DOUGALD HINE

Tag: resilience

  • Organisations That Matter

    Once upon a time, organisations had hard edges: it was clear who was on the inside and who was on the outside. This might still be true for legal purposes, but it no longer reflects the reality in many cases.

    I’m thinking, in particular, of all those organisations and projects whose existence is embedded within a community. That could be a geographical community like the one around the West Norwood Feast – the community-owned street-market that Spacemakers helped to create in south London – or a distributed community like the one that has grown around the Dark Mountain Project over the past four years.

    In cases like these, instead of a hard boundary, what you have are concentric circles of association: layers of people to whom the organisation matters in varying degrees. 

    People move in and out of these circles over time, as their relationship to the organisation changes. This can be because things have changed for them personally: a new job, family circumstances. Or it can be because, as they see it, the organisation has changed: it no longer matters in the way that it once did.

    The feeling that something matters is hard to measure. Of course, the conventional economic answer is that this is what markets do: where we put our money is the measure of what really matters to us. But embedded organisations can’t rely on money as a proxy, in this way, or not to the same extent as organisations with hard boundaries. Instead, if they are going to thrive, those responsible for such organisations need to pay more attention to the experiences of those involved, including the parts of their experience which are hardest to measure.

    When an organisation matters to people, it feels alive. You can see this in the way people talk about it: not just in the words they use, but in their expressions.

    The power of embedded organisations is that they are held together by other things than money. These other things often include time, energy, belief, attention, stories and ideas. Only rarely can they live without money, but they do not disappear instantly if, for some reason, the money stops. This gives them a kind of resilience which is rare in seemingly larger and stronger organisations.

    The danger for embedded organisations is that they can be growing and dying at the same time. According to their finances, they are doing better, yet they no longer feel like they matter. The fire is going out.

    The art of creating and sustaining embedded organisations involves paying attention to the life of the organisation. When those who are close to the centre of those concentric circles come together, do they still look forward to seeing each other? As people talk about the different elements within the organisation’s work, at which points do you see them come alive?

    When, for some reason, the fire burns low within an organisation, people begin to drift outwards. This is not their fault: it is their way of signalling to those closest to the core that something needs to change.

    In such a situation, the nature of the relationships that brought the organisation to life come into focus. 

    Usually, there are one or two people who stand at the centre of the organisation, who will be the last ones left if things go wrong, carrying the consequences on their shoulders. It’s not that these people own the organisation or can control it, but that they have a particular responsibility for it. (Because the organisation started out as their dream, an idea that was thrown into conversation and caught light.)

    Yet it is also true that the organisation could never have come alive if it weren’t for the circles of others who were drawn to it, who saw their own hopes or ideas reflected in what was starting to happen, and who between them began to make it real.

    When the fire burns low, those at the core can feel let down. They may start to complain about the lack of commitment of those around them, the disappearance of fair-weather friends. The feeling is understandable, but it has to be set aside.

    If you find yourself in that situation, I suggest thinking of yourself as the founder of a start-up that has run out of investment. Your community, the people who helped you make the dream real, are your angel investors. For whatever reason, you have burned through their investment, without reaching sustainability. If you are going to turn this around, you will need them to make a further investment. 

    Like any investors, your community will not be overly impressed by how hard you have worked or how much you have sacrificed. What will catch their attention is your ability to put together a story that is large enough and real enough: to make sense of what has been achieved so far, to be honest about the mistakes that have been made, and at the same time to put these mistakes into perspective by reconnecting with why you all felt this mattered in the first place. From there, you need to be able to make a case for what can be done together going forward and why this still matters.

    (I should say, the metaphor of investment is only a metaphor. I’m not usually keen on treating intangible, hard-to-measure things as if they are forms of capital, but in this case, it does fit with my experience and what I’ve seen in other people’s projects and organisations.)

    Embedded organisations, organisations that matter, tend to be those that have the greatest resilience against the unexpected, against the disruption of familiar systems and structures. If we are heading into a world of increasing disruption and uncertainty, the skills of creating and sustaining such organisations are going to take on an increasing importance. (These are also the skills of getting things done without relying on people being paid or ordered to do things.)

