To speed up please slow down
Long-time readers will know that I love speaking about our agency + the responsibility that comes with education and access, + our ability not just to lead and be the change, but also to ensure our families, community groups, and enterprises demonstrate the change we seek in how we coordinate each other, recognise value, account for our commitments and responsibilities and handle integrity in all things.
Change for a world with a future for Earth and all our creatures is ALL of the following — an inside job + the way we act in the world + the cultures we design + the systems and structures that house us.
Unless we enable all these elements, we are working on parts rather than the whole.
Raising consciousness is critical AND will only be enough with changing the structures in which we live — like capitalism, how we measure value, govern, and provide health and elder care and house people.
Changing the systems and structures is critical AND will not be enough unless we raise consciousness and support education that focuses on whole systems awareness, our connection to all things, the respect for all life, the meaning of being a citizen, rights and responsibilities — and more.
Our actions in the world must be backed by comprehensive consideration of the whole before we take action. We must know the systems we are playing in. Actions must be in context. Know the context. Account for externalities. Account for the costs of Mother Nature to create the resources we may be using.
Cultural change is not enough without systems and structures to support their viability. Is it easy or hard to be an active, participatory citizen? To be responsible for decisions. To be held to account if we are in governance positions. To ensure we fund equal access to health care, infrastructure, education, food and housing. To prevent monopolisation. To find the balance between regulation that serves humanity and regulation that serves the elite few.
In Syntropic World, we work enthusiastically to ensure we address all of these elements.
In all of our work in Syntropic World, we cover:
**The inner development process. Be that at the individual, family, community or leadership level. We must grow up and become more aware, educated, and connected to our world. We must move towards humility, service, love, care, vulnerability, decency and justice. This is ongoing. There is no arrival. Life and being human are emergent. Learning is to be alive.
**How we act in the world. Doing this by taking the time to understand the field of our actions. To know the whole of what we are seeking to change. If you want to change money and finance, know the game of money and finance that currently runs the world. Deep exploration is required. We must consider context. The currencies and flows, the pulleys and levers that move the field we seek to change. We must ask what will be the precessional effect of this action. The side effects, externalities, and long-term consequences if we take this action. This is the opposite of going fast and breaking things. Go slow to honour the patterns and life, to know the precession. Consider — which means to be with the stars — everything.
**How to honour relationships, present, past and future. With other people, with the land, with the creatures. Do we value the relationship with the same enthusiasm as we value actions and results? Are the relationships held as sacred? Or are they a means to an end? In Syntropic World, we know that all things happen in relationship. Right relationship is a daily, moment-by-moment investment. We care about the relationship and its health. We care about our connectivity to soil, land, trees, and the wind. To others. Are we building a culture through relationships based on trust, respect, and zero exploitation?
AND
**Changing the systems in which the whole of life is lived. The underlying operating system has by design inbuilt rapacious growth and greed on a finite planet, accumulation of financial wealth by the few off the backs of the many, and the reductionist reflex of a single value determinator — money. The political systems. Our education, health and age care systems. All broken.
There are several ways we can do this integrated response to change.
We can, like Syntropic World, focus on all of these domains. A Syntropic Enterprise deliberately designs for interior development, cultural and relational development, considered actions in the world, and new models and systems that refuse to exploit, extract to extinction or colonise.
Or we can choose an area to focus on — like interior development and raising consciousness — and then partner with others focused on other fields to ensure we offer an integrated approach.
We must design and build into our enterprises — be they family, community groups, teams, projects and businesses — the means to do this work in the world, as the model of the change we seek to make.
Be the model + house our enterprise in the model exemplifying the world we are creating + comprehensively considering all of our actions before we take them = Syntropic Enterprise.
This is beautiful, considered work. It invites partnership, profound relationship with others, our Earth, the land, Earth’s creatures, the past, present and future, and with the idea we have been gifted to steward to life.
It requires emergence to become the normal state of being. It requires dancing with the unknown.
There is no ten-point plan. There is only the next step, held in loving intention towards the purpose to which we dedicate our life’s work.
We become the people able to steward the idea to life, in situ.
We have massive, seemingly unchangeable systems that are taking our precious home planet rapidly towards extinction. Rather than considering these systems impossible to change, we can lead change by building new models that make the existing ones obsolete. This is a slow, steady, persistent race of endurance.
To speed up, please slow down, says Bayo Akomolafe. I agree.
Every endeavour begins with that first step.
And the best day to begin is now.
For a world with a future.
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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.
Find us here https://syntropic.world
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