Geoff Lawton on Permaculture and Time

This is a transcript of a video of Geoff Lawton talking about Permaculture and Time. I notice an increasing amount of people sharing this frustration which Geoff Lawton describes, and hope it can inspire others as it did me. (I'm fascinated by the idea of time being something relative, something we can expand.) See the original video on YouTube (I found the video distracting, therefore the transcript):

"It’s a rather unusual experience to be living in one life and yet believing that you could live another way, and a more sustainable way. Permaculture is something that allows you to realize that that alternative way is very meaningful.

So you want to live this meaningful life and yet you daren’t step over the line to be fully committed. You’re living one way but wanting to live a completely different way. It’s as if you’re dying every day and you’re kinda scared. And it’s not pleasant to have these sort of psychological deaths every day. It just gets frustrating and boring and I’m just fed up with being scared and not making that full commitment. I’d rather just step over the line and go forward in a way that’s meaningful, in a way that makes at least an attempt to establish change.

That first step is quite terrifying, but once you’ve made it, you actually find the next step on is much much easier and from there it gets easier and it gets quicker. What turns from a step, to a stride, to a pace, turns into a run, turns into a charge. In a charge mentality, you’re charging towards something you see as the enemy, or the thing that you disapprove of and what you want to change. You have no fear, because you’re in a rage, in a charge and you’re moving forward. And at that time you start to function. And you never have fear again. Fear completely drops away.

Obviously we all have to face the one death we have to face, but you don’t have to die every day anymore. You start to function, you start to move forward, you start to be meaningful. And there’s something that’s even more valuable that actually happens. Time appears to expand in the moment; the moment is the engaging time that we’re in right now. Time is very very large when all of your life has been meaningful. When your life has been meaningless and you don’t really enjoy it, time in the moment goes very very slowly. And when you look back on it, it’s gone very quick. Once you step over the line and you start to operate efficiently and you start to move in a meaningful direction, you’ve actually expanded your time within your life and that’s priceless. You can’t buy that.

You have to actually engage in the activity. You have to find the meaningful activity that creates that effect within your lifetime. If I could explain that clearly enough, I think that would make permaculture as a design science way to live an evolution in thinking. Probably the fastest expanding epidemic and we would get to a tipping point very quickly. It allows you to start the journey from where you are, to where you want to be and enjoy the journey. You feel honorable, you feel moral, you have humility and you still feel like you have dignity.

Permaculture allows us to move forward and discover our sense of appreciation of creation and existence. Whatever form you like to appreciate that in or whichever way you’d like to see it, it gives you that strength to see things clearly and it is very very practical as a base level. Your clarity of vision, of the existence that you’re in, the feeling that you are central to the universe. And you understand the energy that flows around you, so you suddenly have a meaningful way of seeing the world. That is something that controls your fears and makes you feel very very secure. And as you share that with other people and as other people share it with you, you feel more stable, you feel more secure and ensured that everything is gonna be OK."