    So learn to pay attention to where the life is within your projects or organisations. Be willing to turn down the sensible option – doing more of the same, but larger – when you notice that it represents only lifeless growth. Don’t blame others when the life is going out of something, but go back to the story at the heart of it. See if you can retell that story in a way that will bring life to it again. 

    And don’t be afraid to admit defeat: it is better to walk away from something that is dead than to keep pouring your energy into it, even if it still looks like it’s growing. If you have been paying attention to the life within your work, you will have learned things that you can take with you. And, in my experience, the parts that mattered often seem to come back, in a new form, somewhere down the road.

    Originally published on the Collapsonomics blog.

  • Words Which Matter to People

    PUBLISHED AS PART OF THE RESILIENTS PROJECT IN COLLABORATION WITH FO.AM.

    ‘I don’t know that word.’ He shakes his head and starts to walk away, glancing back to add, ‘…in English.’

    It is the second day of my journey around Europe, a journey in search of resilience, and I am in a park near the centre of Helsinki, asking the locals whether they can help me understand the meaning of sisu, a word that is said to be central to Finnish culture and impossible to translate.

    ‘It’s something about the gut,’ says an economist taking a coffee break on a nearby bench. ‘It’s something about stamina.’

    By the entrance, a woman of around my mother’s age is taking her dog for a walk. ‘It is a kind of strong courage,’ she tells me. ‘People say that we won the Winter War using sisu.’

    During the winter of 1939-40, Finnish forces held off a Soviet invasion for 105 days, despite being outnumbered three-to-one. In the treaty which ended the war, the borderlands of Karelia were surrendered, and their loss is still felt, above all by those Karelian Finns who became refugees within their own country. Nonetheless, the achievement of having fought the Russians to a standstill remains a matter of national pride.

    The woman who stops to help me at the corner, by the pedestrian crossing, assumes that I am looking for directions. I ask if she can help me with sisu. She thinks for a moment.

    ‘It means that, if you really want to do something, you’ll do it.’

    Across the street, two guys with piercings have been watching our conversation, so I go over to talk to them.

    ‘Yes,’ says the first guy. ‘It’s the inner strength that only Finnish have!’

    So the rest of us don’t have a chance of having sisu?

    ‘Well, you do, but not in the same amount.’

    Why is it so strong and so important, here in Finland?

    ‘It’s strong because we go to sauna!’

    We are standing in front of the local library. His friend works here and he takes me inside to meet one of his colleagues. She brings up a website where anyone can ask the national library service about anything they want to know. You can search the existing answers, or if you cannot find what you are looking for, your question will be forwarded to every librarian in the country and you are promised an answer within two days. Someone has to have asked about sisu before.

    ‘Perseverance, persistence, resilience…’ The librarian reads off a list of possible translations, but by now I realise that what I am looking for is more than the English meaning of the word. I want to understand what it means to people here in Finland.

    ‘Years ago, when we didn’t have any electricity and we were into darkness for half of the year, you had to just bite your tongue and do everything that you had to do.’

    So sisu was the spirit that got people through the dark times of the northern winter?

    ‘Yes, I think you could say that. But it gets exaggerated, too. It has become part of this nationalistic story.’

    This story is something I want to come back to. As a concept, though, is sisu still important to people today? Has its meaning changed over time?

    ‘It still holds some sort of significance, even though life is easier than it used to be. As a word, it has a kind of power, the way that swearwords do.’

    This impresses me, the idea of a word that has the force of swearing, except not a negative force. I have been trying to think of an example in English, but I have yet to find one.

    * * *

    Why start from here? Because I cannot think of anywhere in the world where I could stop people in the street to ask about the meaning of the word ‘resilience’ and get into conversations like these. Resilience is a technical term, one which has spread along with the influence of systems thinking and come into use in a widening range of academic and professional fields. But it has no cultural roots; which is to say, it is not grounded in the experience of people’s lives and the ways in which people have made sense of that experience. Instead, with its aura of expert detachment, it belongs to that category of words by which we hold things at a distance. I doubt that anyone would joke about resilience in the way that Finns can joke about sisu, and for this reason I doubt that anyone can take it so seriously.

