Syntropic Living: Connecting the Dots Between Health, Work, and Relationships
I have never separated personal life from business/work life. The desire to compartmentalise humans is a practice that is part of the root of the separation of humans from Nature.
Syntropic World is dedicated to whole human expression. A Syntropic Enterprise is not what you do over there, different from what you do at home.
We are a whole expression, everywhere, by choice and invitation.
If our home is violent, our expression in our work is affected. We cannot bring our best to work if our interiors are broken. If our health is suffering, our work suffers.
How we live and play is a fractal of how we work. Always.
This truth is well known. Yet the world of business-as-usual works hard to separate us into bits: bring only this part of you to work, please. Those other parts we don’t care about.
This is not to say that we bring endless personal drama to work. Nor that our victim elements lead, and we cry desperately for attention because we are broken.
Our work in a Syntropic World is the best expression of our unique offering.
To be our best expression is to be healthy, to have great relationships, to learn to ask for what you need and know your limitations. It is to grow up with your work and your workmates. To hold yourself to account and be held to account. To take responsibility for your choices and agency. To be in integrity. To know your agency.
And to be able to attend to your family and their well-being when needed.
This past week, my family required 100% of my attention. My partner Tony had open heart surgery to repair a mitral valve. He had been diagnosed in a routine medical check-up in March. His heart and arteries are otherwise in excellent shape.
This was a massive shock to both of us — a fit, healthy, skinny guy needing open heart surgery.
Then, the waiting for his name to progress up the surgery list. All of the preparation required for such a surgery. Wills and powers of attorney, getting finances in top order, having difficult discussions about the possible scenarios of stroke and death. Tony is 55 years old.
And the waiting. Surgery looming like a black cloud over everything. Do we book dates for this and that?
Eventually, we had to continue living life, knowing that all plans can cancelled at any stage.
Having arrived at love late in my life after being a single mother for the majority of my life, in those early days of love blush, I found myself terrified that this unexpected and beautiful relationship would be fractured by something terrible. An accident. Illness. Death.
I lived for a short time in the tension between glorious love and absolute terror. It was not a question of it being taken away because I didn’t deserve it. I felt very comfortable with myself and my deservedness. It was more that it would not last because of something out of our control.
Clearly, this is a silly way to live.
Almost everything is out of my control except my response to what happens.
Therefore, I decided to live every moment. To truly love it all. To be grateful for every second. To stay in the present. It was a full-body-mind decision and commitment.
Even with Tony’s diagnosis, I stayed on path to this commitment.
Each day. Love
Each moment. Love.
Partnership in everything.
We were going to get through this together.
On the morning of Wednesday, the 9th of August, I sat in the Gold Coast University Hospital foyer while my love was upstairs in the hands of a team of surgeons. Knowing that his chest was cracked open, his heart taken out, and his life support happening by machine while I just sat there. It is mind-boggling to think about.
I wrote that morning’s Beauty of Beginnings as a way to process the enormity of this experience. All, in the moment.
I worked on a repetitive task. To keep my mind distracted. I forced myself to stay on task until noon, when I was expecting the surgeon’s call after surgery.
When that call came with the combined news of him coming through surgery alive and that the mitral valve repair had been textbook excellent, I burst into tears.
Walking into ICU to see him, still fully sedated and on a ventilator, was not hard at all. I was overjoyed to see him alive.
Neither Tony nor I take medication of any kind. Neither of us has been sick other than the typical minor ailments.
Our health has been a priority.
So much of the tragedy I saw in the ICU and later on the cardiothoracic ward is lifestyle induced.
It broke my heart. People ignore their diet and exercise. Treating their bodies with such disregard. A walking time bomb. Legs too weak from lack of fitness to get up without using their arms, a necessity for post-cardiothoracic surgery.
My focus now reverts back to Syntropic World. Our purpose. What we care about.
If we want a world with a future that increases the well-being of Earth and all her creatures, we cannot keep doing what we are doing.
Capitalism must end. The systems that underpin capitalism want us to be obese, lazy, overeat, drink too much, gamble away our money, and be on multiple medications.
Capitalism needs consumers. Not people.
Capitalism wants to addict us to devices, to fill our heads with conspiracy. To keep us conquered, keep us divided and distracted.
The Molochian impulse in the world appears to be the prevailing force.
However, my mentor, Buckminster Fuller, demonstrated mathematically that the forces of Syntropy are more significant than the forces of Entropy.
We can choose.
The two overarching pathways are either to do nothing, in which case humans and much of life will be savagely reduced if not eliminated. Nature will then handle the rest, rebalancing and restoring itself.
Or we can act.
But how do we act? What do we do?
The time has passed for rearranging deck chairs on our Earth Titanic. The iceberg has been hit.
Action must be comprehensively considered. We must know the system we seek to change. Not superficially. We must know its Source Idea and Pattern Integrity — and the actual purpose of those who steward it, not their stated purpose.
The time is past to be sweet do-gooders.
It is time to confront, head-on, what we have agreed to, often through ignorance.
Syntropic World is committed to the following:
- Education and awareness of the current operating system that has us trapped in its web. The monetary system, legal codes, governance, finance, communication, and technology. Know the enemy.
- Education of the operating system of Universe. Nature’s coordinate system. Tested over billions of years. Know what works and why.
- Application of Nature’s Coordinate system to everything humans do, build, design, coordinate, and act upon.
- Building new models that make the existing obsolete. Implementing, testing, showcasing, and sharing these models.
- Building a community of practice based on generosity and application of Nature’s coordinate system to everything.
The outcome we aim to achieve
New models for recognising and honouring value and exchange that refuse to exploit and extract.
New models of governance.
New models of coordination, currency, design.
New language for a new world.
This we have yet to see. The transcendence of capitalism. No regenerative capitalism. No conscious capitalism. RIP capitalism. Something else entirely. (Not socialism, Marxism, or communism either.)
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Over the last few months, as I have confronted the possible death of my love, as I spent time in the Cardiothoracic ward observing our sickness care business, and the contrast of the incredibly caring nurses and staff, their advanced knowledge and skill, still to this day underpaid and undervalued, I am returning to my work with clearer than ever sight about what Syntropic World is and is not.
Facing death does that.
Into the crucible we go, and if we come out the other side, all of those extraneous elements to our work and life have been burnt away.
This is good. No one escapes the crucible.
Now, back to work, inspired by life, motivated by death.
Syntropy and Entropy as coordinates.
Thank you for being here.
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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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