Wrapping your head round it

There is an English expression that I always found really funny: "wrapping your head round it". It means understanding something, often used in the negative: "I just can't wrap my head round that." It always brings to my mind pictures of Dali skulls incredibly elongated and wrapped some random object, like a high-heeled shoe or a lobster.

I've found that a lot of the trouble people have with trying to live sustainably is, very often, about "wrapping their head round it". This week I've seen a couple of interesting examples.

On Tuesday there was an Energy Group topic meeting about the Action Plan for our city. The coordinator of the group is a guy I have described in a previous post as "hiperlogical to the point of moderate autism". I would also say that he gets lost in detail really easily, and his capacity to see the big picture is astoundingly small. It's hardly surprising then, that he has serious trouble just to think about something as big as a general Action Plan for a city, that would contain lots of different sections (energy, transport, food, etc.), each one with lots of subsections. Simply thinking about it gets him hyperventilating and it looks to him like an impossible task. So what did he do? He created in his mind four different documents, which in practice would all be part of the Action Plan, but that looked like manageable chunks of work to him. Well, whatever floats your boat. Unfortunately, this kind of trouble to think about big-picture stuff is surprisingly common. What's worse, it's also required if you are going to think about any sustainable solution to anything.

On Wednesday there was a Transition forum meeting. It went smoothly, which was a refreshing change from recent memories. But clearly, the vast majority of people still have trouble wrapping their head around things like how to get organized. We had a couple of stabs at it, talking about funding and about finding people to fill specific roles, and even found somebody who is going to take the role of newsletter editor. The bigger organizing issues were untouched. Chatting afterwards in the pub, Charming Guy was talking about how to get more people in forum meetings, and I said: "Well, there isn't even clarity on what forum meetings are and what they are supposed to accomplish, we need to be clear on what is the purpose of forum meetings and then it will be obvious who needs to come." Then he started waffling on: "Let's agree that there isn't agreement and that forum meetings are for whatever the people who come want to do." How can you organize anything on such a flimsy base? Some people have trouble wrapping their head round what "organizing" means, quite clearly.