    This may not seem to matter, from the perspective of many of the discussions around resilience. When the subject is systemic crisis resulting from climate change, resource scarcity and the volatility of global financial and economic systems, how much difference does our choice of words make? My answer is that, when it comes to how good or bad a job we make of living through such crises, on a personal level and collectively, the ways in which we make sense of our situation can make all the difference.

    In his reflections on the collapse of the USSR, Dmitry Orlov notes that the group hit hardest were successful men over the age of forty. For many, their identities were so bound up with the system that, in its absence, they fell apart. Some committed suicide; a greater number drank themselves to an early death. What killed them was not the material consequences of collapse, but the collapse of their structures of meaning. The inability to make sense of themselves in the new reality turned out to be the greatest threat to their survival.

    When I talk about culture, I have in mind the structures of meaning that we make or find within the world. Push at the significance of these structures, their role in how we handle difficult circumstances, and you come up against a background assumption that seems to be characteristic of modern western societies: more often than not, culture is treated as a soft surface layer over life’s harder material and economic realities, a luxury which is the first thing to go as a situation worsens.

    You can see this in Abraham Maslow’s famous ‘hierarchy of needs’. In its popular form, this hierarchy is presented as a pyramid with five layers; you move upwards through the first four of these layers before reaching anything that relates to culture. Only once the basics of subsistence and security are satisfied do we concern ourselves with meaning.

    Yet, as Orlov’s example suggests, there may be no subsistence without meaning. When life is hardest, our ability to make sense of our situation is the difference between giving up and finding a way to keep going. Our words and concepts, the stories we tell, and the way we relate our present difficulties to the experiences of those who have gone before us are all part of this process of making sense. And while it is possible to speak in the abstract about our material needs, in the world as we find it, these needs are always bound up with structures of meaning and purpose, the ways in which people in this particular place and time make sense of their situation. Far from a surface layer, it seems, you cannot get deeper than culture.

    * * *

    Lauri is a sound artist who is fascinated by time and memory, not least the memories of his grandfather, who was among the Karelian refugees. Anu recently returned to Finland after six years living abroad. Her main project since coming back has been to set up the Helsinki Fab Lab, part of an international network of workshops whose aim is to give people access to new small-scale manufacturing technologies. We arrange to meet by the statue of Runeberg, one of the generation of Swedish-speaking Finnish writers who assembled a national culture for Finland. (A process which took place during the 19th century, when the country had passed from Swedish rule to become a territory of the Russian empire.)

    ‘At the same time, they created a situation where the Finnish-speaking people somehow thought they were worse than the Swedish,’ Lauri tells me over coffee in a nearby cafe. ‘Topelius, who was a friend of Runeberg, wrote a book about how this land is and what we should do. At one point, he says that Finnish people are lazy by nature and they ought to take as their role-model the Finnish work-horse. They shouldn’t complain so much about working.’

    Yet it was within this romantic nationalist movement that the idea of sisu became charged with significance.

    ‘It has this feeling that it’s an old concept, and the word is really ancient, but it was made into a kind of national cliché at a certain point.’

    ‘It got powered up with Finnishness,’ says Anu. ‘With the essence of being a Finn.’

    ‘It was created because people needed something, a sense that we have something in here, and it’s a legend, a created concept, after all, but it worked.’

    As they talk, a further quality of sisu comes into focus for me. It is not just about persistence and stamina, but sheer stubbornness, even to the point of stupidity. ‘You push on through, no matter what,’ Anu says. ‘You don’t give up, basically.’

    ‘And you do it because of that inner force. It’s not even because of you, it’s because of sisu that you do it.’

    ‘Even through the gravestone, you push through. That’s what we say.’

    ‘There’s a humorous side to it because, just like pushing through the gravestone, we also say: you climb the tree with your ass first! You just do it because you need to do it, no matter how smart or stupid it is.’

