Prelude

It all started at a Greenpeace skill-share. This is an event where Greenpeace folk get together to share skills!

Steve B was running a workshop which looked interesting and remains a valuable life lesson for anyone and is really simple.

“Take three A5 cards, on the top of each write, ‘Long Term, Medium Term ‘and ‘Short Term’.

Now write out all your goals, aspirations, what you want to achieve, for these time frames.”

This is actually quite a tricky thing to do, as most people don’t purposefully identify their goals, as Steve put,

“they’re just running around at 100mph going nowhere.”

Now it doesn’t matter if you change your ambitions, re-write your goals or forge ahead, so long as you periodically review them and continue to make progress or develop them.

Afterward the workshop, Janet and I compared notes.

Both our Long Term Goals were the same, to be live a sustainable lifestyle, being semi self sufficient, having own place and earning a small income from business or skills.

So we decided to do it. We had nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain.

That’s not strictly true, we had jobs and comfortable lives to lose, but we had both recently returned from spending a couple of years out of the Country. Having got sick of work and comfortable lives, basically being stuck in a rut, I decided to return to the Country of birth – Australia and met Janet over there.

We went our separate ways, but kept in touch and eventually both ended up back in England, throwing ourselves back into the kind of ruts we had  previously occupied.

So a conventional, safe lifestyle, is not something we place too much importance on and the more we learn about the way the World is turning, the less safe conventional lifestyles appear to us.

We now see safety and security as being self generated. The writing is most clearly on the wall for our civilisation and we’re far from convinced that society will continue to provide the cosy benefits everyone takes for granted.

Even if we do manage to steer a course humanity can later be proud of, a little bit of self reliance and resilience is hardly a waste of skills.

And that is one of the fundamental reasons for doing this blog, to try to steer a course for humanity. Many people are already looking for this and in fact achieving it, but how much of it is shared?

Hence this account. If we are to be pioneers, let’s share our story for others to follow, avoid or learn from.