Isabella Martin is the Co-founder of Climate Culture, a purpose-driven design studio whose approach aims to inspire cultural shifts toward sustainability, climate action and systems change. 

Every morning, as soon as I wake up, I try to read one small snippet that grounds me. Today it was a parable, often attributed to Japanese folklore and Zen Buddhism, but familiar to any of you who have dabbled in cognitive therapy or mindfulness. It tells of a traveler haunted by ghosts on a long, winding journey to somewhere. At first, he flees in fear, but the more he runs, the more the ghosts multiply. Then he fights, swinging his staff wildly, only to feel their presence grow stronger. Finally, exhausted, he stops. He turns to face them, and in that stillness sees them clearly for the first time. Some vanish immediately, some shrink into the background, and some dissolve as pure illusion. 
 
The lesson: what we resist persists. Our ghosts – fears, regrets, shadows – cannot be bullied into silence. Their hold loosens only through acknowledgement and acceptance. And it is only from this place that we can imagine a new path forward. 

 
We can see this misapplied force everywhere. In how we wrestle with personal demons, how we navigate challenges at work, and how our mounting global issues are handled across the political spectrum. 
 
Years ago, when I started to examine my own life, I came to understand (with a lot of guidance) that resistance itself can be a trap. It doesn’t just block self-acceptance; it blocks the future. And I began to wonder: Can division ever heal division? Or does resistance block our capacity to dream collectively?  

When fighting becomes the fuel

Whenever I think about resistance I feel something uncomfortable niggle at me, a familiar turbulence in my stomach, that I associate with recognising my own limitations. How much of my own energy had I poured into blame and rebuke? How many dinner table conversations had I let spiral into defensive debates, convinced that the people across from me didn’t care? 
 
It reminded me of being stuck in a job I hated, circling endlessly around my frustration instead of directing that energy toward creating a new path forward. As Cal Newport writes, “there’s a personal satisfaction in grimly pointing out the flaws in a system, but sustainable change…requires providing people with an enjoyable and life-affirming alternative.” How many times had I fallen foul of this? 
 
This pattern echoes through history. Resistance movements that burn bright and then splinter, fading when they can’t articulate a new vision. I wonder if resistance, when it becomes the entire strategy, turns into a kind of performance. Outrage performed again and again until it drains the very energy needed for constructive change. The louder the performance, the less space left for imagination, collaboration and creation. 

I’m not saying that resistance isn’t necessary – it helps us identify when something is wrong. The urgency of resistance varies enormously depending on what’s at stake. For many communities facing existential threats, resistance isn’t a choice to debate, it’s a question of survival. But I’m also starting to believe that resistance alone isn’t sufficient. 
 
Resistance blocks, it doesn’t build. If all the fuel goes into fighting, what’s left for the imagining and building of what’s next? 

The seduction of good versus bad 

In the same way that I create rigid good-self/bad-self narratives – the productive me versus the lazy me, the generous me versus the selfish me – we also slip into good-people/bad-people narratives on a societal level. 
 
This story is seductive, rooted in what Charles Eisenstein calls “the myth of separation” – the belief that we are fundamentally separate individuals in a world separate from us. This myth feeds our instinct towards othering. 
 
It’s much easier to take sides, draw clean lines, name enemies. The temptation to simplify is magnetic. We dismiss perceived opposition not just as “the other” but as “idiots” or “zealots”. We shut people out, silence them, but – as with our own inner demons – this strategy eventually backfires. 
 
We can see the consequences plainly in the surge of movements based on grievance, often made up of people who feel ignored or sidelined. And I wonder: what if our dismissal helped create the very thing we now fear? 
 
We spend our energy attacking people for their group affiliation. We condemn entire national, ethnic, religious or political groupings, while claiming to defend other identities. We treat our differences as absolute opposites, even when common ground exists. And we are encouraged to do so, fuelling false polarisation: the belief that we are more divided than we actually are. 

The result? The sidelining of moderate and bridge-building voices. The exact voices that could imagine new political and social landscapes where shared humanity outweighs division. Movements need these bridges between the old guard and the changemakers, just as organisations need them between legacy systems and innovation. 
 
A mentor recently reminded me that those we resist are motivated by fear – fear of what they’ll lose. When change threatens someone’s livelihood, identity or security, opposition is a natural reaction. But meeting that fear with division and rejection only reinforces the story that someone must lose for another to win. 
 
To unblock this opposition, whether in society or in ourselves, we might start by tending to the fear beneath the resistance. Listening to it, understanding it, showing empathy, and finding ways to meet its needs. When people feel their concerns are genuinely considered, when they see we’re seeking solutions that work for everyone rather than playing winner-takes-all, resistance can soften into collaboration. 

The power in paradox 

What I have come to learn, slowly, painfully and imperfectly, is that in the same way I can’t bully myself out of a destructive habit, we can’t bully others into holding the same views. It was really only when I began to fully accept myself, to see that life is not black and white but a misty smudge of grey, that my inner contractions started fading into the background. 
 
I believe that holding personal paradox might be one of the most necessary practices I’ve ever stumbled into (I’m still working on this every day). And I wonder if it’s also a political practice. Fighting division with division never works, because change is always about connection, not disconnection. 

 
Dealing with people, and all our messy contradictions, is much harder than fighting systems. It’s easier to rage against systems than to sit with the reality that they’re made up of people with fears and blind spots. It’s easier to dismiss spiritual or religious communities, than sit with the paradox that they can frustrate us and hold valuable wisdom at the same time. It’s easier to write off people we disagree with, than to recognise they might be essential for the solutions we seek. 
 
Learning to hold paradox expands our capacity for connection. This kind of connection isn’t about agreement, but about holding space for complexity. This doesn’t make the work easier, in fact, it might make it harder. But it makes it more durable. 
 
What if our challenge isn’t fighting harder but creating spaces for those we disagree with? What if the most radical act is to include people we would rather exclude, not by abandoning our values, but by recognising that transformation requires proximity and connection? 
 
Integration is the opposite of exile and expulsion. And it could lead to more wildly imaginative and equitable futures than we can currently comprehend. 

What if we devoted our energy differently? 

Trapped in our mental models of “the other”, we might never be able to envision new sustainable futures centred on inclusion and justice. Division kills imagination; it makes us more conformist and more reactive. We are trying to birth a new world with the flickered energy left over from hating the old one. 
 
When I dream about a better world, I come back to David Whyte’s beautiful prose on Horizons: “When I refuse to face something real and necessary in my life I stop looking at the edge between what I know and what I do not know…the main horizon in my life is the line over which, imaginatively, my future lies.” 
 
Like Whyte’s horizon, our collective future lies beyond the edge of what we know – in the spaces we have yet to imagine together. But what if part of getting there is the full recognition that we are all just humans navigating a whole lot of chaos, and the future is not a zero-sum game? 
 
And maybe this isn’t such a grand vision. Maybe it could look like creating compelling futures for people whose work is becoming obsolete, making the transition feel desirable rather than threatening. Not cancelling people we disagree with, but building a culture where it’s okay to think differently. Cultivating spaces where people who disagree can co-create solutions, instead of merely grandstanding.