    * * *

    In 1986, having been mistaken for a Latin American, Ivan Illich was invited to Japan to address the founding assembly of an international resource centre for peace research, the result of a collaboration between research centres across Asia and Africa. He tells the story in one of his later writings, ‘The Cultivation of Conspiracy’, and explains his intention that day in Yokohama.

    I wanted first to dismantle any universal notion of peace; I wanted to stress the claim of each ethnos to its own peace, the right of each community to be left in its peace. It seemed important to make clear that peace is not an abstract condition, but a very specific spirit to be relished in its particular, incommunicable uniqueness by each community.

    To stress the right of each ethnos to be left in peace might sound like a formula for segregation, yet Illich was the initiator of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in Mexico, and his earlier life as a Catholic priest had been shaped by his work alongside Puerto Rican immigrants in New York. It was these experiences that sensitised him to the damage done by universal notions: whatever words we use to make sense of an experience, these words have a history; they are drawn from a particular language and are rooted in the experience of people with particular assumptions. If we attempt to use them as abstractions, without acknowledging their histories, the result will be misunderstanding and confusion at best.

    This applies even to the category of words whose purpose is to hold what they speak of at a distance, the category to which I am suggesting ‘resilience’ belongs. If our hope is to cultivate the capacity to endure, the attitudes and ways of making sense of the world that will enable us to navigate dark times, then I suggest we talk to each other about the particular concepts within our different cultures. Ripe with contradictions, ‘sisu’ may provide a vivid example, but as my journey continued, I found myself in similar conversations about everything from the Portuguese concept of saudade to the seeds of resilience lurking in the darkness of the Czech imagination. Perhaps we could see every local culture as, among other things, a kind of survival strategy, improvised in response to a particular landscape and a particular history?

    None of this is to overlook the dangers of essentialising cultures and identities. The history of sisu involves a conscious project to create an identity, and the made-up quality of such concepts is best kept in view. They deserve to be questioned and tested, compared to the other ways in which people have made sense of similar experiences in different times and places, challenged as to whether they still work and for whom they are working. (How does the Finnish cultural identity that I glimpsed in these conversations – itself born of the complex historical entanglement of Finns, Swedes and Russians – adapt to the experience of new generations of immigrants?)

    I wish to argue only this: that the end of all our questioning will not be a set of universal abstractions that transcend the messiness and peculiarity of the local cultural concepts with which we find ourselves. That abstract technical concepts, however usefully they serve within their own context, will always lack the power of living language. And that, if we wish the qualities that we may associate with resilience to take root in the places where we live, we would do well to look for concepts and stories which embody those qualities, and words which matter to people.

  • Three Travellers

    PUBLISHED AS PART OF THE RESILIENTS PROJECT IN COLLABORATION WITH FO.AM.

    1.

    “I don’t think I was given the best careers advice in school,” he says. “There was no future in making things, they told us. If you were bright, you should go to college and study something like law.”

    With his law degree, he spent four and a half years working in data entry jobs and call centres.

    “It was work I could have done when I was eleven years old. But it wasn’t minimum wage, I was earning enough to be saving money. I always planned to have a midlife crisis before I turned thirty.”

    He was twenty-eight when he had enough saved to start travelling. That was a year ago. Since then, he’s been around most of Europe. On this trip, he is headed for Ukraine, then back through Moldova.

    He might have spent everything he’d saved, travelling as long as it lasted and picking up jobs in hostels, if he hadn’t found what it is he actually wants to do with his life.

    “I knew if I kept travelling, it would come to me.”

    It came to him as he was walking on the Curonian Spit, the sliver of land that arcs across from the Lithuanian coast to the Russian naval outpost of Kaliningrad. He spent a while helping the local amber gatherers, sifting sand. They let him keep the small pieces for himself. Afterwards, walking along this beach that stretches on for fifty miles, he realised that what he wanted to do was to make whisky.

    He travelled for a while around Scotland and Ireland, talking to people in the distilleries about how to get into the trade. Twenty years ago, they told him, you would have persuaded someone to take you on as an apprentice. Nowadays, the UK has become so obsessed with education, you need a degree for everything. That includes a Masters in Brewing and Distilling in Edinburgh.

