Reflections on a power cut
Stretching the imagination
“We produce against the feeling of lack.” – Byung-Chul Han, quoted by Oliver Burkeman in ‘Meditations for Mortals’.
On a Monday morning in late April, the electricity went out while I was working – not just in Portugal, where I was staying, but also across Spain, and some of France.
This piece bears no dramatic anecdotes of pitch-black city streets or transport chaos. Indeed, from the outside, my experience that day was unremarkable. What took me aback was on the inside.
Don’t panic
I was staying and coworking in a quiet suburban area near Lisbon, at Quinta Flamingos. Our loudest neighbours were the blackbirds, who spend their days catching worms in the lawn and singing from the fruit trees. Tall pines nearby swayed in the strong Atlantic breeze.
Like everyone in the coworking, the first thing I noticed was the Wi-Fi connection drop. I immediately tried to switch to my phone’s hotspot and rejoin my video call, reassuring myself that power would return before long. I had big milestones to contribute to that day and was simultaneously exchanging emails about presenting some recent research.
Things looked worse when my mobile data could only manage an unstable connection. A few hurried messages later, it cut out for good.
Once our group of coworkers realised the scale of what had happened – and saw how vague the authorities were being about likely causes and timelines for repair – a different mental model kicked in.
My partner and I didn’t have much food in the cupboard, and no mains water to cook most of it (no power meant no working pumps). We decided to check out our closest supermarket, dimly aware that without electricity, its automatic sliding doors would not open, let alone whether it would have enough stock to last. But we went along anyway, hopefully, to find this out in person.
Duly informed, I went home; this still didn’t feel like a real crisis, and I was still worried about my deadline. My partner checked the local grocer’s. It was open, but had run out of bottled water. She returned with cartons of soy milk and apple juice, just in case.
Our host was listening to her car radio and shared what she heard on the news bulletin. We spoke much more than we had before that day, absorbed as we had been in our personal spheres: work, keeping up with friends and family, hobbies and wellness activities – all of which increasingly take place in a virtual world.
Light in the dark
As night fell, I read a physical book from the coworking bookshelf (by candlelight, for the first time in years).
I leafed through Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists, which argues for a universal basic income. The author claims that despite – or perhaps because of – the miraculous capabilities of modern society, “we can’t imagine a better world than the one we’ve got.” Consequently, per the World Health Organization, “depression will become the number one cause of illness worldwide by 2030.”
Bregman hopes to “fling open the windows of our minds”. He states openly that his ‘we’ means “the richest 10%, 5%, or 1%”. Critics have charged that his more recent work on this theme fails to dismantle the power structures which create and perpetuate the same problems that he diagnoses. Yet the imagination is also central in the analysis and creations of writers who are less cosy with capitalism, like
(‘The Crisis of Imagination’) and (‘there is an edge').)Material systems are wired into our mental and social structures; when they prove brittle and break down, the tension and strain they create in us is released.
What I found hardest to imagine when the power cut out was that some of my goals and targets simply wouldn’t be met. Sure, we might have to live only on water stores for two days. But my work? I might reschedule; if I let people know about my delay, we could work around it.
The notion of simply stopping and letting go felt like fiction.
Each of us lives in a unique reality, constructed from our important life experiences and influences (however cloudy those might appear). In this private world, we generate beliefs and ideas about ourselves. These beliefs exist within our minds but are sustained by our bodies. When they speak, it is often in the voice of judgment.
I have noticed how often I judge the way I pass the time. Above all, how much I ‘produce’ – content of any kind.
In the Balance is no exception. I judge the four months it has been since my last post and how I still struggle to carve out time and space for a writing practice; I judge my list of shelved topic ideas, gradually losing their lustre; I judge the fact that I keep writing these mid-length pieces, rather than slightly shorter ones that might do better at attracting and holding interest.
However, by also judging how ‘organised’ my life feels at any given moment, I can serve up a steady flow of chores and minor tasks to preoccupy myself with, allowing me to procrastinate on what I should be producing.
Lately, with various sources of support, I have been looking deeper into my own constructed reality, pushing to see behind the goals, targets, and choices. Which beliefs do I really want to keep?
What is it that I feel is lacking?
The answer matters less than asking the question.
When is a problem shared not a problem halved?
The ‘lack’ is also felt collectively, if not distributed evenly.
The lights came back on not long before midnight, shattering the illusion of a longer crisis and thrusting our to-do lists back to the front of our minds.
Critics blamed Spain’s high participation of renewables – particularly solar – in its electricity grid, which others disupted. An expert panel was set up to investigate. The case reminds me of when Texas was hit by winter storms in 2021; Fox News and Republican figures blamed wind turbines’ frozen blades, failing to mention that gas-fired stations had also shut down.
Factually accurate or not, criticism of clean power channels a deep, public anxiety about losing the safety and certainty that an energy supply is thought to provide. In Europe and the US, such problems usually feel remote, but as Keith Johnson points out in Foreign Policy, “for much of the world, energy poverty (and brownouts and blackouts and rolling blackouts) is a frequent occurrence”.
Countries in the Global South want to expand energy access and industrialise to raise living standards for some of the poorest people in the world. In the Global North, there are calls to ‘electrify everything’ to prevent further climate harms. Both cases clearly have moral force. Yet growing infrastructure, industry, and colossal amounts of waste are leading the planet to collapse. Reducing energy use is still rarely discussed, as we sink deeper into our digital matrix. The world at large is stuck in an efficiency trap.
Somewhere on the trajectory from deprivation to abundance, there has to be a discontinuity, a further transformation, if we are to truly be free.
I don’t think we have found it yet.
The feeling of lack drives rich people, corporations, and societies onwards, producing, organising, and striving, without ever stepping back to create space and imagine something different. (By which I don’t mean the net-zero targets and milestones of ‘energy transition’.)
Taking new paths
Transformation sounds big, but maybe it starts small.
A couple of weeks after the power cut, I went for a run on a route through some unfamiliar trails. I tried to navigate while recording my pace and streaming a mix on Soundcloud, as I usually do. My weary phone gave out; I fought with it for a minute or two, swearing at how such a powerful piece of technology could fail me with what I felt to be such a basic request.
Then I took my earbuds out. I heard and felt my breathing. I looked up from my screen and saw the trees, the sunset, the path ahead. I ran on, listening to the birds sing.
Where to go next
Burkeman’s book Meditations for Mortals is that rare and wonderful thing: a read that is both entertaining and liberating. It has helped me a great deal and I strongly recommend it.
This episode of the On Being podcast, in which Krista Tippet interviews Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, is worth a listen whether or not you are familiar with his music. Their conversation touches on burnout, embodiment, time, and joy. “If we could all be curious about our fellow people and ourselves – like, hey, what’s actually happening right now? – I think we might be surprised that the answers are actually quite simple.”
I recently joined a 4-night retreat at The Barn (by the Sharpham Trust), near Totnes (in Devon, UK). The experience is still fresh, but has reinforced what I feel about the themes in this piece. For anyone even mildly curious about mindfulness in community, breath and body, and what the Buddhist tradition can offer – especially if you are searching for time to recover or heal.
"I judge the four months it has been since my last post and how I still struggle to carve out time and space for a writing practice; I judge my list of shelved topic ideas, gradually losing their lustre; I judge the fact that I keep writing these mid-length pieces, rather than slightly shorter ones that might do better at attracting and holding interest." Yeap, I FEEL THAT.
Have you read "Make time" it really helped me rethink the use of my time and my need for long to do lists