13021 Timelines of Your Life and Design

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. — Groucho Marx

Time is a fact of your life. The timeline of your life and its cycles are integral aspects of your design. Your design work includes developing a schedule for implementing the decisions you’ve made for your life. It takes careful work to coordinate your life’s timeline and its cycles with your design schedule for implementing your permaculture design decisions.

This coordination does not just automatically spring forth from your brain into life action. During design work, you make numerous decisions. You can’t follow-through on all of those decisions at one instant of time. You must decide what are the first things that go first, the second things that go second, the third things that go third, and so on and so forth through all of the decisions you have made in your design work to date.

Let’s review —

• We start small or we don’t start at all.
• We prefer biological solutions and use appropriate scale.
• We use succession — which means, we don’t put the cart before the horse. We put the horse before the cart and we then put the horse and the cart on the road. We don’t put the horse before the cart and put the pair on the roof.

As you work your way through your design process, you develop ideas for your design. You work on those ideas, evaluate them, change your mind, change your mind again and redo something, and so on and so forth. As the process continues, you pile up a series of design decisions in each area of endeavor. The design elements have beneficial connections with each other and the world around you. We stack functions. Important systems have back-ups. If something is seriously important, the back-ups have back-ups.

Never let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Don’t allow your inability to achieve perfection freeze yourself into inaction.

There is good, better and best.

If you can’t do the best, do the better.

If you can’t do the better, accomplish the good.

If you can’t do the good, at least you can avoid doing more harm.

Let’s look at that natural succession again:

Sometimes to reach the best situation —

• You begin by not doing harm,
• Then you do good,
• And when you get good at that, you can do better,
• After you do better, you can do the best.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are, at every stage of your life.

No one would give a new-born child a steak to eat. Instead, the mother would offer the baby milk from her own breast. Later, the child gets solid foods, mashed or pureed. It is only after all of this development, when the child has grown teeth and learned to use a knife and a fork, that a steak would make sense as a menu choice for a child. If you tried to feed a new-born baby a piece of steak, he or she would choke and die.

So it is with the decisions of your life as you move towards sustainability. Sometimes you can move immediately to the best choice — cutting up credit cards, for example, can be done by anyone at any time. Other choices may not be as easy nor as clear. Appropriate scale is as much a matter of time as it is of size or magnitude.

How do we weave these seemingly disparate threads together into a coherent narrative of life and action?

That’s where the importance of what we call “staging” — an organized timeline for implementing your design decisions. — becomes evident. This is a golden thread that weaves through all of the often complicated tapestry of design decisions to draw all together as a coherent good life plan of action.

Use patterns of action. We’ve learned that energy follows the pattern. Use patterns of action as you contemplate actually doing the changes in your life that your design anticipates. Borrow existing patterns and/or create new patterns for your own situation. By folding your action into patterns, you follow the path of least energy invested for work achieved.

Succession organizes design decisions.

• First things first,
• Second things second,
• Third things third.

Since it is physically impossible to implement all of your design decisions in one burst of activity, you need a schedule for those decisions.

Your design has a time line and it will have cycles. There will be times when you do more and times when you do less.

The natural process of succession is a good pattern to follow. Many decisions have pre-requisites, things that need to be done before a particular action can occur. Staging involves sorting your diverse design decisions in a workable plan for action.

Here’s an easy example. Suppose you are in college. You have some decisions that relate to your time after college. Schedule their implementation for the period after you have left school.

Other decisions relate to your time in college. Schedule them to implement now, during your college career.

If want to be part of a housing cooperative that will buy an apartment building, first you must find fellow cooperators and organize the cooperative. Then you must raise the money necessary to buy the building. Next you find the building. Moving in is the final stage. You don’t move in first, before you even find the building, nor your fellow cooperators, nor the capital necessary for the cooperative to buy the building.

Careful timing avoids complications. If you plan to start a container garden, don’t assign some other function to that space. Schedule acquisition of the necessary materials and knowledge before you schedule building the container garden.

Pulses regulate the rhythm of your action. Think of staging as pulses of action in your life. Consider the way you grow. Generally your body and its various parts and appendages grow at the same scale. A baby does not grow an adult sized stomach or a teenage sized hand. It’s not completely uniform. There are various awkward stages, but on the whole, the process of timed growth works well in all species. Something internal to the organism regulates this as a series of pulses. Think of the implementation of your design in the same way. You regulate the rhythm of your life with pulses of action.

Cycles follow pulses. Pulses create cycles. We think of everything as linear progressions. We get snatch-grabbed from our parents at an early age and confined in a coercive industrial institution whose great achievement is for students to pass from one grade to another, in a linear manner.

That’s not the way that nature works.

Since your life will travel in pulses and cycles, take advantage of this natural process as you stage your decisions for action.

Do NOT be in a hurry. The temptation in the beginning is to substitute energy for time because we are always in a hurry. We are taught to be in a hurry. If we are not in a hurry, we are wasting time! And wasting time is surely a mortal sin according to the default system. If we are wasting time, we aren't consuming or excreting! That can't be allowed!

So like I said, don't be in a hurry. Don't feel guilty about "wasting time" thinking. Don't procrastinate — but that's not the same as being thoughtful and deliberate in the pace of your action. If civilization suddenly crashes, we can all get in a hurry, but short of that, thoughtful and deliberate wins the day over hurry and rush. Just ask the Tortoise and the Hare if you doubt the truth of this wisdom.

A certain amount of this trading energy for time can work for specific tasks but the key here is "appropriate" for the task. If the implementation of the design for your life stops being energy conservative, it starts being a problem. Discernment of the energy limitations in your life is a wisdom call. When in doubt, err on the side of “less energy”.

This issue comes up a lot with travel. Let's face this right away. Most of us like to travel — a lot. We have a sense of entitlement to travel. We don't like to think about the ecological consequences of our travel. We don't mind composting our kitchen leftovers, but we hesitate at the thought of curbing our travel.

Meanwhile, the data are clear and not ambiguous — the most fuel and carbon emission efficient method of travel between cities is the bus.

So we tell ourselves that we don’t have the time to take the bus. People like "us" don't take the bus because, well, we are people like "us" and "we" don't take the bus. It's just not done. We have to fly because that way we get there quicker.

We ignore the ecological costs of flying because of our addiction to speed and the velocity of our lives.

Be wary of that addiction at every point in your design process.

One of the common errors made by beginning permaculture designers is the tendency to seriously front-load design decisions into the first year or two of implementation. You have your whole life ahead of you. Knowing your ability to accept change is as important as anything else for the successful permaculture development of your life.

Add one thing at a time. Don’t get up some morning early in the implementation of your design and —

• Quit smoking,
• Start baking whole wheat bread,
• Plant a garden,
• Sprout some seeds,
• Organize a community permaculture program,
• Start a grey water recycling system for your house,
• De-plastic your life.

Whew! That list makes me tired just thinking about it. A better idea is to add one lifestyle evolution or project at a time. Get good at it and then add something else. Take your time.

Think of the pulses and cycles of your life and fold the implementation of your design decisions into to your life gradually, gently, and peacefully. Be kind to yourself as you change your life.