"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete"
Instead of protesting and demanding changes from our errant parents, we must initiate these changes ourselves. It is time for us to grow up. In doing so we step out from under those parents - the system that currently defines our relations for us - and take control ourselves.
We all have skills to offer each other. We may, at the moment, only do this in the form of a professional relationship. In other words, we offer our skills and get paid for them. The professional relationship has its virtues, but also its limitations - limitations that are critical at this point in time.
A friendship-based contract (contact) is one that is free from these limitations. Instead of offering our services for a fee, we offer them for free.
Friendship-based relations could be a crucial way for us to transition away from the current system and towards something more healthy. Professional relationships have a certain tendency to them - they take us in certain directions.
They are infused with the logic of the current - dysfunctional - system, and so keep us within the old story.
The friendship-relationship is a space in which we are free to do what we want, in which we can redefine our relations and write a new story.
In concrete terms, we must find ways to offer our skills to each other for free. This will mean making sacrifices, something our generation must accept. These sacrifices may mean accepting a simpler lifestyle, a life without as many 'things' in it. It may mean foregoing certain luxuries, or novelties. Those generations that went before us were unwilling to make the sacrifices that were required of them, and so the baton is passed to us. Will we have the strength to do what they could not, or will we, once again, pass the burden downwards?
There is no way that we can transition to a more sustainable and healthy world without making sacrifices. Yet through sacrifice we grow as people...
1. Get a skill. Choose something and specialise.
2. Establish yourself
3. Examine your lifestyle. Think about what your core necessities are and what can be sacrificed for the greater good.
4. Begin to offer your services for free. Devote a certain percentage of your professional time to community service. Offer your services on a non-professional friendship-oriented basis. Convert professional to non-professional: distance to friendship. Both parties are made aware of the arrangement.
5. Keep assessing your lifestyle. Continue to weigh up what you can sacrifice in order to convert more professional time to non-professional time.
6. Aim to pare things down to the minimum you need in order to sustain an acceptable lifestyle. As you make more changes to your lifestyle your idea of what is 'acceptable' will also change. Draw what you need from the system in order to support your lifestyle but otherwise aim to devote as much time and energy as possible to using your skills in a friendship-based gift-giving way.
The more each of us do this the more we - collectively - will move away from the system that separates us and the closer we will draw towards each other. In this way ties are reestablished, communities rebuilt.
Trust will resurface as a result of our non-professional relationships. From within the walls of professionalism, we can emerge into a new story.
................................................................................................................................................................................
Related posts:-
A Circle of Gifts
Guiding Fiction
Lost Tribe
Community Service
Carry Each Other
Know your place
Life Support
Walter
Set it Free
Open Source Approaches
Sell Out