    “So I’ll be going back to college in September. Only this time to study something I actually want to do.”

    2.

    First he was a portrait painter, then a seaman, and now he walks into the bar carrying a banjo and a rucksack with a three-stringed ukelele sticking out of it. He gets himself a beer, comes to sit at my table and offers me a cigarette from a pack of Winston’s.

    He asks me what I am doing and I try to explain. About resilience, the systems we depend on, the things that carry us through. I say that I want to learn about how people cope in hard times, why one person will keep going where another gives up.

    “Singing,” he tells me.

    He reaches for his banjo.

    “I know one English song.”

    Both the index finger and the middle finger of his right hand are missing. He fits the picks onto his thumb and the two remaining fingers and starts gently, once around the tune before he sings, verse and chorus. “Can the circle be unbroken? Bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye…” He has a way of singing out of both corners of his mouth, cigarette still held between his lips.

    “It is about his mother,” he says, when he is finished. Later, he tells me he has been to another city to deal with his mother’s apartment which he recently inherited.

    I order two more beers.

    From his rucksack, he takes out what looks like a cigar box. It has Greek lettering on the outside. He opens it to show a small backgammon board. Instead of checkers and dice, it holds a row of six harmonicas. He takes the first of them and plays a blues that sounds like a memory of the end of something.

    He was at sea for twenty years, an ordinary seaman and then a radio officer. He learned to tap Morse code in the last years before it went silent and the satellites took over. Three years ago, he came ashore for good. I ask what made him choose to become a seaman. He must have been well over thirty, at the time. He looks as though I have asked a question too big to expect an answer.

    “Because the sea is poetry,” he says, finally. “You understand?”

    A few years ago, there was a UNESCO competition to commemorate Joseph Conrad, another Polish seaman. Did I ever read Conrad? He had written a song to enter the competition. It took first place in its category. First place.

    When his mother’s apartment is dealt with, all he wants is a small place beside the sea, as far from the world as he can get.

    By now, we have finished our drinks. I leave my rucksack and go downstairs to the bathroom. When I come back, he is gone.

    3.

    “Sometimes it’s not so good to travel alone,” he says. “Three nights ago, I am cycling in the dark on an empty beach, and now I can’t tell if I did that or if I dreamed it.”

    He is awake when I get into the compartment and heave my rucksack onto the overhead shelf. Awake, but sleepy like a child that has just been woken. He asks me where I am going next and when I start to describe it, he brightens, and tells me the name. He remembers.

    “It was after nine when I came there. I was climbing in the dark and there were drums playing across the hillside. I knew that I was close, but I missed the turning and I had to camp in the forest. In the morning, I found them.”

    The moon is like a slice of caramelised orange over the station at Tczew, a moon from a children’s story. He gets up and walks to the end of the carriage to check his bicycle is still there. He comes back, reassured. The train pulls off again.

    “So, you will go there.” He is smiling to himself at the memory. “I think it is some kind of paradise.”

    He sleeps more than I do that night, as we draw in and out of empty stations, but he is already awake when my alarm goes off, a few minutes outside Warsaw. He looks better. Sleep has grounded him.

    He watches as I repack my rucksack.

    “You go through Bohumin? That is the way I would go from here, if I was going home.”

    Next week, he thinks he will be in Berlin.

    “And Zajezova,” he smiles. “You will be there tonight.”

  • The Breadline

    PUBLISHED AS PART OF THE RESILIENTS PROJECT IN COLLABORATION WITH FO.AM.

    The breadline runs through the middle of the Kallio district of Helsinki. On Wednesdays and Fridays, when the Hursti Charitable Association’s regular food distributions take place, queues build up along the pavement of Helsinginkatu all morning. Once a month, there is a special distribution for students.

    For some, these queues are associated with the crisis of the early 1990s, when the collapse of trade with a collapsing Soviet Union and the implosion of a homegrown financial bubble sank Finland into economic depression. At its worst, unemployment was five times its pre-crisis level and GDP had shrunk by 14%. The memory of this time came up in conversations during my stay in Helsinki, and while the Helsinginkatu distributions turn out to be older than this – their founder, Veikko Hursti, began handing out food to needy people in the city back in 1967 – it seems that lengthening breadlines during the crisis years left an impression.

