Sustainability Schmustainability
What’s in a name? I’ve been banging on about sustainability for about 5 years now. Even so, I’ve always been allergic to the word. It never felt quite right.
And by that, I literally mean that it had an uncomfortable feeling associated with it. My perspective on this is that words carry intention, and each intention has a specific energy attached to it. This energy is either an energy that makes us open up to it or contract.
Say to yourself the word “hate”. And now, say “love”. Contemplate them, and notice whether you can feel anything different in your body. Is there any sense of opening or contraction?
When I reflect on these words, I get a different physical sensation in my belly. How about you? That’s our belly brain we are feeling. Try a few different other words.
When you utter ‘Sustainability’ to yourself, what do you feel? For some time I noticed that I felt contracted, and when I thought about it further, it fell short of describing the wonder and beauty that I have in mind which in every way surpasses the anthropological world that we created thus far. It was about preserving ‘the current state’, which felt static, rather than opening up to ‘what could be’; the future, the potential.
So it turns out, the words we use really matter. And the energy that words have is powerful and important. That’s why I think it has come time to banish a whole bunch of words that are not serving us. For the chop (in my opinion!) are ‘green’, ‘eco’ and ‘sustainability’. I’m even feeling pretty sketchy about the term ‘climate change’. Which if we are invoking negative energy with this word, we better be careful - because we’ve been using it a hellava lot over the past decade!
The term “regeneration” popped up on my horizon a couple of years ago, and this certainly generated better ‘feelings’ in my belly brain, but it also raised feelings of ‘lack’ or maybe a sense of ‘barrenness’. This is because every word has a “shadow”. When one word is uttered, its companion “opposite” word is also presenced. I also noticed that I only was able to associate it with the environment and was unable to relate it to human activity.
A few years ago, I wrote an article for World Sweet World called Sustainability, Schmustainability. It was at that time that I planted a seed for a new term. Its taken all this time for the fruit to ripen and over the weekend, I plucked a juicy well formed and nutritious word that gives me all that I need to help guide my action as a citizen and social innovator:
‘Thrivability’.
It really does it for me. I can see it applied to all aspects of society - from business to health, from education through to ecology. I could imagine using it when talking to climate skeptics, politicians or greedy businessmen, and I could imagine using it and knowing that it captures and articulated what is deep in my heart abou the world that I am striving to bring about. I also think its got legs - it is a term I hold in my heart and know that it will serve me for a lifetime.
If you like it, take it and use it. I’d be interested to hear how it comes across to you and to the people you use it with in your conversations.
