Last summer, I was invited by WorldSkills to join a panel on sustainability in Kazan, Russia. If you don't know yet, WorldSkills is the bi-annual olympics of vocational professions. There is no other place in the world where you get to see a Saudi prince competing in welding, and that's just for starters.
The trip is memorable mainly for two reasons: firstly, I was up for 66 hours straight flying from the European Forum Alpbach deep into Russia and back; secondly, it is the only time I shared one of my poems with an audience so far. The Austrian alps and my first experiences with coaching (kudos to Shanti) brought a lot out of me. I hope you find some ideas here that will inspire you.
Shake, transform and develop – these were the keywords at today's opening ceremony.
We do so to achieve our goal: environmental, social and economic sustainability for all.
But what does it take to actually achieve that?
In this short amount of time, I will try to cast light on what I believe to be the cornerstones of that process. But not from a practical standpoint. Rather a very personal, philosophical one. For that is what serves as the foundation.
Between 2016-17, I served as the first Youth Delegate of Hungary to the United Nations representing over 2 million young people at the highest level of diplomacy. Naturally, most of our discussions revolved around various matters of sustainability: unemployment, climate change, innovation or education.
But one in particular stood out: HAPPINESS – and rotting at its heart: APATHY, a sense of losing control over our lives and not being able to do anything about it.
If we glance through the past 200 years, it is hardly surprising that many of us feel like that. Despite that we grew our wealth, we also became more stressed and anxious due to profound changes in our lives, such as mass urbanisation and the loss of space, information overflow and time scarcity. They all make us feel smaller and more uncertain, which in turn severely decreases our confidence in the ability to make a change.
Tackling this challenge I call 'Rekindling the Fire'. Often, we can restore faith in our free will to act by simply reverse-engineering the changes: reclaiming our space, physically showing that we can change things – even if it is just sweeping the street in front of your porch –, or by inventing new methods to cope, focusing strategies of education on happiness to restore personal agency.
Once we have fire, we have light to see our goal. But how do we get there?
This I call ‘Driving the Waters’ – it’s about the simplicity of messages. Climate change as a concept - and the data about it - has been around forever. Jeffrey Sachs, the foremost economist on sustainability told me a few days ago that the first academic article about global warming was published in 1896. Yet, it was only with Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future that it became a truly mainstream political topic. Why? Because this was the first time that a simple, honest and powerful narrative was proposed and spearheaded in the public space about it. People, activists, all found it easy to identify with it, therefore we managed to drive the waters into one river-bed, multiplying its impact. This is the second cornerstone.
The third one is tricky: I call it 'Harnessing the Wind', which has to do with listening. One can only achieve so much with protest. Eventually, the narrative turns polarising unless its owners listen to voices of dissent, to those who disagree. Why are they doing so? How could we make their story a part of ours? It is a lot like sailing, when you are responsively zigzagging to proceed in the direction of the wind. Sustainability is an all-encompassing topic, therefore we need decisive support for it: differing voices must be incorporated too.
So we have fire, water and wind to save our Earth. What else do we need? I say, we need 'Love'. And I am not joking here. By 2019, we have managed to desensitise our society to an extent that we see numbers instead of humans. I am pretty sure that even here, at WorldSkills there are people who only care about winning. That's an impossible attitude for sustainability in the 2000s. We need warm passion and compassion for others to drive change. And to encourage you to embrace this idea, I will now close with a poem I wrote 2 days ago in the Austrian alps, thinking about the concepts I just mentioned to you:
It feels cold at the peak...
The mountain flower has dropped weak.
At the force of the alpine gale, heed
My legs tremble and surrender:
Have I fallen to my lead?
Have I grown cool and numb,
In always pursuing, the hunt?
Drawing my bow to many ends,
But never released, never shot.
Now, see as my body bends...
And takes the dive in strain.
All that augured strength spoiled in vain.
Frozen; the chambers of my eyes,
Archways of my heart, and the pain
Within me has crystallised.
It feels cold at the peak...
The alpine gale tears me in shriek.
Come, thick cloud, be my veil in death!
In your cover, I remember
What makes us all toil for breath.
Surrounded, I feel loved.
Taken under your wings, above.
Here, I sense you, and you hold me,
Shielded within, I will pull through,
Until I can find the key.
Thus, when the Sun shall dawn,
And in tears, you lift and move on,
I will harness the long-sought truth,
To spark the fire, mend the bones,
Reclaiming my wasted youth.