    Today, Kallio is one of those places you find in most European capitals: a working class district close to the city centre where small apartments and low rents attract the young, creative and broke, until their activities in turn begin to attract those with more money to spend, and the rents begin to rise. No one hates this process more than the artists and activists who are its catalysts, and everywhere it is a source of angst.

    The Kallio Movement began here, a year ago, when the city council proposed to move the Hursti food distributions out of the area and off the streets. There had been lobbying from a longstanding local society: the lengthy queues were causing ‘unreasonable inconvenience’ to residents. One resident disagreed and wrote a post on Facebook, a proposal for a movement that would represent the larger group of people living in the area who had no desire to see it ‘cleaned up’. Within three days, over five thousand people had signed up to this proposal. The network that formed as a result has campaigned successfully to defend the food distributions and a local refugee reception centre. It is also organising block parties and flea markets.

    One thing struck me, hearing and reading about the origins of the Kallio Movement: there is a clear feeling that something would have changed for the worse if the evidence of poverty were moved out of sight. The breadline acts as a living statistic, harder to ignore than a set of numbers in an official report: so long as people are hungry, its defenders say, this inconvenient reality should be a visible part of the society in which we live.

    * * *

    My host in Kallio, Anu remembers an explosion of flea markets and street stalls during the crisis of the 1990s, as people looked for ways to make ends meet.

    There is an ambiguous overlap between the improvised economic activity that may constitute a type of resilience in times of crisis and the forms of activity embraced as a lifestyle choice by the artists, activists and hipsters whose presence brings attention to an area like Kallio.

    This ambiguity shows up in another of the projects that people kept telling me about in Helsinki. The first Restaurant Day was in May 2011, the same month the Kallio Movement was getting started, and the plan spread in a similar way over social media. It’s one of those plans that’s simple enough it can travel by word of mouth: for one day, open your own restaurant, anywhere you choose. In parks and clothes shops, at kitchen tables or in a basket from a first floor balcony, people took up the invitation, sharing their passion for food with friends, neighbours and anyone who came along.

    It’s easy to see why this would catch people’s imaginations, resonating as it does with the buzz of pop-up culture that has spread from grassroots DIY activity to the blogs of every branding agency in the western hemisphere. I remember MsMarmiteLover, founder of The Underground Restaurant, coming along to the first Social Media vs the Recession meetup I hosted in London in early 2009. A year later, when we were working on the Space Makers project at Brixton Village, it was a one-day festival of pop-up restaurants that gave the first clue to the new popularity the indoor market was about to experience. What’s brilliant about Restaurant Day is the power and lightness with which it scales: with only the barest infrastructure, it has become one of the biggest things happening in the city, providing a strength in numbers that allows unofficial restaurants to go overground. It doesn’t surprise me that, one year on, the idea has spread to seventeen countries around the world.

    Yet this is not all there is to say about Restaurant Day. For one thing, while the creativity and imagination people put into their pop-up restaurants is what grabs the attention, it is also a form of non-confrontational civil disobedience: through that strength in numbers and an appeal to common sense, it challenges the strict rules by which the making and serving of food is usually regulated. This is not an accident. The idea began as a protest, a response to reports of small restaurants and kiosks around Helsinki being fined or shut down for minor violations of these regulations. You could call it an occupation of this regulatory space: a challenge to the authorities to cede ground, or else evict an idea that people have taken to their hearts.

    This point has not been lost among the success that followed. You can find Restaurant Day written up as a case study in reports on Helsinki as a ‘Smart City’, its authorities adapting flexibly to networked initiatives that stimulate urban culture. Given the role played by Nokia in pulling the country out of the depression of the early 1990s – at its peak, the company made up 4% of GDP and 20% of the corporation tax take – it seems likely that Finland is ahead of many countries in taking seriously the power of networked technologies and the social possibilities they can make room for. But I want to suggest another take on the significance of Restaurant Day.

