I’ve recently started a master’s program at Stockholm Resilience Centre, and it’s been quite a shock. I walk around feeling exhausted all the time and kind of lost, like I don’t know where I’m going and what I’m doing. Like I’m holding on to a string, being pulled in high speed toward something, but I’ve got no idea where. Maybe it’s the whole thing about starting a new master’s program, meeting all the new people, having to adjust to new ways of learning, different expectations.
Or it might be this whole resilience thing, and all our lectures about the Anthropocene and planetary boundaries and how we’re more or less screwed, in general, as a species, in the world, more or less. Of course that’s not what our teachers are saying, they are not that fatalistic, but it kind of feels that way.
It’s probably a combination of both. I find myself feeling annoyed by people. Not because they are annoying, but because I need to talk to them, and I have nothing to say. Create a common language. The study load is heavy, and all the others in the program are so ambitious and on top of things. And then this what’s-the-point-feeling rushes over me and I have no idea of what to do with all this knowledge.
I’ve read a book, though. And right in the beginning of it, there is a passage that makes things, if not clear, then atleast clearer. A sort of explanation for what resilience is, and an outlook that I hope to acquire during the two years of my master’s.
Resilience thinking is a way of looking at the world. It’s about seeing systems, linkages, thresholds, and cycles in the things that are important to us and in the things that drive them. It’s about understanding and embracing change, as opposed to striving for constancy.
(Walker & Salt 2006: “Resilience thinking”)
That, I like. So maybe there is hope for me yet.
Katja Malmborg 