Regenerative Thinking: Grief, Love and the World We Are Entering. Part One

I have had to reset and become quieter to work with intention...whilst it was exciting being in spaces communicating my skills and experience, I lost sight of what words we should be talking about.

Two words I hear in my own growth and in every conversation, every piece of research, every room I walk into...Grief. And love. As a coach I think we need to sit with that for a moment.

We are grieving for a life that felt abundant that everything was possible, a time of exuberance, of possibility, of safety. We now feel lost, angry, at nature, at systems, at each other and we have stopped communicating these two words.

The truth is we are angry at how we have been blindsided by greed, structure and forgotten about the most important relationship we have and that is with Nature and Mother Earth.

She is not our enemy, she is exhausted, burning out and she is overwhelmed. Leaders you are are not listening.

Do you remember the film Wall-E? It came out years ago and we watched it, enjoyed it and moved on.

But that film was not entertainment, it was a warning. It showed us exactly where we were heading if we kept consuming, kept disconnecting and kept outsourcing our lives to systems that do not sustain us.

We just were not ready to hear it.

That is the thing about forward thinking. It rarely gets recognised in the moment.

And then there is the word sustainability itself. We have overused it the same way we overconsume and overcommunicate everything.

It has become a throwaway word, dropped into strategies and boardroom presentations without any real understanding of what it means.

Sustainability is not a word. It is a circular model of life where everything interlinks, just as the roots of a tree connect to everything around them in order to grow.

Nothing exists in isolation and everything has its connection.

And we have spent decades making that disconnect. From nature, from community, from ourselves. And now we are feeling the consequences of it in every area of our lives.

From a systems thinking perspective, something strikes me again and again. When we talk about food, productivity and health, the answers always come back to the same place.

Back to simpler living. Back to farming, to tight communities and real connection. Back to the way we used to live before the vast supply chains of distraction pulled us away from what actually sustains us.

We can make all the films and write all the documentaries. But we have to ask ourselves honestly who it is for and where is the actionable change for regenerative thinking?

Is it to create genuine awareness? Or is it feeding our own eco-anxiety? Are we performing concern rather than creating action?

There is a difference and that difference matters enormously right now...

Continues in Part 2