Living and travelling across the UK and Europe over the past month, I found myself planning each day around the heat. Closing the blinds before leaving the house. Opening windows late in the evening. Making sure there was always cold water in the fridge. They are small habits, familiar to people living in much hotter climates, but until recently they were rarely part of everyday life here.
It made me wonder whether the climate is asking us to notice something.
For years, climate change has often been framed as a problem for future generations. Yet this summer reminds us that it is already reshaping how we live. More than that, it is reshaping the relational field in which we all exist. Rising temperatures are not simply environmental events; they affect health, migration, inequality, conflict and our collective sense of safety. The quality of our relationships cannot be separated from the conditions in which those relationships unfold.
As relational practitioners, perhaps we have something distinctive to contribute. Gestalt has long taught us that we do not exist as isolated individuals. We emerge through relationship with one another, with our communities, and with the natural world itself. We do not simply live on the planet, we live with it. We co-emerge.
Perhaps the opposite of the climate crisis is not simply sustainability, but relationship. A different way of being with the world, one that recognises that how we relate to the Earth reflects how we relate to each other. If this summer is sending us a message, perhaps it is inviting us to widen our awareness and ask a simple but profound question:
What kind of relationship are we cultivating, not only with the people around us, but with the living world that makes every relationship possible?

Written by Marie-Anne Chidiac

Photo by Javier Miranda on Unsplash