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Excess and Abstinence

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Somehow a conversation about excess turned into a conversation about community and it made sense.


The second Listening Circle (held again on the hottest day of the week but in a much cooler room) was a gradual transition from reflections on excessive and addictive tendencies, to an exploration of some of the reasons and context surrounding and underlying those patterns: being overwhelmed with choice, surrounded by messaging of what we could have and could do, and untethered from community.


Rather than narrate it to you, here is a breakdown of the points that guided the discussion so you can go back whenever you want and let your mind fill the gaps with your own thoughts, experiences and perspectives.


  • Balancing extremes, from excess to cutting things out

  • Excess of substances, excess of work, excess of time alone, excess of socialising, excess of going out…

  • Digital media and the multiple possible experiences, lives, professions, opportunities, trips, partners we could have, live, embody, enjoy, love.

  • Excess of options

  • Consumer culture and the availability for excess

  • The pressures for constant improvement and growth.

  • Is excess defined by a lack of balance?

  • Balancing extremes of isolation and extroversion or stillness and productivity with seasonal cycles; acclimatising to cold insular winters and extroverted outdoorsy summers

  • Collective rhythms and cycles of hedonism and hard work

  • Using seasonal and menstrual cycles as an anchor for balance

  • Work, creativity and flow states

  • Individualistic pressures to be self-sufficient leading to burnout, instability and isolation

  • Community as a grounding force for balance

  • Community as shared responsibility and mutual care

  • Our need for belonging, reliance on others and the taboo on (non-romantic) ‘codependence or at least ’interdependence?

  • Interdependence as the formula to feeling useful and valuable 

  • The challenges of finding community and the appeal of joining a cult

  • The importance of being of service

  • When free time can be a lonely, daunting prospect

  • The beauty of unconditional friendship and family bonds

  • Loneliness and the line between the joys of solitary time and lonesomeness

  • What does abstinence look like? Is it depriving yourself on purpose? Is it about testing an extreme to figure out our place of balance? 

  • Celebrating sobriety and moderation

  • Discomfort and suffering as essential ingredients of life

  • Excess to test and set our own limits 


The next Listening Circle will be held on Wednesday 9th of July on the topic of 'Progress'. Are we progressing? What should progress look like?

Entrades populars d'aquest blog

BRISTOL LISTENING CIRCLE

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What does progress look like?

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Another evening at 30+ degrees, another La Ruca Listening Circle with fresh faces bringing fresh ideas and novel approaches to avoiding the glare from the sun. This topic, ‘What does progress look like?’ , was our most ambitious yet, and (happily) we ended up with no firm answers and nothing like a consensus, just more questions and perspectives that will fester and ferment.    “When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.” — Henry David Thoreau “Stick your progress where the sun don't shine Keep your big mess away from me and mine If you leave us alone, well, we'd all be just fine Stick your progress where the sun don't shine” — John Rich Before everyone’s thoughts became intertwined in the conversation, the initial round revealed two main levels at which to engage: collective/political progress and individual/personal progress. While they are inevitably correlated, some parallels became apparent in both categories. What followe...
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Honesty and White Lies

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One golden, sweaty evening, six (sort of) strangers assembled in a secret cafe above Gloucester Road to listen deeply to one another and hold space for the traumas of being lied to about Santa… It is not usually the case that we gather to talk about something that isn’t either urgent or deeply personal on the one hand, or a small-talk sideshow on the other – where there isn’t a primary speaker and where there is no agenda or a goal for consensus, outcomes, actions. But it is equally unusual to engage in conversation about a topic that nobody in the circle is specifically an expert about, where nobody has recently read a paper or book, seen a documentary or listened to a podcast about it. It is unusual amongst a group of people to stay on topic wihout letting the flow of the dialogue start many conversations and finish none.  Just people talking about ideas, reflections, perceptions, experiences around one topic. That’s it.  “This felt like one of those really good conversation...
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