The day the sheep fell silent

I’m going to start this post off with a question that gets run past me a lot as a therapist.

“Why can’t I change, even though I know I want something different?”

It’s a question I’ve asked myself in the past, and the answer has always been that I have needed something extra in order to be able to make the change and stick to it.  Wanting and knowing alone have rarely been enough to make things different.  And I haven’t always known what I have been missing until I have stumbled across it.

There has actually been quite a lot of change in my life over the last year.  Last winter, my partner and I moved to a new home in rural North West Wales.  This move is something I have wanted for a very long time.  I have always felt at my most grounded and at peace when immersed in a non-built environment and it has felt, for many years now, that every cell of my body has been craving that immersion on a more permanent basis.

So, when we had the opportunity to relocate, my heart jumped for joy, and I did everything in my power to make it happen.  I did so though, in the full knowledge that I have been a city girl my whole life up until then, and that the reality of living in the countryside might be very different to the romanticised vision in my head of what I thought it might be like.  I had a little itch somewhere in the edges of my brain asking the question “What if you don’t like it there?”

I decided to plough on regardless.  Not ignoring that little voice as such, but resolving to remain open to new experience and to see how that would shape me.  I didn’t need to only ‘like’ things in my new home.  This was going to be a new adventure, and I might miss something if I set ‘liking’ as the only measure of whether I had made a good decision.

Since we have moved, I have had a lot of new experiences, some welcome and some less so.  I have tried to approach each one consciously and with the openness to be impacted.

What I have found when I do this is that I have been repeatedly faced with the following  questions:

• How does this impact me?
• How will this influence and me?
• What does this mean about who I am?
• How does this change my beliefs about myself and the world?
• What will this mean for how I behave in the world?

When I have answered all of these honestly, I have learned so much more about myself, which has surprised me, because I thought I was already pretty self-aware.

This new knowing about myself has inspired me to initiate quite a bit of change in my life, but there are still some things which I know I would like to be different but I haven’t quite nailed down the how or the why of what that will look like, never mind addressing the practicalities of putting that into action.

I had a really thought provoking experience last week which got me thinking deeply about what it is that we need in order to move us towards change.

I attended a showing of the People’s Emergency Briefing which explores the urgent environmental crisis we are experiencing, shares why it is relevant to all of us, and invites us to be agents of change (if you haven’t seen it already, I would highly recommend it).  Following this there was a friendly community discussion about what we thought we could each do on a personal level to make a difference, and how we might influence those in power to make the changes necessary to make sure we don’t make the earth uninhabitable.

One of the biggest things which came out of this was that each of us felt our individual input would not be great enough to make a difference.  We were all going to make conscious changes, but we also all wanted to rally others to the same cause.

With this realisation came some despair.  One of the audience members suggested that not enough people actually care enough to want things to change, and therefore any attempts we made to make things different would be potentially pointless.

Something niggled inside of me when I heard this.  The word care.

People really do care.  And I think those who don’t are actually in the minority.  Saying that people don’t care enough made me want to stand up and defend the honour of the unnamed people that this person was talking about.

I know lots of people who care, but I also know that for some reason care does not automatically translate into doing things differently.  And that got me thinking.

We can care very much about the state of the world, but if we only care on a thought / academic level, because we have no direct experience of the impact we have in relationship, or no direct experience that things can be different, our care very rarely translates into impactful behavioural change.  The familiar is hard to break out of.

I have witnessed this process in myself since I have moved.  My exposure to new experience and my questioning what this means for me has absolutely changed the way I view the world, and changed the way that I behave.

When I lived in the city, there is no doubt about it, my care for the more than human world was apparent to anyone who met me.  I would talk about the impact we humans have on the rest of the natural world. I would raise money for charities who do work to support ‘nature’.  I would litter pick and write posts about leaving no trace.  I would share information about rewilding and caring for natural habitats when we enter them. But since I have moved here and I am more directly in connection with some of the wilder parts of our island (the UK), my ‘care’ has amplified.  I no longer just ‘know’ that these things are important, I now regularly directly witness some of the distress of the more than human world, and this gets inside of me in a very different way.

There is one stand out experience (out of many that I could choose from) which I had during the summer this year.  This might help you understand what I am talking about here.

One of the things I have enjoyed the most since moving here has been sitting outside the front of my house on a late afternoon, soaking up the sights, smells and sounds of the living environment I am surrounded by here.  One of the sounds from the spring and summer, was the bleating of the sheep which were being grazed in the fields over the road.  They were so loud, and the lambs were so very cute and springy.

An then one day in late June, I went and sat outside and as I was settling in, I became aware that something was different.  It took me a moment to realise what it was…

The sheep had fallen silent…

I got up to investigate whether the sheep field was empty.  It was not.  But, there was not a single lamb left in that field and the remaining adult sheep were totally silent.

Now, I learned in primary school that the lamb chops sitting in a vacuum-packed plastic package on the supermarket shelves had, not so long before finding themselves there, been part of the body of one of the cute, fuzzy, white creatures that skip around the fields in the spring time, bringing joy to so many onlookers.

I used to be one of those onlookers.  I would drive past all that cute woolly gorgeousness on my way to access some green space or other most weekends when I lived in the city, and I would ooh and ahh with delight when I saw a group of lambs playing together.  And I would think about how sad it was that their lives would get cut short, and on the odd occasion I would have a fleeting thought that I hoped they were at least being treated well while they were alive.

But now, the sheep have become my neighbours, and you bet your bottom dollar that my knowledge about where lamb chops come from was suddenly sinking in on a whole different level now that I was experiencing this.

I felt gut-punched by the silence.

It was quiet for days before the sheep eventually started to communicate with each other again.  It really got inside me.

Interestingly, what it inspired in me was a keener interest in the remaining sheep’s’ wellbeing.  There were a couple that had a cough for a few weeks and one that had a limp and I found myself wanting to contact the farmer to alert him to the struggle of his flock members (I didn’t, but I felt the pull).  I did however look into what to do if I was concerned about the wellbeing of a livestock animal, and I have also been inspired to learn more about regenerative farming and smart land use.  This in turn is leading me towards becoming even more active in my local community in relation to things like litter picking and nature conservation, and has also inspired me to take politics a lot more seriously than I did before too.

‘Care’ and ‘knowing’ got me so far towards wanting to make a difference in the world, but Knowing on this deeper level has really inspired some active outward change in me.

Now, circling back to that question that I started off with.

We can very much ‘care’ about our own experience or that of others, and we can very much ‘know’ we want things to be different, but sometimes we need more conscious awareness and more direct experience, in order to be able to mobilise towards making long lasting meaningful change.

I’ve witnessed it so many times, in myself and others.  We go round the same loop so many times, thinking we’ve understood, and then suddenly we are faced with a new experience and we find ourselves saying “Now I get it!”

We can only know ourselves in relationship.  Without something there to have an impact on, we have no mirror to show us how we are experienced.

Sometimes a change of mirror can help us achieve a better understanding of ourselves.  My change in location has definitely been a change in mirror for me, but that could equally have been meeting a new person, starting a new job, or trying out a new activity.

Starting to work with a therapist can also be that change in mirror which can move you towards the change you seek.  If you would like to have a chat about whether this could be helpful for you, drop me an email to rachel@ramblingpsychotherapist to book a discovery call.