I've been forced to simply observe this weekend, a cold has turned into a painful right side when I breathe.
It felt a good time to delete my Instagram app (ok, I was advised to do this) and, removing emails from my phone at the same time, I lay myself on the sofa with a book.
It was hard. My hand twitched towards my phone more times than I'd like to admit and my focus for a book was non-existent.
Instead I simply stared out the window at the trees.
The feeling I should be doing something productive, even if just listening to a podcast or reading a book took a while to ease.
What's the point?
People are feeling stuck.
People are feeling stuck.
With a rapid acceleration of the problems we are facing comes an acceleration of people desperate to find solutions and in that urgency, we don't know what to do.
One of the biggest adaptations required for these times is learning to properly interact with each other again, to be in community together.
And by this we don't mean the reactive, dopamine driven social media communities.
We mean deep and meaningful interactions, time properly spent together with long silences between points made.
What's my point?
Observe and Interact is the first of the twelve principles of permaculture and is the concept that one should observe the land they are on for a full year, taking notes on the light shifts in every season, what animals visit, where bad weather may hit the worst. It is only after that time you should begin any work on it.
When applied to people, the idea is the same - we don't give enough time to simply observe each other or ourselves in different situations. We want to skip to the solutions.
We see this with all the courses being created and sold. We want to solve the 'problem', fast.
While there is a place for this - for example teaching updates to a piece of software - humans are not machines and their problems are not all the same.
The Portal Collective came about for three reasons we're covering here.
This post doesn't have a point.
My staring out the window at the trees didn't have a point but I came away much better.
On the Sunday we sat at the bottom of the garden in the sun, which we rarely do.
Pete started to notice strange shapes flying across the sky.
Cobwebs.
There were hundreds it seemed, some flying really high. We looked it up. Spider ballooning. We watched them in awe.
There was no point in watching them. Except there was every point to watching them and we came away different.
You can read more about how to have an experimental learning experience created for you on The Portal Collective, as well as explore what we have already created here.
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