Here is a narration of my latest ‘a calm presence’, inspired by this quote from Indy Johar’s May 12th, 2025 Substack posting, The Stickiness of Want - And the Systemic Amnesia Behind It :
This posting was written while traveling in India and Japan in April and May of 2025.
The narrated version was recorded in one take on May 21, 2025 on the streets of Hakone-Yumoto, Japan with the Haya River and lively birdsong in the background.
See the Transcript of this episode for the complete posting.
First, I recommend subscribing to Indy Johar’s Substack, which consistently inspires and motivates me to keep going.
Thank you, Indy.
For example, on May 12th, 2025, in The Stickiness of Want - And the Systemic Amnesia Behind It :
Indy writes :
We—you, me, everyone in this room—are the last generation with viable agency before degenerative volatility locks us into conflict and collapse. The window is painfully small but gloriously open.’
As a subscriber to a calm presence and a listener of conscient podcast, you’ve heard these kinds of warnings and projections before.
But it bears repeating, again and again, because Indy’s shrinking window of time is painfully true and its consequences on future generations are unbearable and unimaginable.
Indy provides further context in his posting:
We’re living in a moment of converging constraints, yet most public and private imagination seems to operate as if the future will simply be a redecoration of the past—with slightly more technology, slightly greener energy, and slightly better intentions.
In other words : we living in a bubble that is about to burst.
Strangely, I found Indy’s posting about systemic amnesia quite uplifting.
It reminded me of a call to arms from Emily Johnson’s essay, Loving a Vanishing World which I used in episode 1 of the conscient podcast :
If you can retire, then the world needs you, and it needs you right now, because anything that we do this year or next is worth ten of the same thing ten years from now.
Emily’s essay was published on May 10th, 2019, some 6 years ago and remains valid today.
My point is that western societies (and beyond) seem resigned —by default — to the inevitability of ‘degenerative volatility that locks us into conflict and collapse’.
Western societies (of which I am complicit), also seem willing to pay the price for this massive ecological overshoot, quite unaware of the real price.
One day we’ll wake up and that painfully small window will have closed…
This being said, this does not exclude other possibilities not yet imagined but is discouraging nonetheless.
I wrote about this dilemma in ‘climate amnesia’ :
Sometimes, I think we should all just live our lives to the fullest and not worry about all this stress. You know, ‘que sera sera’. But then I think about the horror of a 3C+ warmer planet and the needs of future generations of humans and more-than-humans : especially in places like Delhi, India, where summer heat can reach up to 50C…
I experienced 45C heat in Delhi, which was unforgettable.
Thankfully there are countless efforts underway to understand our predicament and suggest actions.
Just this week I received ‘An EcoGather newsletter all about Peace’ by Emily Shaljian and The EcoGather Team at Sterling College in Vermont :
In the face of the countless crises presented to us in both a physical and digital reality, avoidance and denialismmay be a psychological coping mechanism to combat the overwhelm of it all. Countless social media profiles exist producing content that tells users to cut off any person, event, or piece of information that threatens their personal peace. In this sense, peace seems to be a euphemism for conflict avoidance.
We are overwhelmed. This newsletter about peace goes on :
We exist as part of a larger collective, and there is no peace in existing in the comforts of modernity when those comforts are dependent on the extraction and exploitation of other forms of life. The "personal peace" we cling to desperately depends on a malicious ignorance.
Often innocent but malicious ignorance nonetheless.
The newsletter concludes that :
We must learn to put our egos aside and allow for temporary discomfort in the pursuit of sustained peace. We must be willing to engage in generative conflict.
What might generative conflict actually look and feel like ?
How can we experience both discomfort and pain while remaining joyful and hopeful about the continuance of life? Note: see conscient e214 for more on joy.
What’s the balance point?
Where do we go from here?
I like Indy’s proposal in Systemic Amnesia :
This isn’t a call for moralism or austerity. It’s a call to reawaken our capacity to see want as constructed, adaptive, even negotiable. Our real task is not to meet historic demand with decarbonised precision. It’s to reimagine what dignity, aspiration, and collective flourishing can look like under a different planetary logic. If we don’t, we risk designing futures for ghosts—building cathedrals to yesterday’s desires, while the world quietly shifts beneath us.
Indy’s words reminded me of this quote from Joan Sullivan from conscient episode 1 :
I would want to spend my last few months or years doing whatever I could, in my own little way, to make this world a better place for my daughter, for the bees, for the forests. Even if we are doomed, and I think we are, I refuse to do nothing…
Doomed or not, what should we do?
I suggest we slow down.
I’ve been hearing this kind of advice often in conscient podcast conversations these days, most recently by Chris Creighton-Kelly in e214 roundtable – this moment in canadian culture :
We need to slow down, not speed up. This is a moment for really slow thinking and to be listening and to be doing deep listening. … We need to go into communities and listen to people, go where people are and understand what it is they understand about their cultures, plural. And their art practices plural. And after that process, maybe there's something to be said.
How then do we listen in these times?
In my listening practice I keep these words by Vanessa Andreotti close to my heart :
curiosity
humility
relational depth
a willingness to sense beyond inherited horizons
To conclude I’ll share this haiku, which was inspired by a statue at a Shinto Shrine in Kyoto, Japan on May 10, 2025 (see cover photo of this posting) which helps me keep going:
ancestral spirits
listening through time and space
help us awaken
Thanks for reading or listening to this rather long and meandering posting.
I has helped me figure some things out and hope it is useful for you in some way.