Transition Bro Ddyfi Trawsnewid and the Slow Journey to Change

When I first joined our steering group, there was a sense of great excitement and urgency. Our awareness raising campaign kicked off with an impressive programme of movies, speakers and workshops. Before I knew it, we were hosting events for more than a hundred people on a regular basis.

We had great speakers: Rob Hopkins, Roberto Perez, a double bill with George Monbiot and George Marshall, Starhawk and even our local mayor and Will the Butcher.

Within a few months, having dinner with husband and kids became a rare event or a very rushed one, as there were a lot of meetings to go to, things to organise and to do. So I shoved my own stuff on the backboiler for a while, as transition took over my life. It’s not just that there is a lot to do, there is so much to learn as well; peak oil, climate change, permaculture, systems theory, Joanna Macy, and so on and so forth. 

Before transition I had some idea of what all these subjects entailed, but all of a sudden I felt the need to become far better versed in all of them and then some. The pile of books next to my bed took on a tower-like appearance. I scoured the internet for peak oil news, climate change articles and economic doom and watched all the movies and documentaries I could get my hands on. I took part in one of the early Trainings for Transition in Totnes and not that long after, Train the Trainers and became one of the Transition Networks’ trainers.

Meanwhile, at home, I had noticed that things were not all as should be, but chose to ignore this for now, to be sorted later when I had time. Our kitchen was still regularly being taken over by steering group meetings. I was hogging phone and laptop and as my kids finally let me know: I wasn’t there even when I was there. They told me they felt I preferred doing Transition stuff to doing things with them, they said they hated transition, said it was depressing and boring, said it just took their mum away from them. I remember my husband standing in the background looking grim. This felt very unfair; I was working so hard, I was doing this for them and their future, couldn’t they see that?

But kids are kids and they don’t care about their future if they are not enjoying their here and now. I had to stop and take a good hard look at what I was doing to my family and myself. I felt exhausted, but driven, fuelled by gallons of strong tea. I had developed a stomach problem and was in constant pain. A lot of the time I was grumpy and short tempered. My boy didn’t have a birthday party until six months later, because I just didn’t get round to it. What was I doing?

Meanwhile, Transition Bro Ddyfi Trawsnewid carried on, but our steering group wasn’t performing as before. Things didn’t get done, or took a long time and we rarely had more than half the group present at meetings. Despite attracting a couple of new people to help spread the load, it became clear that we had lost our “vavavoom”. I wasn’t the only one to feel exhausted. Some of our group had events happening in their own lives that required their time and energy to be spend there. We decided it was time to “hand it over to the community” and with our last reserves, organise a Big Launch.

We had hoped that the Launch would result in the creation of at least three working or topic groups. That was the condition we had set ourselves in order to be able to “demise” as a steering group, but that condition wasn’t met. Only a Heart and Soul group and a Food group went forward and this development threw the steering group into limbo.

We couldn’t officially disband or evolve, but we had no energy left to give to the initiative. Our personal lives, for more than two years on the backboiler were in dire need of more than a little TLC. And thus Transition Bro Ddyfi Trawsnewid slipped into a silent slumber, occasionally stirring, but like King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, the initiative rests until the call comes.

So much about Transition is about preparation, to be ready for when the hard times come: preparation as a community, but also as families and individuals. I know that quite a few of our steering group members have been busy doing just that. They’ve dug gardens, insulated their homes, started keeping bees and poultry, got involved with local food production and retailers, pulled their families and friends close and celebrated them and much, much more.

And now after putting our own houses in order, we might be ready for another round. I’m hoping to start up with some more awareness raising events, because we were good at doing those and they were fun. I know that at least two more of our group wouldn’t mind getting involved with that again. And the fruit trees we planted in the local housing estate will need pruning, that’s just too good an excuse for a workshop. We will go on, slower, wiser and more respectful of the needs of our personal lives. It’s as that old Welsh farmer said, after we’d delivered a Transition talk in his brother’s front room: “In Wales, things and people take a long time to change…”