The Great Humbling S1E8: 'How's your humbling?'

Why we’re recording this final episode of Series One at night, as our children sleep

Reviewing the journey we’ve been on together since late March...

1. Mapping Lava...where are we now on the emerging sensemaking and stories? 
2. Can we afford an economic recovery?
3. Towards a language of longing…
4. Bestiary of metaphors
5. World turned upside down 
6. As deep as culture
7. Cultivation of conspiracy

David Fell’s Eleven More Things: ‘WE MUST LOOK AFTER OUR KEY WORKERS’ 

“There are ways of identifying the things that really need doing; and these things that really need doing need to be done by people who we can call key workers.  If we don’t look after them, we are in deep s**t: there’ll be no food, or no power, or no money, or no houses, or no healthcare, or no families, and there certainly won’t be any of the comforts and luxuries we’ve come to expect.

Do you remember that time in 2020 when everything nearly fell apart?  When all those people died and the only people who kept going were all those key workers? We must look after our key workers.”

Storytelling adventures with Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘The ones who walk away from Omelas’ and Ernest Callenbach’s ‘Ecotopia’...

Alan Lane, artistic director of Slung Low, a theatre company who relocated a few years ago to The Holbeck, the oldest working men’s club in Britain, in Leeds – and his very powerful post about their experience of being the ‘ward lead’ for social care referrals in their part of the city over the past ten weeks.

The story we’re telling is that no one in our community will have to go without food during this time and the only way to tell that story well is to make it true.

Rutger Bregman’s ‘Humankind’ in which the Dutch historian argues that the assumption that people are inherently Hobbesian, and need authority, control and power to manage their baser instincts is fundamentally not true

The Humbling as a lesson that will be endlessly repeated. Until it is learned. 

The pandemic as only a ‘warning shot’ (Inuit artist Taqrilik Partridge) of the real storm ahead 

Shakespeare “Is this the promised end? Or image of that horror?”

Churchill  “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”