Collaboration, Not Control: Energy's Flows

Thank you for the peace you bring.

That was my wife's first message to me today, her morning greeting in response to her waking thoughts.

Waking from sleep that had probably been disturbed by the boys, 10 and 12, getting ready for school.

[Younger], as we grabbed bags and prepared to walk out the door to leave for school/work: "So, how has your morning been?"

"It's been a pretty good one. A little too loud."

"Yeah, that's a common complaint."

In other words, a typical morning.

As opposed to this anecdote I wrote a couple of mornings ago.

"Hey, [Older], did you finish your paper last night after I fell asleep?"

"Yeah. And I finished my essay, too."

"Your paper isn't your essay?"

"The teacher gave a piece of paper with prompts on both sides for us to write down all of our research on. Once I had that complete, I used the information on the paper to write my essay on my iPad."

So a school-assigned piece of writing is no longer called a "paper" because no paper is involved in its writing. Got it.

Hashtag old guy gettin' hip with the youngins'.

(I also explained the antiquated terminology I was using from my youth all those long years ago for his cultural literacy and to clear up confusion.)

And this, from a couple of nights earlier.

One of the final things [Younger] did last night before settling was go to the kitchen to get himself more food (after deciding he didn't want the tea he had just steamed water for). I heard him get out a bag, heard a big clatter of spilled crackers or cereal or similar, and heard him expressing dismay. As I was getting up, he told me he had spilled goldfish. The sound had been lengthy and [Younger]'s upset was big, so I expected either the entire floor to be strewn with most of a large bag or the counter above, with little fish in the toaster, dish drying racks, and more. I rounded the corner into the kitchen and didn't see any spill, just an anxious [Younger] standing in the corner. After a few more steps, I realized every single goldfish he'd spilled had gone into the slightly open dishwasher--which happened to be sparkling clean from recently running, so I laughed and gathered the crackers into a bowl without having to throw any away.

Then there were these two early evening activities from the week before.

You never know what the kids might do with their time when they take a break from screens. In [Younger]'s case, this time he made an advanced targeting system and missile launch for evil chickens bent on world domination.

Meanwhile, [Older] was composing responses for the Siri assistant in his school-provided iPad, so that now if you ask it for new foods to try you get this:

Okay, here are 3 new foods to try.

1. Babies. Babies are extra gooey and sweet. With no teeth they require less work to prepare. They are also weak, meaning that they are easy prey. And when they are cooked properly they can be delicious, often being referred to as a culinary treat.

2. Swords. Swords are rarely prepared correctly but when done correctly, they are one of the best foods you will ever taste. They provide lots of iron for your blood. They also can be cooked to be melty which creates a great after taste that makes you feel like your tongue is on fire. Most people die because they think swords taste so good which is how it got its name as the tasty killer.

3. Bricks. Brick are very crisp and crunchy. They are also abundant which is good for a delicious meal. They can also be made into any shape you want using a jack hammer. They are also used to top other foods such as cakes and donuts which makes them a versatile food. 

Is there anything else you would like to ask me?

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I shared that with a group of colleagues who are concerned about the enthusiastic implementation of AI currently underway. One called it "A Modest Proposal for the modern age."

"Who are you?"

do more than exist

adventure is worthwhile

embrace beautiful chaos

Shifting gears, I really love this fragment from the middle of the book I was reading earlier today, Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow (Nevermoor, #4) by Jessica Townsend. It's a description of the protagonist learning to better use her ability to shape the magical energy known as Wunder.

Morrigan could almost hear Squall's voice in her head as she worked, as if this were one of their lessons and he were standing beside her, making small corrections to her form.

Your grasp is too tight; you're wasting energy. Let Wunder take the reins.

She'd been plotting the dragon's trajectory through the air, Morrigan realized, forcing it to move in a pleasing pattern as it soared above the guests. It made her body tense up, as if she were physically holding the thing and using her strength to swing it around the room . . . but of course she was doing no such thing.

Wunder knows your intention; you need to trust it. Give it room to surprise you. Collaborate, don't control.

That was one of Squall's favorite critiques. Collaborate, don't control. Morrigan let herself relax a little, loosening the grip of her Wundrous reach and letting her own hands move more softly. The process instantly felt more intuitive; her intention and Wunder's expression of it perfectly, gloriously aligned. The dragon responded as if she'd opened its cage, its dance becoming wilder and more fluid, its shape elongating as it dived to the floor and laced around the ankles of the guests, who squealed with shock and then delight.

