At a time of financial distress and environmental crisis, can we build a better life for ourselves and our families?

I am a birthright Quaker who loves the teachings of the Buddha.

STOP for a moment.

Try to see things as the really are.

Our Old Economy cannot be rebuilt because it was flawed and built upon a delusion. And the forthcoming crisis of Climate Change is severe. Trying to patch up the old banking system and restore the old economy by encouraging us to spend more is not a solution. Recycling our newspapers and changing our light bulbs is not enough. Because we have become addicted to our old ways – they felt good but never satisfying – we may not be able to avoid a great catastrophe. In the interests of our children and our grand-children, we have to find another way.

There is another way but it is contrary to our time and will seem absurd. For the truth is that we may have to have less and to share what we have more fairly. Oddly enough, this could increase both our well-being and the well-being of the Earth.

Please read these extracts from my most recent work and let me know what you think.

A GREAT UNEASE

One of the most disruptive characteristics of our present time is a Great Unease: an assertive sense of always having to do something; having always to be on the move; and ever having to be part of a virulent and addictive consumption. The present economic turmoil suggests that this way of being is highly unstable and damaging and, since it is certain that we cannot find a solution in the old ways that have brought us to where we are, we need to find new ways of being.

What about turning our old ways on their head? What would it be like if, instead of greed, discontent and selfishness we sought a way that was based upon unfashionable qualities such as patience, slowness, gentleness, selflessness, humility, simplicity and peacefulness? Oddly enough, I want to suggest that these are the very qualities that we need for a new economy and a new way of life that would be more sustainable and more likely to deliver well-being.

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AN ORDINARY & EVERYDAY HOLINESS

How shall we live well and in peace? I want to propose that the answer to this question lies in the nature of what I want to call an “ordinary and everyday holiness”.

I realise that to use the word “holy” is either an act of bravery or foolishness, for there will be many that will say that such a word is “out of time”. But, in truth, the word is timeless and in many ways also ordinary, a part of our common remembrance. For, as William Blake put it “…everything that lives is Holy” and to be holy is to be whole and at one with the Divine in thought, word and deed.

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> More about David Cadman

The Roots of Sustainability

David Cadman's book The Roots of Sustainability probes beneath and beyond the conventional discussion of sustainability to reveal that upon which it depends.

The Roots of Sustainability is available from:

Ben Bolgar
The Prince's Foundation
19-22 Charlotte Road
Shoreditch
London
EC2A 3SG

Cost: £13.50 inc. p&p