In Between
Infinity in an instant
Amidst the chaos of trade wars, military interventions, humanitarian crises, extreme weather, and injustice everywhere, peace also exists, and is attainable through the combined efforts of countless committed individuals.
It’s easy to get lost in a moment, lost in oneself, in thought, in action, but getting lost is not always so bad. Sometimes getting lost allows us to become present. Presence is a necessary condition for calm, thoughtful, and advantageous decisions to be made.
When we make decisions based on urgency, we are often stressed, and therefore do not make the best decisions. When we can plan, consider consequences, and think about what we’re going to do before we do it, we make more informed, and generally, wiser decisions. Our ability to model in our brains what we think might happen is a unique gift. And, if we use this gift in concert with a positive mindset, we can make even more capable decisions.
Thinking about architecture to support sustainable living systems helps us look into a positive future. These mindful activities also bring us into closer connection with the infinite. Similar to how distancing from ego enhances awareness from a selfless perspective, there is a great abundance of energy and power in the infinite for it contains all of life in countless forms. In thinking forward on a global and local scale, we feel all business activity should address: societal progress and wellbeing, interconnectivity, global equitability, and preserving authenticity in every relationship, experience, and environment.
With a rise in collective synchronicity, individual authority and responsibility for one’s own energy remains paramount. Integrity, empowerment, and the freedom to define one’s best self at the benefit, and not expense, of any other life will be the pillars of personal, societal, and environmental stewardship. It’s time to blend our abilities. It’s time to produce a balanced version of what physical and digital interaction can be.
At this point, looking forward, the single biggest contributor to arriving at the foundation for a positive future a generation from now will be mass adoption of circular principles and patterns in our economic and industrialized systems. Circularity, in this sense, means both deriving ways to keep resources in use as long as possible and also ensuring that all parts of a corresponding system benefit from those resources. This approach resembles the circulatory systems of our bodies, in which networks of blood, blood vessels, and the heart all work together to supply oxygen and nutrients throughout the body and remove unnecessary waste. * There’s no shortage of examples to borrow from nature when it comes to circularity. From the solar system itself with orbital arcs, shape of planets, to the structure of a simple food chain, to more personal matters like menstrual cycles, humans are surrounded by the cyclical nature of circularity, and benefit tremendously from incorporating its structure into our collective activities.
“Implementing circular economy opportunities would result in a decrease in consumption of non-renewable resources, including fossil fuels, by 49% in 2030 and 71% in 2040.” — Ellen MacArthur Foundation, The Circular Economy Opportunity for Urban and Industrial Innovation in China (2018) **
“The accident is an inverted miracle, a secular miracle, a revelation. When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution… Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” — Paul Virilio, 1999
As we learn from the mistakes of technologies built around neuro-feedback loops designed to manipulate people’s behavior and sensations, we become more aware of what we decide to integrate into our lives and how those micro-decisions play a major role in how we perceive reality. The more we incorporate a mindset of resilience, receptiveness, and adaptability into our practices, the more that we can leverage innovation to help guide approaches to a global paradigm of morality.
Tap the source of universal connectedness. Through a greater awareness of interconnections, we can revise our social and economic systems with healing and harmony in mind.
“In the long term, it’s not a question of if things go wrong, but when. The ethical concerns of innovation thus tend to focus on harm’s minimization and mitigation, not the absence of harm altogether.” ⁂
— Tom Chatfield
“History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are more disastrous than the lack of the technique would have been.” – Jacques Ellul, 1954
We need to be mindful of how we approach technology’s exponential effects. In the last decade, the buzzword of “disruption” described how industries served by longstanding business models were upended by the applications of new technology. Disruption became a kind of synonym for innovation. Now, as we approach 2020, we can see that this model of disrupting the status quo through novel solutions to existing challenges, is insufficient to heal humanity on the whole. Healing is a process, not a set of solutions. Thinking of disruption as a metric for success is problematic. We became so wrapped up in a quest for solutions that we forgot we’re not here to solve life. What we can solve, however, are the problems we’ve created that disrupt life. Problems like families not being fed or having adequate shelter or simply getting to spend enough time together. In this way, the focus of innovation can become more tied to holistically-revising systemic, economic standards. A sustainable, socially desirable, and ethically acceptable model for business will also have to be acceptable for the planet on the whole.
“The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. It is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
As long as the impetus for innovation, within the business sector, remains engrained in the current economic system of capitalism, we don’t have much of a chance at affecting the kinds of change that we desperately need. This is why the value of slowing down and being more attentive to the true needs of life is so important.
Now’s the time to figuratively lift a flame to money. We can feel the flickering embers begin to catch fire beneath the sodden deadwood of an old, stagnant worldview in which profit defines value. By inserting more uplifting values, like integrity, in place of corrupting principles, like profit, the entire machinery of our economic system will shift its gears into much more fluid and empowering dynamics. As we learn to better incorporate economic stimulus packages to circulate capital to areas that have suffered from neglect and more of the population thrives, ideas will be able to cascade around ways to heal damaged relationships between people and planet.
Challenges don’t exist in vacuums. Each challenge we encounter has a relationship to another, most likely larger, problem. Economic injustice is connected to greed and a desire for domination. Economic justice will arise through relationships founded on solidarity and a desire for cooperation. In order to innovate our way beyond the conventions constraining our ability to live sustainably on this planet, we need to consider risks in terms of relationships. How might our own seemingly independent decisions affect others? By considering the connections between how we live and the conditions of our current economic system, we can better see where the problems emerge. With this knowledge we can begin to break open empowering definitions of wealth, aid, and exchange.