AI Art created with the prompt: "A woman in love with the science fiction writer"
My laptop crashed today. The only loss was all my writing on systems thinking I've been doing. On a practical level, writing such deep material should've definitely happened on a document editing platform like Word. I was writing it directly on Hive.
Instead of feeling frustrated at my carelessness or disappointed that I lost all my writing, I found myself feeling a great sense of relief. A willingness to let go of all of it. I'm in full trust that whatever's working through my mind about this deeply meaningful topic will emerge again when it's ready, with more clarity and space for integration. For now, all of these efforts can wait. My mind has other things it wants to focus on.
Keeping things simple feels important to my process. I've been enjoying writing Hive blogs that aren't so heavy and deep to process. Something I've been noticing are all the extra words I use in sentences. How I tend to get lost in exploring different perspectives and ways of looking at things in any given situation. Instead of pausing and being in silence, I want to ride the waves of mental chatter and explore everything that comes up. I want to see how everything connects with everything.
This feels symbolic of where I am in my life right now. Constant change and invitations for growth beckon me to pay deeper attention. The possibilities of life seem endless, and my basket wants to be filled with the best of experiences and knowledge. On some days, it feels like the insights and connections I make about myself and life hit me like a train.
The discoveries feel so strong. And alive. And sometimes overwhelming. And of course the mind, out of its own desire for certainty and security, wants to grasp at these revelations. Something must be done now, or else I'll lose the magic of what I've found.
This isn't necessarily a terrible thing. In fact, this can be a catalyst for change and right action. Yet when this excitement pulls me out of my body and feeling states, I know that I am not present. When I am not present, I am heading to the world of abstraction and over-intellectualizing. As teacher of nonviolence Kazu Haga says, when we over-intellectualize, we lose its essence.
Haga's method of talking about violence is asking people to define violence in a few words. Keeping things simple creates an impact that's accessible to process. When a young girl says "violence is painful," everyone in the room understands what's she's talking about. Everyone knows what it's like to be in pain. When nonviolent communication founder Marshall Rosenberg says "violence is the tragic expression of unmet needs," it speaks to the heart of the matter, cutting through the intellect. In contrast, here is the World Health Organization's definition for violence:
Violence is the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.
While bureaucratic language may be useful in some realms, we also lose the humanity of the message. One of the central tenets of Taoism is that everything is. The more we try to define what that "is" is, the further we get from the central truth: that all of reality simply just is. Instead, we overcomplicate. This happens a lot in social change work, especially in liberal-democratic spaces. Big words, academic jargon, excessive processing, and over-intellectualizing. This seems to be why art and visuals are powerful tools for communication. It engages us on personal and emotional levels, while sparking full-body participation and engagement of all of our senses.
How do we consume and synthesize complex information in meaningful ways? This is the growth edge for me on an interpersonal, professional, and individual healing level. The practice of containment. The art of managing ideas and concepts in embodied ways. When the head gets too involved, so often do the reactive defense systems as well. In a society that's rapidly changing, the ability to hold space for anxiety and complexity seem vital to our collective future. The trained mind can support that process.
Sensemaking, a term introduced by organizational theorist Karl Weick, refers to how we structure and articulate the unknown, so as to be able to act in it.
Sensemaking is about creating space for listening, reflection and the exploration of meaning beyond the usual boundaries, allowing different framings, stories and viewpoints to be shared and collectively explored.
Sensemaking is an emergent activity—a capacity to move between heuristics and algorithm, intuition and logic, inductive and deductive reasoning, continuously looking for and providing evidence, and generating and testing hypotheses, all while “playing the game.” As such sensemaking requires that leaders have emotional intelligence, self-awareness, the ability to deal with cognitive complexity, and the flexibility to go between the “what is” of sensemaking and the “what can be” of visioning.
— Sensemaking: Framing and Acting in the Unknown, Deborah Ancona, MIT Sloan School of Management
It's ironic that I'm exploring the limits of intellectualizing through getting intellectual with this blog. Yet the point is not to throw away intellectualizing, but find ways to relate with it in healthy ways. I think the process of sense-making speaks to the ways we find that balance.
This is especially true for me, given that I am verbally and intellectually excessive at times. My current mantra in life right now is "less words, more feeling." I won't be perfect with this process (unfortunately), nor will it always best serve me in every situation I'm in. Yet it seems important to hold while I manage the significant changes happening in my life. Changes in love, work, home, and all the responsibilities that come with being an adult. I'm finding my way through all of this.
Oh, and dance. Dance helps me talk less too :)
