Arrange the pieces around you. Start where you are
This week I offer three articles for your contemplation. The first two were written nine years ago, long before Syntropic World became a thing. Yet, they clearly show that the threads of what is now Syntropic World were weaving their way into my being. The uncertainty of my life at the time was almost unbearable. Yet endurance is one of my superpowers.
I held close to my heart the sense that I was working towards an integration that would make sense of everything. I simply didn’t know the timing for this to happen. So I offer this story for those of you still in the thick of the journey to clarity.
The third article I wrote today was inspired by the quote by Gibran, shared with me by Nikki Thomson. So, in its way, this article threads the first two together.
Arrange the pieces around you. Start where you are. Take a synaptic leap. Live, act and work into the unspoken spaces where love is needed most.
Be Syntropic.
Thank you, as always, for being here, and for the work you do.
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“Arrange all the pieces around you” is a quote by Virginia Woolf.
This quote has been haunting me. Simple as it sounds, it brings enormous resonant truth with it.
Imagine this scenario. You are at a stage in your business where you need something. Let’s say you need capital. What are the usual steps?
Do a spreadsheet, get clear on how much you need, and ask people for money.
Or perhaps you need the confidence to do something. You might procrastinate. Pretend. Bumble your way around.
There is another way. A more intuitive, whole systems way.
Start where you are.
Return to the primary impulse behind your business, what we in Syntropic World call your Source Idea. Connect with that — big deep connection. Remember where you were when it arrived. Feel its landing in you. Remember how your body responded, what your mind said. What it felt like, tasted like. The Source Idea is to take you on a journey towards yourpurpose, or the purpose of the idea.
Look to your purpose. Why do this? Why? And why again? How will you know you have been successful? What will the world look like, feel like, and how will it respond when your purpose has been achieved? What will be the same? What will be different? How will you be different?
What does the business need now? Not in the next three or four steps, or even the second step, but now? It may still be money, but it may now be much less than you initially thought. It may not be money at all. It may be stuff that you thought you needed money to buy. Like travel costs. Or digital camera equipment.
It may be that your confidence is being challenged because you are looking at the whole journey and life of your enterprise. It is huge. Overwhelming. Ask yourself what is the very next step you need to take. Not the 10th step. Even better, ask your Source Idea what step it needs you to take. Just the first small step. Take that. Repeat. This is how you build confidence — by taking the next step, repeating again and again.
Look in your ecosystem, the world you inhabit, your friends, local and global, and everything around you. Look through the lens of abundance. What is in abundance in your current world? List everything. Step over (discard considering) nothing. Consider EVERYTHING.
If you have connected with the Source Idea and the true why of your business, and you stay centred from that place, then as sure as night follows day, there in your immediate world will be the source of provision for the next stage of your enterprise journey. Often not in the form you expected and regularly not coming from a place you expected it to.
It may not look obvious initially because we have been so conditioned NOT to see it, to see scarcity instead. But it will be there. If you cannot see it, invite your team or friends to look with you.
All the pieces we need are around us. We have but to arrange them.
*This is the foundational work of Synergistic Accounting.
**This article was originally published on March 12, 2014.
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Synaptic Leaps
Many years ago, I had the privilege of spending seven days on the Big Island of Hawaii with a group of about 100 people studying the work of Buckminster Fuller . The material we used as the background for our immersion was a video of Bucky speaking to a group for 21 hours. He described this recording as the sum of his life’s work.
Included in this audience were people who knew Bucky and his work well, including his protegee of the last three years of his life, Amy Edmondson .
For about the first two days of this event, everyone in the room struggled with staying conscious and awake. It was as if someone had put a sleeping drug in the water. We all had narcolepsy, literally falling asleep at the table. Try fighting this for two days! It was painful. We sat on squished heels, causing pain, danced, and did anything to stay awake. Imagine being in a room for the day where the overwhelming natural urge is to fall on the table and pass out. Not just fall asleep, but pass out.
Then suddenly, as if something inside shifted gears, we became present and alert. From then on, we had no issue with sleeping sickness.
I have a theory about this experience of narcolepsy in the face of information and knowledge that bends worlds and minds. We are all entranced in some form of collective sleep. Problem is we do not even know we are. So when a teacher like Bucky comes along, someone who dedicated his life to speaking truth from his direct experience and doing so in such a way as to be precise in his communication, few people can engage without making a synaptic leap.
And it is a leap! From one state of knowledge and worldview awareness to another. We were all gathered there with a clear intention to leap. We had a field established to leap. We had people in the room to support us in leaping. But it still took two days.
Ilya Prigogene , Nobel Laureate, is known for his theory of dissipative structures. When you take a system and apply stress to the system, at some unpredictable point, the system will change, a threshold will be crossed, and energy as heat (emotion) will be released. The change is irreversible. You can never go back to the previous system.
If you desire to be a Syntropic Steward leader, and by that, I mean someone who holds the shape and space for a world with a future, then making synaptic leaps is a prerequisite.
Our thinking and being structures need to undergo fundamental change. Not just once but repeatedly. This is not simply an ‘ah ha’ moment but a neurobiological and physiological change where there is no turning back.
We are in a collective trance. The only way we will break from this is to make synaptic leaps. We must set our intention for a synaptic leap and the conditions around us to enable this. A guide or two for the process is advised.
Many people today know that they are being called to make this kind of leap. They know it intuitively. They also know it is irreversible. They find themselves poised on the precipice, staring out at the unknown and uncertain future, their feet still planted in the appearance of a comfortable present.
But the present is neither comfortable nor sustaining to their soul/spirit/life/work.
To leap, or not to leap? There is no question. Leap it is. See you on the other side.
*First published March 7th, 2014
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Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost. Khalil Gibran
This space between where we find the pain of our relationships. Of being misunderstood. Of misunderstanding. Being ridiculed. Bullied.
Of the widening chasm of the unspoken daily removing hope for connection.
In this space is our longing, uncertainty and isolation.
Speaking into this space is the first act of self-love. Speaking to affirm self. To claim or reclaim our identity. To ground our intrinsic value as a given. To remember who we are.
It takes courage.
We must hold the purpose for our speaking to be greater than we are, even while not excluding the value we will get by speaking.
It is this space between what is said and not meant and what is meant and not said that the skills, tools, and reflections we teach in Dare to Care find fertile ground.
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Syntropic World is a global education and community of practice applying the organising principles of nature to enterprise design and human coordination. Creating ecologies of trust, ensuring integrity in everything, enabling collective sense making, and organising around a central purpose — how to create a world that works for 100% of humanity without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.
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