Possibilities emerging: Shikhar Agarwal on a compassionate orientation in the commons
Shikar Agarwal is an experienced Regenerative, Effective, Ambitious, Lively (REAL) Project, Programme and Community Manager. He is co-founder of GreenCheck, which offers grassroots climate-action organisations a space to fundraise, build community with their supporters, and request assistance with non-monetary barriers to their work so they can do even more good. They also support the seeding, nurturing and flourishing of hundreds of hybrid communities of collective action and mutual support around the world.
In this interview Shikhar offers a ray of hope emerging from the commons - an evolving consciousness that transcends traditional activist circles, which seeks change not through polarised and reactionary stances, but through compassionate service to others.
This is part of a series of possibility-oriented interviews published by Foundations Earth. We are currently engaging with active members of communities responding to our inquiry: ‘What if we could respond inclusively and effectively to planetary-scale problems?’ To learn more about our work you can visit our website or check out our inquiry.
At what crossroads do we find ourselves standing at this moment in time?
There are multiple crossroads, given the complexity of that framing. A few that come to mind right now…
One is around what we have addressed as “glocal localisation”:
How do you balance agency at the grassroots level with participation at the planetary level?
And how does one create systems or inter-linkages of communication that don't overwhelm people with the amount of knowledge or awareness needed to act effectively in the global landscape - and at the same time provide enough information to the local change- or decision-maker or political leader that they can act and be in sync with, and equipped with, the knowledge that is relevant to them from other similar or related communities or stuff at the local level.
So I think that's one crossroad.
In my mind, the biggest challenge of the information age as it stands today is knowing what information or knowledge is useful or that needs to be looked at by any given stakeholder in a system. And that is also the biggest kind of chaos factor in today's world.
For me, the mental health crisis is the biggest thing on the planet. One of the key reasons is because there's so much information and knowledge just unfiltered, available to everyone, that we have no business knowing. We haven't got the genetic or the intellectual capabilities to deal with this overwhelming amount of information about everyone else's lives and geopolitics and what's happening here and what's happening there.
So for me that is a big crossroads. How are we going to deal with information and how are we going to develop systems that effectively manage what information one is getting, without these systems becoming manipulated by vested interests or centralised decision makers or power holders?
The most important thing for me is that everyone is healthy, because most people are not healthy today and continue to do what they are doing without trying to become healthier, from a mental health perspective, physical dietary health, spiritual and social health perspective… Health is largely ignored in any realm of systems change, because it is seen as something in the personal domain, something that you have to work on.
And slowly, some consciousness is arising within the activist spaces where people have been burnt out, around taking care of ourselves as radicals, but it's still a very small percentage of the discourse.
For example, when Foundations Earth was born, we never came across discussion around health, yet our health is a key element of making that agency available for people around the world to participate in global governance processes. Until a person’s mental health is taken care of, how can they have the ability to contribute to something or how will they even have the mind space to think about contributing something? This is often phrased in terms of basic sustenance and those discussions are raised because obviously there are communities that are on the frontlines of the climate crisis or in war zones or in places where the next meal is not confirmed. That is a consideration we've thought about, but people like us doing this more top-level work, are people making connections, what about our mental and physical health? Are we talking about and addressing it?
So that is the main thing that I want to be a part of addressing while we make these huge systemic changes.
What is it that enlivens you that you see hatching or growing wildly in the commons?
I think there's a growing consciousness among even the non-activist population around an air of change in an era. There was the COVID years, where everything was bad. Before that, there was the climate crisis for a couple of years where everyone was really anxious. And now that the world is coming out of COVID, largely, I think that a lot of people have used these last four years to really take stock of what we are here for as humans.
I think the spiritual question of “What is our purpose for being alive in today's extremely critical juncture of human civilisation?” has come up for anyone who has the privilege to not worry about food and violence basically.
In just general discourse, I have seen more people feeling ready for big change. For me, more people are engaging with topics in non-polarised, non-reactionary, non-siloed ways and demonstrating their ability to take a step back, whenever something triggering comes up. I don't have to choose one or the other that positions me against another; but I can see it and address it and take part in it when I'm asked to.
I am sensing a greater development of the compassionate or service-oriented attitude amongst a larger number of people, which begins with the desire or intention to be of service to others, through whatever means is possible in whatever ways are asked, rather than to try and impose a way of service.
So something emerging in the commons is a greater service orientation, a greater compassionate orientation.
Photo from Tegan Mierle (available here)
How are you being affected by that to which you are paying attention?
Oh, what am I paying attention to?
I think since I've moved here [United Kingdom], I have been paying attention mostly to the microcosm, which is myself and my community and the village that I'm in and the ecosystem of relationships within and around the village.
I'm being affected in ways that are compelling growth in my journey, my vocation, occupation, but also in me as a person. For me, whatever I pay attention to, if it's done with an intention, it's always oriented towards growth and towards how I can assimilate this information in a way that is useful to my progress. Which is why I spoke about the information overload in the first question, because I have the inherent proclivity towards just taking in information from everything that provides it - from new sources, observing people, listening to sound, seeing patterns in the sky. I'm constantly paying attention to everything that's around me.
