I don't want to talk about climate chaos but I'm going to.

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It’s too hot to write. It’s really too hot to do anything. It’s definitely too hot for outdoor therapy sessions, or even lugging giant discs of metal around. And I’ve barely slept these last few ‘tropical’ nights (as we now seem to be calling them) – there is no breeze, the humidity is giving me headaches, and I just can’t rest for worrying about the coming weeks when I will be in Europe (more on this next week) potentially experiencing worse than this.

Sure, there have been heatwaves before, but something about this one has broken my spirit (and my heart) more than others. Maybe with this one, I’ve just had more time to think about it all? Maybe it’s just because of the ongoing structural denialism reaching a sort of absurd fever pitch? Maybe it’s just that point in my hormonal cycle where the veil is pulled back most starkly on *everything* and I can see things as they really are? These are chaotic times and yet still the news outlets report ‘smashed summer records’ with poorly veiled glee. Still everyone says ‘it’s nearly too late’ or ‘our chance to stop this will soon be gone’ and it all feels a bit like counting to three for a naughty child in the hope they’ll stop doing the silly thing they’re doing, so that you won’t ever have to get to one. one and three quarters, one and a half, one and a quarter, one and an eight… The adult thing would be to say, there is no more time. Time is up. This cannot be dialled back. There is now only what lies ahead: adaptation.

So, yes, it’s too hot to write, but I am also too devastated to write anything else but this, this week. I don’t write posts in advance, so what I write is what I’m with. I would rather talk about writing projects and creative flow. I’d rather not be the killjoy. But here we are. Our elected leaders should be doing more than they are, and it is a grave crime that they aren’t. In the absence of their leadership I imagine many of us are having to make our own ways with this – working out what it is we can be doing as individuals to make a difference, but also how to adapt in real time. How to stay sane. Perhaps you recognise this?

I feel a bit of shame that I can’t cope with 35 degrees heat. Where does that come from? I’m more or less a viking living in Greece right now but still I feel I should somehow be better at it. That’s the shape of climate change denial for you isn’t it? It is hard for me to do the one to one work that I would ordinarily – it’s simply too hot to be outside or in a small space that doesn’t have adequate cooling. I used to think my main issue would be the wet and wild winters, but it will be the summers too. This is perhaps the first heat wave where I have had to cancel work because I am too hot both outdoors and in. It is the first heatwave where I have had to wrestle with whether to get air con (I have always been theoretically against in) for the greater good of health and wellbeing. These are relatively small things, but they will become cumulative. It makes a difference because I don’t get a salary to smooth through these sorts of moments.

What I’m saying is that increasingly, we are going to have to – I think – make our own calls around what we can and can’t do, what we can and can’t manage with. We will have to assert our own climate-related boundaries, especially as self-employed people. We will have to get used to the possibility that ‘productive time’ will be lost to the overburden of heat and other forms of weather chaos. And not next decade, but tomorrow and next month and next year (Hello, El Nino again…) If our governments won’t get real, we’ll still have to. As one slogan I read this week said climate change doesn’t care if you believe it or not. It doesn’t care for paralyzed governments.

All of this to say, I’ve been thinking about the actions we can take as individuals to adapt to the climate chaos that is already here. I don’t mean the obvious pro-environmental behaviours as such (we all know about eating less meat, flying less, recycling and so forth) – I mean the other ‘little’ things. The actions that support emotional processing around this ongoing crisis that we will now never be out of, one way or another. I have been thinking about them because I have clients worrying, and I myself am worrying.

Here are four things on my mind this week. Things I’m thinking about, things I’m doing in response to the heat: