Sense-Making Sundays
A Local Co-Learning Pod
On Sunday, a group of new and old friends got together to watch Week 1 of a 6-week course on Visioning a Regenerative Future. It’s hosted by Daniel Pinchbeck (author of Breaking Open the Head & How Soon Is Now) and exists in the collapse-aware, liminal web space. From what I know of the line-up of speakers I hold them to be ambitious, earnest thinkers if a bit heady and overly-steeped in Western orientations to the world.
I felt compelled to join this course for 3 primary reasons:
(1) I knew if others joined me, I’d be way more invested. Once a few of us committed to watching it together I knew there would be rich co-learning and connection that came from this. I am way more invested in learning among community I’m already in relationship with than attempting to thread connections with other (likely wonderful) zoom squares. So grateful to those local and further away who said they wanted to chew on this together.
(2) I am optimistic there will be a depth of seeing that comes from weaving together insights from the 18 speakers and our local pod, as we all carry distinct but interconnected fluency in various relevant subjects.
(3) A strong Sunday gulp of perspective on the urgent-yet-ageless questions surrounding how to be human satisfies a certain thirst in me. The importance of wrestling with the Big Questions feels more and more important to me and I’m grateful to have a facilitated space to do this in. “There’s an essential piece of the puzzle just over this horizon…” is a feeling I live most of life with.
Week 1 Retro
Alright so here we are: Week 1 Retro. I’m committing to digesting and sharing at least some of my insights each week; likely in a bulleted list for brevity.
- Feedback loops are what we govern ourselves by. Arthur Brock offered this in his reflections on currency and it really caught me. Human behavior is sculpted by pattern matching. It feels basic — obvious when you look — and worth tracking. Shape the feedback loops, shape behavior. His inquiry is around currency flows and the values they have embedded in them. Shape what gets valued by different currencies, shape how people navigate the world. Money as we know it is new; and evolving with each monetary policy….CWJD other examples.
- The US ranks fairly low in our wealth to happiness ratio. Meaning we are overspending and getting worse results than most countries when it comes to a number of metrics including wellbeing and education. I would guess that this doesn’t surprise most people, and yet, shouldn’t it? To me it reaffirms that we are being oversold and falling for it. One of my mantras for the last few years has been finding delight in enough-ness. Embracing wanting in a moment and only pursuing consistent material desires in my life. By buying/owning/consuming less, we are likely to end up happier. It also makes me imagine that we are under-utilizing our capacity to give; to care for those around us and surprise friends and strangers with gifts.
- No one’s predictions of where-and-what humanity is collectively headed for can be trusted. Not when it comes to the Big Questions. This sentiment came up as Jamie Wheal responded to Daniel Pinchbeck’s persistent probing into why Wheal didn’t believe the climate scientists gloomy predictions about what’s ahead. I think about this a lot. There is So Damn Much energy in the system right now. There are no reliable prediction models to run, no amount of data to pull from, or seers to trust, or polycrisis-complexity-scientist who can honestly claim to know what forces will most drastically shape life on Earth 30 years from now, let alone 200, or 10,000. There are a lot of things this leads me to but saving those for later.
- Don’t over-compromise today for the future. Our group’s discussion at the end touched into a lot of things but one theme was not letting future-focused thinking overpower how you show up today, this week, this year. It distinctly does not mean discount the future impacts of your actions to 0, but I increasingly find myself orienting to the massive uncertainty of the future by savoring the presence of what is. Oh, be here now? Is that more or less what we’re saying? How’s that for some time-tested wisdom, I chuckle to myself while also wanting to add an asterisk explaining the deep need to curtail the gluttony of modernity.
More to come ~
