A need to look beyond routine

There is little doubt many of us enjoy a life of routine. Being able to get up every day without pain or illness, go to work to make a good wage where we can experience varying degrees of satisfaction and then arrive back home to the comfort and security of family all sounds pretty good.

In fact it sounds idyllic, albeit perhaps a little simplistic or even naïve.

Being able to establish a comfortable day-to-day routine free of war, famine, disease and other upheaval is understandably a benchmark for many in measuring the success of a modern society.

But celebrating routine can also stifle creativity, development and ingenuity and can sometimes be dangerous.

While it is easy and sometimes appropriate to stick to the concept of ‘if it aint broke, don’t fix it’, it is also important to understand the meaning behind ‘if we want things to stay the same, something has to change’.

Wimmera Development Association’s probe into the opportunities surrounding the use of hydrogen as an alternative energy source in the region is a great example of understanding a need to look beyond routine.

In the Wimmera we could easily sit back, do what we have done for eons and let everyone else around the world make all the tough decisions on issues that directly affect our communities. It can also be easy to blame everyone else for many of our regional shortcomings.

While we can’t influence everything that makes the world, the nation and the state tick, we can certainly have a crack at some of them.

‘Who dares wins’ is another phrase that comes to mind and the reality is that we often do not have to be too daring – just well-informed, engaged and driven – to enjoy success.

Concerns about the health of our planet and invariably us, whether it be based on climate change or how we are polluting, degrading or ignoring our environment, are stimulating a healthy shift away from the routine.

If it is doing anything, it is sparking people into action to open fresh doors of discovery, opportunity, capacity and possibility.

Perhaps the message for our part of the world is that we should no longer accept our relative isolation as a handicap, nor accept that we can’t be the beating heart of fresh innovation.

In pinching yet another saying, ‘it’s a small world’, the Wimmera and the broader region encompassing the southern Mallee, Grampians and Western District fringe, already influences what happens in Australia and overseas.

We need only take note that our part of western Victoria, amid a national drought, is supplying most of the fodder for the country’s eastern seaboard this season.

Agricultural production is our traditional bread and butter but what other opportunities can we explore?

We can always return to rebuilding a world of routine – that is, until we experience the next light-bulb moment.