How to design and maintain healthy human relationships — how we work and live together
In our human experience, we live in a world of solid things. The chair we sit on. The spoon we eat from.
Yet, at the atomic level, no two points occupy the same space. The spaces between atoms that make up the solid chair are far greater than the atoms themsleves that we are made of. Most of existence is empty space.
It is the space between, the field, that is rich with the immeasurable weightless warm data that connects us to each other and our Mother Earth.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I will meet you there. Rumi
My mentor, Buckminster Fuller, often spoke of the tensional integrity of existence. Tension and compression are pairs, co-arising. You cannot have tension without compression, and vice versa. Compression is pushing down. A rock on the ground compresses the ground underneath it, just as my feet do when I walk.
Tension is a pulling apart force. Our Earth and Moon orbit because of the gravitational tension between them. Without that force, we on Earth would be flung into the galaxy.
Any healthy relationship requires space, and through creating space, we also create dimension and structure, even if we do not intend to. Relationships have a structural tensegrity to them.
This might sound fascinating, but what difference does it make in our lives?
While there is an impulse in all things towards equilibrium, equilibrium itself is entropic. Therefore, to stop moving, to stop leaning, and to stop our interior development is to begin to decay.
Move our bodies, move our minds, move our spirit.
Keep learning. Practise being a novice at something on rotation. Invest in growing up emotionally and spiritually.
Our desire to be free of conflict, to keep the status quo, to stay safe, boring and vanilla is to decay and become entropic.
Our impulse for same same same — all white, all of the very same beliefs and values, all cloned — is entropic.
Anti-life.
People and communities who seek same same are in the process of decay. There is simply a lag between now and the breakdown.
This is not only true for people, and communities but also for religions, businesses, and governments. So while we must not stop protesting and speaking out, the result is inevitable. Breakdown to allow the new to emerge.
I see you, Iran.
As we seek to build super-safe communities of undifferentiated clones, we have begun the process of decay and entropy.
We need tension, polarity, new ideas, beliefs, and worldviews that are alien to ours. We must try different foods, listen to different music, and learn new customs. It is from the new and different that we keep alive and evolving.
Ageing of body and mind is a decrease in movement, learning, engagement, tension and polarity.
Healthy relationships are not about falling — in love. To fall in love is to merge, collapse, and seek to become a singularity. There is no space. No difference, no aliveness in a singularity. Only nothingness.
A healthy relationship is about orbiting in love. Each person maintains their agency as they contribute to the relationship itself. The orbit is held by metaphysical gravity — love.
The quality of the relationship — the field of the relationship — that invisible, weightless, immeasurable warm data-rich space — is worth attending to as an entity itself: you, me and the quality of the relationship.
Like a garden, it must be tended to and cared for, which may sound absurd given that you cannot see the field of the relationship. Yet you can feel or experience it. For example, you might notice when it feels dissonant, disconnected, blurred. Or where something in the field has been violated through action, silence or withdrawal.
Are we bonded in such a way that Trust is evident all the way up, down and through? Are we bonded without disappearing into each other?
Added to this relational dynamic is the expression of our unique Pattern Integrity — our arc towards wholeness from enculturated fragmentation.
How do we find room for individual agency — the gorgeous difference — and remain in a healthy relational dance around the tensions and polarities that enable space?
This is why we seek to live and love in a container of agreement while we express our differences. In Syntropic World, we call this a Trust Manifesto.
In this operating field, synergy is evident. We are better because we are together. The complementarity of our difference is a tensional pull itself towards our wholeness.
Any idea that the creation and maintenance of ecologies that support this type of synergistic dynamic is only happenstance is foolish.
There is an architecture and design to the ecology that enables synergy. This architecture is thoughtful, adaptive and emergent. If the design is not beautiful and the invisible does not become visible through the lived synergy, then we have the design incorrect for this moment.
Designing ecologies of synergy require a tune-in-ability to the design, shape and tensegrity itself. It is a living system, this invisible relational structure. Alchemy is present. Awe in the brilliance of the collective is a daily experience for all.
Designing and maintaining healthy human relationships — how we work and live together — is our singular most important investment. Bringing people together, co-ordinating people to consider how to respond to the many tensions we have to face today and doing so in a way that enables every participant their agency as they respect and partner with the agency of others is foundational. Until we can do this well at the local and global level, we humans will continue to fracture and tear each other and Earth apart.
Human relational design is a tensegrity design. Therefore, tension, difference, polarity, and diversity are essential.
Essential. Not optional.
Integrity is the essence embedded into everything.
Developing Steward Leaders able to design ecologies for synergy — able to hold the shape for collective brilliance — allowing the work of people to shine as the leader holds the space in the background — this type of leadership is rare.
The elements of:
Designing the synergistic relational architecture
Evolving Steward Leadership
Creating and maintaining the field for synergy
Evolving the people participating towards a higher order of their wholeness.
are some of the key features we teach in Syntropic World.
These skills and tools can be applied to the family, partner, community or enterprise level. Indeed, anywhere people, or people in relationship to Earth, gather.
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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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