The Un-conference in the UAE

I just wanted to share with you some personal reflections, one week after our Sustainability unconference.

It starts from a personal commitment that I made: to have 2 minutes of silence in between actions. Well, honestly, it didn’t work! People started to freak out after 30 seconds or so every time I was in the company of others. Then I thought, the essence is the silence, and then changed it to 30 seconds. But still I forget it most of the times! After a week of working with it, I think the main gift for me is to be more mindful of making commitments when highly excited.

The second gift for me was observing this shift from operating purely from the mind to a balance of head, heart and hand, collectively. Many times through out the day I felt things falling into place naturally, and sometimes even magically. Based on what I have learned so far from the collective work, that only happens when the heart dimension is at play. What brought all of us with so much diversity of backgrounds and beliefs together was not an ideology or a shared belief. The source of energy was “what we care about“, coming from the center, the heart. Over and over I was touched by the words, movements and drawings of others throughout the day. It’s a personal belief that a highly critical, and yet very complex topic like sustainability can only be addressed from that collective-open-heart-space. A sum total of our individual heads is not enough anymore!

The third precious gift that stayed with me strongly is the collective image of the Sustainable village. There were so much life in those images. For me it was an affirmation that, although we have created these life-less unsustainable urban cities all around us, yet still we all hold the memory of a living with life all around us. We are not completely lost, yet! Maybe all we need is to constantly re-member those images, individually and collectively. I have a feeling that they can guide us to a different future, much more powerfully than the promises coming from an already expired “science”. A new world is already here, right within us and between us. It’s just the matter of bringing down the walls of fear that we have created within and between ourselves:

Three Enemies – Otto Scharmer – Presencing

And the last gift to be spoken here, which is highly connected to the previous ones, is in a form of a hope. Something is profoundly shifting, locally and globally, in the way we understood life in the past few centuries. Before SustainabilityCamp I was a pure critic of Dubai community, in terms of pushing for something that is already expired, not leaving any space for something completely new to emerge. But now I see it differently, thanks to everyone who made it possible, visibly and invisibly. Sitting back and being a critic is just very easy, but is it enough for having a better future? The gift is a window of hope, that we will all keep coming back together, maybe in different constellations but in the same open-heart-space to collectively dream and actively create a better future. We just can’t afford to wait for the “leaders” anymore. It’s time to awaken and give voice to the leaders within each and everyone of us.