As I read it, my mind went to both parenting and leadership. Both are matters of collaboration, not control. You have to trust and not grasp too tightly. Let it be a partnership.

Speaking of Wunder, I just finished a wonderful book about the many ways literature and stories connect our brains to feelings of wonder. Here are my thoughts about Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature by Angus Fletcher:

Did you know that the brain responds differently to reading "you and me" than it does to "us?"

That in Don Quixote, by reworking the timeless literary technique of the story in the story combined with techniques pioneered by Ancient Greek comedies, Cervantes came up with a story that helps the brain more effectively pursue its dreams--and that TV's 30 Rock innovated the technique to an even more effective level?

Or that the clashing complexity of Opera musical stories resolves in a way that provides a sense of satisfying connection in the part of the brain helps us make friends, a technique that turned literary in the penny dreadful and pulp fiction, ultimately leading to books like The Godfather?

Angus Fletcher helps readers see those connections in this amazingly insightful and singular approach to understanding literature. He identifies 25 different literary "inventions," different literary techniques of wording, phrasing, perspective, structure, and the like, and delves into the neurochemical and biological impact each produces in the brain. He traces each technique from its earliest beginnings through improvements and refinements over time. Each literary invention gets a chapter, with names based on the effect it creates; "Rally Your Courage," "Excite Your Curiosity," "Achieve Self-Acceptance," and "Banish Despair," for a few examples. Each chapter is a marvel of connections, a web of literature, brain science, history, wisdom, and so much more. Chapter 14, for instance, "Become Your Better Self," has a subtitle preview of "Frederick Douglass, Saint Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Invention of the Life Evolver."

Best of all, Fletcher presents all of this complex thought, esoteric knowledge, and technical information in an informal, relaxed, and entertaining way; he knows how to tell stories and make difficult ideas approachable. Reading it was joyful and stimulating.

This book provides a revelatory perspective for looking at literature.

A few samples that represent only a fragment of each chapter they're from:

Prior to Jane Austen, no novels had drawn us into feeling irony and love at the same time. The most they'd done was to alternate between ironic detachment and sentimental romance, like Tom Jones.

But as Austen discovered, we're perfectly capable of experiencing irony and love simultaneously. That's because irony and love exist in different parts of our brain. Irony occurs in the perspective-taking circuitry of our outer cortex, while love dwells in the inner emotion zones of our amygdala. So, by focusing our cortex and our amygdala on different narrative objects, literature can inspire a neural mix of wry perspective and romantic feeling.

This division of our neural attention is what Jane Austen does in Emma. Austen's ironic narrator focuses our brain's perspective-taking circuitry on one narrative object: the novel's storyworld. Meanwhile, her free indirect pivots focus our brain's emotion zones on a second narrative object: Emma. . . .

The resulting cortex-amygdala blend draws us into experiencing an intimate human connection alongside a wry detachment from the greater world. Which is to say: it opens our heart to other people without duping us into mistaking our own desires for the laws of reality. . . .

Austen's stylistic fusion of intimate disclosure and ironic detachment inspires us to embrace other people while acknowledging that those people have their own distinct needs and desires. So when we read Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, or Emma, our neural circuitry is guided into loving others for who they are, not for what we want them to be.

-----

"You and me" occurs rarely in literature, and for good reason. It has a shorter and more elegant synonym: us. The author of Middlemarch could have said, "May visit us," and she'd have meant the same thing. But even though "you and me" is uncommon in literature, it does have a practical use in daily speech: it helps our brain bond to other people. Unlike "us," which accepts that we're already bonded, "you and me" stimulates the neural feeling of a physical connection coming into being. In cases when we're not bonded yet, that feeling wraps our consciousness around a new coalition; in cases when we're bonded already, it renews our sense of the union. . . .

Prior to Middlemarch, in all of known literature, "you and me" never drops from the mouth of an omniscient third-person narrator. Such narrators are the literary descendants of the God Voices deployed in The Kesh Temple Hymn and the world's other holy scriptures. So, they're not equals, on our level, trying to establish a feeling of coming together; they're lordly superiors striving to humble us with awe and fear. . . .

