Money is weird when you start looking at it closely

Having recently started work at the Addington Timebank I've been having lots of conversations about trading and money amongst other things, and I've concluded that money is not the straightforward means of exchange that we take it to be.    

Looking at what has been going on in Greece, I can see there are huge problems when a financial system collapses.  But, like Charles Eisenstein, in Sacred Economics,  I wonder, why do things grind to a halt when there is a financial crash and banks close?  

Banks don’t do any real work - they simply shuffle money around and, make money out of nothing (more about this another time!).    At the same time, farmers and gardeners are still growing food. We still have people who can cook, care, cure, build, clean, organise, entertain and all the other things that people need.  Surely it is a little odd that we need the blessing of a bank to make this continue.  

To take the odd nature of it even further most "money" as it is used today is a bunch of 0s and 1s recorded on computers, and doesn’t actually exist in any other form. When you take time to stand back and look at all this, it is clear that our real assets are our own skills, connections and communities, along with the ecological systems that provide us with the things we need to survive and thrive. 

This is one of the premises of the Timebanking idea that was first developed by Edgar Cahn.  Joining a timebank such as the Addington Timebank in Christchurch is one way  to learn about the many skills and abilities that people around us  have.  It introduces us to the idea of a local currency (time credits) and helps use imagine how we might survive in a world without money.

Timebanks also provides us with a way to imagine a world without banks and financiers, who simply make money out of money and who at present are creaming it because we've forgotten how to imagine a world that does not rely on them. 

Climate change & feeling crazy: some personal reflections

A few years ago, I wanted to believe that my life and the lives of people around me would go on the way they have up until now. And I'm still tempted to do that. It looks easier!  In the short term it IS easier.
The trouble is that I realised my mind had to work hard to manage this disconnect.  There I was talking about the science of climate change, of mass extinctions, of unsustainable lifestyles on the one hand, but continuing to get into planes, to drive, to eat and to live what I recognised logically was a completely unsustainable life without really thinking about what I was doing.

I tried out a lot of justifications and I'm still tempted to use them sometimes.  These include things like:

I can't really make a difference as one person, so why try?
I'm doing so much in other parts of my life that I deserve to have some fun sometimes, or
I'm travelling for work, so this doesn't really count as my personal consumption. 


The part of me that keeps looking for ways out has also tried these approaches:   


Well,  nobody else is doing anything, so I may as well enjoy myself while I can,
They'll all think I"m crazy,
Maybe this is not real and I might be completely wrong because nobody else seems worried, or

I don't want to be THAT person (the one that rants on incessantly and makes life uncomfortable for everyone).

On top of this, I sit in on a lot of conversations about people's fantastic trips to amazing places where my mind tells me that I'm just plain boring.


But then I think about the children I know whose lives might be very difficult, or worse, perhaps even very short.  I think about the people I love and I don't want to see them suffering.  And that makes me want to do everything I can to make whatever difference I can, to the best of my ability. 

When I do look at it squarely, I see that if we could pull out of the mire of our foolish busyness, and work together build a future (any future!), it would be possible to effect the change we need, and to have good, happy lives as well.  And yet, I see a lot of good people turning their heads away from the truth of what this really needs because the path to disaster takes less attention, thought and effort.