How immersing ourselves in nature can help achieve the balance we all need in life.
Jamie Dimon, CEO and Chairman of JPMorgan Chase Bank, the largest bank in America, recently put together a group of 250 top CEOs from the United States who have started re-writing the rules of shareholder primacy. Since the 1990s the focus of companies has always been profit over planet over people but Jamie Dimon and this group including Jeff Bezos, are re-writing the rules to move from shareholder focus to stakeholder focus and towards purpose, people and planet over profits, or at least together with profits. This is quite exciting for all of us as it means that shareholders and executives are starting to mature and to make decisions that are more long-term and funnily enough, actually more profitable. We are not living in a short-term world anymore, we need longer-term viewpoints of looking at businesses to be able to bring about profitability. So to have Jamie Dimon who is a very respected CEO doing something like this, makes me confident about the natural resources that we have and their future on planet earth and therefore our future on planet earth and this is a very key moment for our future.
I recently decided to take a month off to travel to Thailand. Being away has allowed me to think about our connection to nature. It has allowed me to walk barefoot on the grass and ground myself alongside this very conscious being; mother earth. We call her mother earth because, make no mistake, she is our mother – she feeds us, she lets us live with her – and for us to have this respect for our relationship with her, is something that benefits us. So for me to get this sense of nature that I’m experiencing in Thailand and then to start seeing these big shifts from organisations around the world moving towards respecting mother nature more, it lets me feel a deep sense of optimism for the future and to know there is hope for us to reverse some of the things we have done in the past. We’ve all been talking about sustainability for a long time now, but I don’t think that is enough moving forward. We need to now become more regenerative in how we go about doing things in order to secure our future.
1989 was a key year for humanity because it was the year that the human population around the world on average went past the age of 40 for the first time. As we mature we move into a very different space and things drastically change. After 40 a lot changes in us and who we are and I think as humanity evolves we are changing in the way we think about nature and spend time in nature, and I also think that we have seen a huge evolvement around farming connected to this. We have new vertical farms, new ways to produce crops, and much more localised farming which is a growing industry. Two-thirds of the cost of our products amounts from transportation, storage etc. so if we are locally producing goods this will cut the costs drastically. Mother earth is a living being and for us to treat her like that shows our level of consciousness and awareness that we are growing into.
If you believe in energies at all in any way, you’ll know that there are many research papers on people’s energetic aura and space and how this grows exponentially when you spend time in nature. We are much more aware of who we are when we spend more time in nature and we naturally move into the cycles of nature, becoming symbiotic with it. This is the key because if we adopt the pace of nature, we then start to realise that patience becomes an incredibly important aspect. After all, nature has been working in symbiosis with itself for millions of years, evolving at a very slow and patient space. As human beings, we could all adapt and learn a lot from her patient ways. The best balance for us all is to spend some time in an ambitious, driven, creative, innovative, disruptive world, and then retract ourselves into a space of patience and stillness that we can get from nature. The idea of balance needs to be replaced with a concept that I call obsession and silence, which means getting into a space where you are obsessed about something, you work through it and then you move away into pockets of silence so that you can give yourself the space to reflect. This combination for me is a necessity.
