13041 Evolutions of the Story

A beautiful thing is never perfect.

The permaculture design for your life is a living document. Change and evolve it as your own life’s journey changes and evolves. It will never truly be finished until the day you die. Even then, the design of your life continues on via the influence and relationships you leave behind with the people you knew and cared about and that cared for you.

Keep your eyes open. The one constant in life is change. Sometimes life changes slowly. Sometimes the situations change with such rapidity it is hard to keep track of and understand what happens to and around you.

Record your observations. You need a system to record your ongoing observations. This could be a public blog. It could be a private journal. It could be a box with notes and receipts and photographs. You designed and implemented an observation system to do your design work. Adapt that and practice it so you get good at it as an ongoing aspect of your work.

Feedback and understanding outcomes are critical for your on-going implementation work. These reports tell us how we are doing. If your outcomes are not what you want, if feedback turns negative, this should drive a reexamination and reworking of your design decisions and actions. This goes on in nature all the time but we can’t observe the actual process as it occurs. We can see the results in a forest or a prairie or other complex ecosystem that maintains itself, somehow, without our assistance. Our designs will never be that well regulated. Our inability to achieve perfection should not stop us from always striving to be responsive to feedback from our actions so that we make appropriate adjustments in what we do to enhance the positive and minimize the negative.

Feedback and outcome analysis is critical for our work with invisible structures. Human factors complicate receiving, understanding, and processing outcome analysis. People sometimes react defensively when they receive feedback. It is not always easy to accept criticism, even when it offered honestly and without personal animus. Yet, accepting and giving feedback in invisible structure work is every bit as critical as it is for our work with systems like gardens and water harvesting systems.

Analyze your circumstances as they evolve. As life changes, always seek to understand what happens with you and your household and your watershed and ecosystem. How do the new circumstances impact your existing plans and decisions?

Learn more. Never stop learning. As the body of knowledge available for permaculture develops, be informed about its content and its applicability to your own life.

Praxis consistently. It’s not enough to just observe and analyze. Praxis includes both reflection and action situated in the context and historicity of human persons as beings integrated in natural ecologies (whether we know this and accept it or not).

Continue to design. The more design you do, the better your design skills become. That seems to be the way it works. If you want to do better at a skill, you practice that skill. Actually, you praxis that skill. As you learn better design, you may see things that need changing in your lifestyle design. You won’t necessarily get everything right first time out of the chute. Mistakes happen, in permaculture as in everything else. When you find a mistake in your design, correct it! Notice that the previous sentence says “When,” not “if.” You would be most exceptional if you worked through all your design work and did not make one mistake. Just remember that mistakes are opportunities for learning and you will do fine.

Be open to unexpected developments. Just when you think you have everything figured out, life will hand you something completely unexpected, punctuating your own personal equilibrium. Such events will almost always call for a revision of your design for your life. Do it!

Always trust yourself. You first heard those words early in this learning experience. Your willingness to trust yourself and your own experiences is critical to successful design work, whether it be the first time you work out your design ideas or subsequent revisions and changes. You are a unique expression of Creation, a human personification of beauty. Don’t let anyone tell you differently or allow any system or structure to deny your true reality.