Humans are infinitely resourceful by Beth Barany

I see people around me feeling hampered, feeling stuck, feeling like they’re in a prison. And now with lots of shelter in place orders, including where I live in the San Francisco Bay area, and now the whole of California, the need to stay put is real.

I’m also someone who hits the internal reset button at least once a day, if not more. That means I really feel lost, disoriented, rudderless, totally forgetting what I’m about, what I’m up to, and this feeling triggers a sense of despair and hopelessness.

So what can we do?

When one of my dear friends asked me in despair how I dealt with feeling stuck, feeling so sad, I told her,

“I ground, I connect with the earth, I walk, I move.”

The earth is here for us. She’s going nowhere. Yes, we may be ravaging our resources, without a thought for future generations. Global warming is real. I’m not here to debate that.

Maybe because I was a preemie, two and a half months early, and was born with a big yell, my mom says, I had to draw on whatever resources I had and that were given to me. I was in the incubator for the first two months of my life, fattening up, because when I was born I had no meat on my bones. I was only 2 1/2 pounds. (1.13 kg)

I feel like I have an inherent sense of “we can do this.” For me, perhaps it was a matter of survival to be super resourceful. These days people are calling it resilience.

All this to say, I believe we humans are infinitely resourceful. I have found myself saying that already a few times today to some friends.

I often ask myself:

• What can I do?
• What resources are out there?
• If I don’t know what resources are out there, I wonder: who can I ask?
• And: Who does know what resources are out there?
• Who could help access those resources?
• Where else could these resources be?
• More still: What are the resources inside I can access?
• What are the tools and skills and beliefs I can harness to help me now?
• What are the resources I haven’t even thought of or that I forgotten?
• Lastly: What else?

That last one is my favorite. I always ask my students, “What else?”

Let’s reach for what else is there and be surprised and infinitely curious about what we discover.

I’ve recently been watching and tremendously enjoying Star Trek: Picard, the new Star Trek series on CBS streaming. Picard often talks about curiosity as a tool that makes us human, that makes us so able to surmount overwhelming odds. I love that. A lot of the teachers I have studied with talk about curiosity as a wonderful place to be in.

What are you curious about? How can that help you and your current work in progress?

What else?

How can you be resourceful today?

Comment below and let me know.

♥