Reflections 18th April

Sometimes, it's difficult to tell when something is ending, or beginning. A liminal space where something is emerging but the old has not yet disappeared, and both seem present at the same time. It's confusing and unsettling and which version we choose to accept is a choice we make depending on our mindset.

This week has felt a little like that, as I've watched a major utility, British Gas, decide that sacrificing employees in order to maintain short term profitability is a sustainable strategy, and a former Prime Minister get depressed because he's been caught out peddling influence for profit, and worse, doing it for a business that then collapsed. Why get depressed? - it's not an accident, and he's not a victim, it's a simple if distasteful game of consequences. What interests me is the conditions that create the behaviours.

As always, the natural world offers us rather more than a clue. Locusts and Grasshoppers are the same creature. What turns the Grasshopper into a Locust is its e…