Ideas are not only life's oxygen, but also its currency

Ideas may well be the oxygen of life, but they are also its currency.
Communities rich in ideas are vibrant and exciting places to live and as ideas grow so does the wellbeing of those who call it home.

Art by Veronica Kelly
 at Nathalia's 
G.R.A.I.N. Store.

An idea that had been in gestation for a life-time drew its first breath in Nathalia.
Australian/American artist, humanist and human-rights advocate, Bill Kelly, who received his artistic training at the Philadelphia University of the Arts and the National Gallery School in Melbourne, finally settled with his family in the small community.
The Fulbright Fellow and former Dean of the Victorian College of the Arts, had, buried in his mental luggage, an idea to enrich the community and within that expand and extend the reach of art – the not-for-profit G.R.A.I.N. Store   opened late last year.
Kelly’s idea is about strengthening community (it does), but beyond that, life has generally stalled as there is a paucity of implemented ideas that take people beyond what the rather strictures allowed by the commercial/military/industrial complex.
What exists is essentially focussed on growth that takes little note of the cost, be it in the plundering of the earth’s finite resources or equally in the physical or psychological damage to people.
Most of us claim to have open minds and consequently see ourselves as flexible and able to accommodate changes to our way of life, but immediately that new idea, although possibly ancient, unsettles what may be even unconscious conceptions of right and wrong, a sense of fairness and an understanding of what is seen as the good life, then we begin to harden and our resilience vanishes.
The evolved lifestyle we live today, given a cursory glance, is neither right nor wrong, but it will not stand close examination as it survives only because we are spending the capital earth has accumulated over billions of years.
The Goldilocks years – not too hot, not too cold – have allowed us to benefit from earth’s largesse, but that era’s idea, the idea built around growth and the suppression of the other, is exhausted and we urgently need new ideas.
Fresh and workable concepts, such as transition towns and steady-state economies exist, but their introduction and application require us to embrace new ideas, something that historically is not common.
However, from the perspective of a troubled world threatened by uninhibited growth that has little regard for ecological concerns or the finitude of the earth’s resources, we need to step back from the madness of the Western democracies growth ideologies.
The idea that has sustained us for the past two centuries is dead, or has been shown to be counterfeit, and so the new idea, or the new currency, needs to be about people, rather than things.