It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
—Atributed to Charles Darwin
This statement from Darwin can best be summarized in one word: resilience. Resilience is the capacity to bounce back, adapt, and regain the shape that may have been radically altered by change or trauma. In recent years I have been presenting numerous workshops on emotional resilience—a quality that I believe is crucial if we are to survive and find our place in a chaotic, collapsing world.
If change comes suddenly or too quickly, our nervous systems have great difficulty adapting. However, if we make changes in anticipation of the collapse of industrial civilization, we will naturally become more resilient and, therefore, more capable of weathering the changes without being overwhelmed by them.
Enter the sacred—a word inextricably connected with sacrifice. What are we willing to sacrifice in order to prepare, and—as we ponder what collapse may ask of us—what feels impossible to sacrifice? Considering these questions is in itself a spiritual act, because it compels us to explore the inner recesses of the soul and confront demons incorporated from consumer capitalism and its false promises of “security” and “comfort.” Someone has said that the only real “security” is a false sense of one. Sadly, the masses of consumers that inhabit our planet have yet to understand this. Anyone reading these words, however, has a golden opportunity to become physically, emotionally, and spiritually resilient by consciously working with the concept of sacrifice.
This is not to say that we should radically strip our lives of all comforts but rather be very present and aware in our lives of the comforts on which we depend and feel we cannot live without. We can experiment with withdrawing from them and seeing how that feels. Undoubtedly, we will feel disoriented, deprived, and resentful. We should not feel morally obligated to suddenly begin living a monastic lifestyle, because equally important as actual sacrifice is our awareness of how resilient we have yet to become.