    Even with the breadline, Helsinki feels about as far away from economic crisis as anywhere in the Eurozone. Yet beyond the hipster pop-up appeal and the Smart City civic start-up angle, there is an edge of future reenactment to Restaurant Day. Think of it as a quarterly rehearsal. For what? For how we make a good job of getting poorer. As Kevin Carson writes in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, the effect of regulation is very often to create tyrannies of scale: the overheads imposed make lightweight, small-scale, DIY or part-time enterprises almost impossible to sustain. It’s a point echoed by Dmitry Orlov in his darkly entertaining commentaries on life in a collapsing superpower, drawn from his experiences in first the USSR and now the USA. ‘Before the collapse happens,’ he says, ‘the solutions that would work after the collapse are uncompetitive and illegal.’

    The unlicensed restaurants popping up in Helsinki and elsewhere are, if not illegal, then deep into a grey area of regulation. That this might be a source of resilience is neither the intention behind them, nor the reason why they have proven so successful, but it may yet turn out to be an unintended consequence of their success.

  • The Dark Shapes Ahead

    Published as part of The Resilients Project in collaboration with Fo.AM.

    The dark shapes ahead are islands. Beyond them the sea shines and the sky seems a soft reflection of its light, and beyond both of these, the faded darkness of the next line of islands. This goes on for hours.

    The thousands of islands – tens of thousands – that merge into the Stockholm archipelago are one of the gentle wonders of Europe. This side of midsummer, their trees are a deep green that fades easily into darkness on a cloudy evening. Here and there, where land meets water, a red-painted house by a small landing stage. Where the channel tightens, you can see old fortifications: a marker of the times in which Sweden was a great power in Europe, and in which power in Europe was settled with armies and navies.

    Today, the big ships sailing through these straits are cruise liners and ferries full of Swedish and Finnish holidaymakers. Three hours into the crossing, as we pass into the open waters of the Baltic, the disco of the MS Silja Serenade is screaming with children in party clothes playing musical statues.

    * * *

    We are living through a moment of crisis in Europe of a kind that has not been seen for generations: not since the 1930s, or the summer of 1914. I hear this from people whose reading of events I do not find easy to dismiss, and I see traces of it in the news stories I follow. I do not think it is possible to talk about ‘resilience’ in Europe today without doing so against this background.

    And yet it remains a conscious effort to hold this in focus, while the blur of normality goes on around us.

    * * *

    All week the air seemed to be holding its breath, until by Saturday the only answer was water. We went swimming twice: diving in the afternoon from a jetty at Ulriksdal, then again at almost midnight, closer to home, the sky not fully dark, walking down to the shore in our dressing gowns. The surface of the water was black and silver, a different substance to the one we swam in earlier.

    I had been thinking about the slipperiness of history, how it escapes our grasp. When we study a war in school, the first facts we learn are the last to be known to anyone who lived through it: when it was over and which side won. Those who do not remember the past may be condemned to repeat it, but hindsight is very nearly the opposite of memory. To remember is to be returned to a reality that was not yet inevitable, to recall the events which shaped our lives when they might still have gone otherwise.

    * * *

    I imagine conversations taking place in Europe in the 1930s, as history darkens, and two thoughts come from this.

    First, that there is no wise moment to leave a bad situation, when leaving carries a cost. There is only a choice between two kinds of foolishness: to be too early and risk losing much for nothing, or to be too late and risk not being able to leave at all.

    Then, a second thought, that leaving may not be an answer to anything. This is not to speak against self-preservation, only to notice that it is not always a sufficient cause to carry us through.

    If someone were to ask me what kind of cause is sufficient to live for in dark times, the best answer I could give would be: to take responsibility for the survival of something that matters deeply. Whatever that is, your best action might then be to get it out of harm’s way, or to put yourself in harm’s way on its behalf, or anything else your sense of responsibility tells you.

    It seems to me that, if we can talk about such a thing as the tasks of resilience, then today these tasks will share that quality of taking responsibility: not an impossible, meaningless responsibility for the world in general, but one that is specific and practical, and may be different for each of us.