Day 1

On the number 2 to Hove Town Hall I had a moment of considering how strange it feels for the future to become the present.  That feeling when a day finally arrives that has been long anticipated, hoped for or dreaded:  birthdays, surgeries or hunger strikes.

I've been arrested three times now during my last two years of activism.  It's beginning to feel a bit like going through the motions.  Time to try something new.

I struggle to express how I feel about the climate crisis.  How can something so big and bad be truly understood? It stands outside our experience.  Except perhaps in dystopian films and TV series: Mad Max, and the old BBC series The Survivors come to mind.  And those films where a comet is about to hit.  

But the thing that makes all this hardest to deal with is that people aren't running around panicking about the impending disaster.  It makes me feel like I'm a mad person. 

The normal world is hard to live in right now.  It's just too normal.  Even the covid version of normal, is just too normal.  Never mind all the talk of "getting back to normal".

A hunger strike isn't normal though.  It feels like something that is done in extremis.  I feel comfortable with it as it reflects my sense of our extreme vulnerability that is present in my thoughts of the future.  

Who knows if it will "make a difference"?  I've never had a head for political strategy.  To me it's about trying for integrity, to be a whole person with my thoughts and actions aligned.

So that's the end of Day 1.  Feeling tired, empty and ready for bed.  Looking forward to a day of low normality again tomorrow.