think about collective endeavors, like team sports or military drills, the process of “training” is primarily the inculcation of habit. Our basketball coach makes us go to practice every day. He’ll bench us if we’re late or miss entirely. Why? Because he knows how powerful habit is, for good or ill. In the army we run Immediate Action Drills in case we’re ambushed or come under fire. Why? So we don’t have to think when trouble strikes. Habit will take over and save our lives.

In sports or the military (or any communal endeavor), discipline and habit are imposed on us from the outside. Some VP or senior staffer makes us do it. In the world or the arts and entrepreneurship, it’s different. We’re on our own there. We have to teach ourselves the right habits. Our discipline as artists must be self-discipline. We ourselves have to make ourselves show up, run those lay-up drills, do those wind sprints. We need to reward ourselves when we do well, and take ourselves to the woodshed when we drop the ball.

Steven Pressfield is one of my favorite writers. He writes also about being a writer. His main theme is overcoming resistance - the blocks that put in our own way. But this self sabotage seems to be widespread in more areas of our lives than writing.

I have taken this idea of habits to heart.

I am changing how I eat - creating new food habits

I am changing how I work - cutting out the extraneous - creating a new focus

I am changing how I work - I put in 3 hours of hard writing every day - the book is emerging for real now

Great advice!