Networks, the “mesh,” and the like are slow-moving, gummed up backwaters of the flow that is our world. They are actively working against the flow, trying to tie it down to milk it, or nail it down to derive a profit. Everything is flux in 360o of directions. Freedom it thrives upon, the ability to choose directions every moment. Networks would profit from loosening up.
:- Doug.
Bees outside the hive are solitary critters, rarely meeting. Butterflies sometimes meet and dance, spiraling!
:- Doug.
We live in a complexifying world: we need a complex of hearts, heads, hands and voices to meet it.
:- Doug.
This POST is not the answer. No document is. It is a shoehorn. The doctors, nurses, social workers you work with want to be compassionate, but they don’t know how to start the conversation. Let’s make it part of how we practice. POST can be the way to ease our foot into the shoe.
:- Doug.
What is the response to growing meta complexity? Invite more into the conversation: more voices, more hearts, more heads. The more of these we have the greater our capacity to comprehend and apprehend the complexity—and apply compassion.
:- Doug.
Complexity dictates speed (to cover all the connections in the old time alloted) and increasing complexity (to create shortcuts to cover all the connections in the old time).
:- Doug.
Back when things moved more slowly there were fewer of us, whoever you count as us. When there are two of us there is only one possible relationship. When there are four, and then twenty, the relationships grow exponentially and the relationships start relating to one another. When 7 billion of us, all moving at X kph, how many relationships, how fast? The world is not just faster. It is a different place. Every nanosecond.
An example: our diseases are not just growing immune to our toxins, they are morphing. What used to be acute conditions—cancer, heart disease—are now chronic—they may help kill us, but they take a longer—larger—toll. Consequently we are the first generation to face caring for dying people and for people who need, over decades, our help to breathe and move and shower and eat. Consequently our dis-eases are more complex than in years past. They are different.
I used to think we’d reach a time we’d say “Enough! Stop!” But I no longer think so. Rather we will create ever more quickly (because we love to create and we love speed) complexity and meta complexity. There will not be time to get used to it. Until we get used to it.
:- Doug.
We have this picture of us as lawyers sitting here across the desk from clients, working on them and their static issues and opportunities. Of course we know it is a moving target, but we see ourselves and our clients as static, real objects, having an existence.
What if we saw us as motions coming into view moment to moment? What if we saw target markets as not things but as flowing actions, actions materializing ephemerally in our eyes as players moving across the stage in some Disney-esque hall of prospective clients?
We might adopt a fisher attitude: let’s sit in the stream as the fish swim to their spawning grounds; let’s troll till we find where they are resting or feeding.
We might adopt a friendly attitude: let’s find our companions, see what they need and get to work or simply hear them out, or go where they are and spend some time together, grow together.
Isn’t that what it is about, growing together, in all the ways there might be to understand that phrase?
:- Doug.
A competition-free market does not mean there are no competitors: it means you do not act as if they competed with you, that you see everyone as swimming in one big free ocean, with enough for everyone. The others out there are your friends, with whom you are creating the banquet.
:- Doug.
I work with small and medium sized conversations.
:- Doug.
What has been the meaning of your life? What can it be?
:- Doug.
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