Fortunately, I do not need to think too much about what's happening at the bigger picture scale, given my current sort of associations, but it just keeps giving me cue points to keep growing.
I have made a sort of gradual turn over the last two to three years from directing my life based on what's happening in the world outside, to directing my life based on what's happening in the world inside and using that as listening to my body, listening to my heart, taking a breath, pausing to observe what's happening in my mind, seeing what enlivens.
But it's still very much in the initial phases, it's 24 years of unlearning.
What declaration of possibility can you make that has the power to transform our response to planetary-scale problems?
The declaration of possibility that I can make that speaks to addressing the planetary-scale problems more holistically is of unconditional friendship being at our doorstep, in every situation that we can imagine sharing with other humans.
There's many ways to back that declaration up, but most importantly, I feel it and I sense that possibility in almost every interaction that I have that is more than, like, one minute long. Maybe that's too generic, but there's an energy in the air of many people being ready, willing, whether on the surface or their heart of hearts to take each other more seriously as friends, brothers and sisters and not just the veneer of social capital or transactional relationships or finding something exciting about the other that makes us feel good.
And I declare the possibility of genuine friendships being the norm for any relationship that we enter into as part of our daily routine. To unconditionally accept the other, there are many sorts of counter arguments. Like my father's voice comes up in my head as I say this, because he's always cautioned me against trusting too much, which I have the tendency to do - because people will take advantage of you. But that's where wisdom and life experience steps in, and also other friends step in, right? If you have genuine friends, then even if you get hurt or scammed or taken advantage of, then you have others that you can rely on that you treat as authentic friends.
I think that the friend, the friendship ethic, has to start permeating everything that we do. And I think in Foundations Earth we have a friendship ethic, at least within the original team that worked together, we treated each other as friends. And I feel like that has continued to evolve.
What is the courage you need to take you in that direction?
I think there's a couple of things that come up. One is the courage to let myself be who I am, and let my energy flow rather than to try, because I have been thinking recently that I have a very sharp brain which remembers everything. And every time I'm in a conversation, it's constantly bringing up past things that I've learned or relationships that have been broken off or things that I've observed, and it's like it uses those to frame or to compel a better reaction.
That is great when they're doing something like this, which is an interview, sort of thought-provoking questions. But when I am in conversation, or in interrelation with someone doing some activity or just meeting someone, I feel that it's actually counterproductive to that genuine friendship, to draw upon what is in the past, because it creates artificiality in that interaction rather than just seeing what comes up and letting it flow.
Because what comes up is inherently trained by my life experience in the past.
That's the one courage - to let go of my preconceived notions about myself, and what I'm meant to be doing and how I'm responding.
And it's easier online to do that, because that physical presence is not there, because otherwise, I think some part of my neurodiversity means that when I'm physically together with others, I get much more affected by their energies and influenced in my responses.
The other courage that I need is to take myself more seriously. I think I have fluctuated in my life between taking myself too seriously and then not considering my opinion seriously at all.
I think now I'm at a stage where I have to take myself seriously but not too seriously, and that needs courage - the commitment to the shared mission and commitment to challenging yourself regularly to be courageous.
What do you want or need from your community to make that happen?
I'm willing to do the same for them, but I need my community to take me more seriously in ways that are demonstrable. So to explain that, maybe it's because of my culture or just how I interact with the world. We're all playing parts in different stories all the time. That can be more direct, like as a mother, sister, brother, daughter, father, etc. as a colleague, as an activist, as all of these labels that we have created, so that we have stories that we can latch onto and perform.
But most of us are not in artistic fields, or even the ones that are, we have lost or we don't consider that we can create our own stories within the groups that we are part of, which are not compelled or framed by the systems that try to subjugate and box us into just the labour that society gives us.
I feel this especially strongly as an Indian because of the continued weight of the caste system that applies in society where, for generations, what your family is born into completely defines what you can do. And only now, in the last 50 years, I think that's starting to change a little.
What I need my community to do is to be up for creating the stories that we want to tell and actively building each other up to play the roles that we want to play in those stories.
So if I want to play the role of someone who is a catalyst of unconditional friendships - which I call co-creative facilitation - then I would like to be taken seriously as that person, even if I don't take myself seriously, you know? Have that fallback option, like if I'm having a bad day and I'm having low self-esteem, and I'm like, “Oh, I can't do this”, someone in the community will say, “No, man, you can do this!”, and be able to do the same for others. Like hyping each other up - and I am more than willing to hype other people. But I feel shy just hyping people up, because I don't know if they want to be hyped up.
It boils down to mutual accountability, because no one entity or software will ever be able to keep track in transparent ways of everyone's participation or contribution. It will have to boil down to local levels of trust and reciprocity and mutual accountability.
This interview was conducted by Tchiyiwe Chihana, with editing support from Philippa Willitts and Jack Becher.
Learn more about Shik‘s work at GreenCheck or connect via LinkedIn.
Find out more about Foundations Earth on our website or social media accounts below, or check out our organisational summary and core inquiry.
