Daily pages - February 14, 2022

I wrote in Evernote about ideas around creating an Inventory of Solutions. The more I think about it, the more it seems like it’s a kind of pattern language. The things that can be effective are solutions to reoccurring problems and that is the essence of patterns. A pattern language is also pseudo-hierarchical and these solutions that I would be inventorying rarely fit into a rigid hierarchy. each one can affect any number of systems, and the best solutions will affect all the systems it touches toward greater living.

In a way, this is the kind of thing that World That Works was envisioned to do. I wanted to list the solutions that would move us in the right direction. Hmm.

On another topic, I was thinking the other day about my Mondayless Week project. I’d like to assemble that into an open artifacts project, but with the idea that it’s a great example of a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Or at least, it’s an example of a solution that is not a good one.

The idea is that if people don’t like Mondays (everyone’s always complaining about them) then let’s just get rid of them. We can take the 24 hours from Monday and distribute among the remaining 6 days of the week and have six 28-hour days. Problem solved. Of course, it’s not really Mondays that people hate, it’s going back to work after a weekend. If the first day after the weekend is Tuesday, then people will just hate Tuesdays.

And the solution doesn’t take into consideration people’s sleep rhythms. We can’t just switch over to a 28-hour day? We’d all be wrecks in a few days.

Nonetheless, I’d like to recreate the conversion wheel and probably put up an algorithm for computing the Mondayless day and time from the regular time and day. Then, I plan on using the concept in my writing.

Thoughts on my submission for writing the Action Plan for the UN Decade.

My small one-person business is based on a simple creative practice: find work that needs doing, and decide what work is mine to do. Work that needs doing is work that moves us globally toward a better future. What’s mine to do is work that I feel I can accomplish successfully while imbuing it with something special from my life’s experience.

This Action Plan for the UN Decade is clearly work that needs doing. We need to stop damaging Earth’s natural systems, but more than that, we need to undo as much of the existing damage as we can. As you mention in the job detail, the UN Environmental Programme helps set the global environmental agenda, and documents like this Action Plan are a key aspect of that.

For decades, I’ve tried to get to the “how” of the problems our planet and our species face. How do we change? How can we move from where we are toward a better future? How can we halt and fix the damage we’re doing without our world systems grinding to a halt? How can we harness the efforts of governments, businesses, organizations, and individuals to make the rapid progress that we need?

The Action Plan for the UN Decade is an important global how-to document. It will help define what work needs doing for many organizations.

I think the simple answer is that we decide to take action, and we allow ourselves to change and grow as we change and grow the world. It’s a kind of double-helix version of a virtuous cycle, where we improve ourselves and improve the world in an upward spiral.

In recent years, I’ve been writing a book that explains a lot about how this works, so I’ve been improving my writing as well as improving my thinking.