Sitting by the muddy river
✍🏼 Written by Annette
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the value of being still—and why it is so damn hard to be so. Alan Watts once said, “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” It makes sense in theory, but in practice, it feels deeply counterintuitive. Why is that? And what might we learn if we resist the urge to act?
The system behind the system
In the past couple of years, I’ve started to look critically at the economic theories I was taught at university. We learned models like Samuelson’s Circular Flow Diagram - a tidy picture of money circulating in isolation from the Earth. No energy in. No waste out. Nature, absent. We were taught that GDP growth is the only meaningful measure of success. No one asked: growth of what? And for what?
Progress, we were told, equals constant forward and upward movement. No limits. No questions.
It’s baffling to realise how deeply this capitalist logic is embedded - not just in policy and markets - but in our thinking. As a culture, we seem obsessed with action, because productivity is what society values.
Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher Julian has often introduced me to, argues that "doing nothing" can be a more radical and effective act than engaging in pseudo-activity. He suggests that our urge to participate and act can serve as a mask for the emptiness of the system. I can’t say I was deliberately trying to mask anything rotten, but looking back, I can see how my eagerness to develop "circular solutions" and "fix problems" often acted as a smokescreen for scaling business as usual. Even when I thought I was practicing "systems thinking", we rarely questioned the system behind the system.
An experiment with stillness
In recent months, I’ve gradually dimmed my consulting hours and introduced more nothingness into my schedule - not out of apathy, but from a growing fear that my efforts to solve problems may have only sparked new ones. As an experiment without a known expiration date, I’m giving myself space to be still and to listen.
As cliché as it might sound, I’ve found myself in the garden, growing vegetables and wildflowers. I listen to podcasts about death and composting. I have deeper conversations with the people around me about what we long for in our lives.
I struggle to see myself returning to corporate life, but I also feel the tension - and shame - of standing at the side of the road. It feels terrible to be “unuseful.” It’s frightening not to know where this new path leads.
But maybe that’s part of the shift too. Holding space for the unknown. Holding space for difficult questions without rushing to silence them.
What becomes possible when we slow down?
Ecologist and systems thinker Daniel Christian Wahl says that the transformation ahead of us is not primarily technical or political - but cultural.
“It is a transformation in how we think, how we ask, how we imagine ourselves in relationship to the Earth.”
That feels true. I can sense a longing for a more collective pause. A deep breath. A willingness by more people to sit by the muddy river. Maybe there, we can practice asking better questions:
What assumptions is this “solution” based on?
What worldview does it reinforce?
What am I not seeing because of how I’ve been trained to see?
What is missing from my life - from our lives?
Margaret Mead said that every movement starts with a conversation. Maybe cultural transformation starts the same way - with small, living conversations that ripple outward…