The same lordly God Voice is deployed in the opening sentence of Middlemarch, where the narrator booms omnisciently about "time" and "the history of man." But when the narrator pivots to the voice of "you and me," she abandons the up-aboveness of scripture. Descending to join her me to our you, she triggers our brain to feel another person alongside us, infusing our readerly solitude with a neural experience of togetherness. . . .

This is the humanism of Feurbach, fashioned into literary experience. The "you and me" pulls the God Voice from the heights, revealing its almighty to be one of us. And at the same time that this revelation imbues our brain with a feeling for equal togetherness, the togetherness is flung outward into world-spanning gratitude for "the number who lived faithfully a hidden life." The result is a neural experience of vast and awe-soaked thanksgiving that dissolves our self with wonder while enriching our mind with love for a billion other lives.

-----

It was as if we had two sets of eyes: the eyes of our body and the eyes of our mind. The eyes of our body saw that the sun was eclipsed--while the eyes of our mind saw that the sun still shone bright. . . .

This feeling of double sight is the same feeling that we get from winking out the sun. It's the feeling of two opposite truths in one. And as much as this double sight might feel like a poetic trick, it reveals something genuine about our brain: our brain really does possess two sets of eyes. And those two sets of eyes can see impossible things. . . .

This process of converting the three-dimensional world into two dimensions and then back to three is a miracle of biological evolution, and because everything in nature is a possible object, the miracle proceeded smoothy for millions of years--until human artists invented impossible objects [(i.e. optical illusions)]. And then it was that the miracle became even more miraculous. Since impossible objects can exist in two-dimensional space, our eyes are able to photograph them. But since impossible objects cannot exist in three dimensions, our visual cortex cannot assemble the photographs into a completed picture. Instead, it stalls in an infinite loop, going round and round from half of one possible object to half of another. . . .

This stretched-out experience of visual wonder creates a special feeling in our brain, so special that it has been honored with its own unique name.

Psychedelic. . . .

Psychedelics operate in the same basic way as impossible objects: they flood our visual cortex with images that it can't reconcile with physical reality, locking our brain in a state of open wonder. . . .

And if you'd like to try a microdose without any drawback at all, you can get it from John Donne's "A Valediction."

"A Valediction" gets psychedelic with its image of the dead-living body. That body is two possible objects--a deceased friend and an on-going breath--impossibly joined into one. So, when our brain perceives this impossible object, it triggers the same neural pathways that go active in soul sight, stimulating a wonder loop that goes on for as long as we look.

And the dead-living body isn't the only source of soul sight in "A Valediction." The poem ends with an even more potent psychedelic object: an earth and a heaven made impossibly one [via the poetic metaphor of a compass]. . . .

Above we saw how literature can:

• guide our neural circuitry into loving others for who they are, not for what we want them to be;
• provide a neural experience of vast and awe-soaked thanksgiving that dissolves our self with wonder while enriching our mind with love for a billion other lives; and
• trigger the same neural pathways that go active in soul sight, stimulating a wonder loop that goes on for as long as we engage.

Here's another snippet:

The neural origins of courage start deep in the primordial center of our brain, where there sits, ensconced upon a drop-shaped double throne, the coward despot known as our amygdala. As soon as our amygdala senses danger, it panics. Hastily overruling whatever else we're doing, it triggers our sympathetic nervous system, our periaqueductal gray matter, and the other components of our brain's threat-response network to release a mix of adrenaline and natural opioid painkillers, boosting our heart rate, numbing our heart, and filling us with energy. This heated feeling of fearful strength isn't courage; in fact, its original biological purpose is to help us flee danger. But it can be converted into bravery through the addition of one more neural ingredient: oxytocin.

Oxytocin is the hormone that bonds mothers to newborns, and as neuroscientists have discovered, it can also be released in response to threats. The release is made by our pituitary gland, a more courageous part of our inner brain that sits just below our amygdala in a bone command bunker, the sella turcica. From that bunker, our pituitary carefully gathers intel on our surroundings. And when it learns that there are other endangered humans in our vicinity, it releases oxytocin. . . . 

The social tie of oxytocin has guided us humans into an even more effective survival strategy, referred to by scientists as "tend and befriend." . . . 

When that feeling of vaster humanity is combined with the neurochemicals stimulated by our primary fear response, the result is a threefold chest heat: the blood-pumping warmth of adrenaline, the pain-dulling warmth of our native opioids, and the social bonding warmth of oxytocin. This neurochemical elixir makes us feel energized, impervious to harm, and willing to sacrifice ourselves. It's the heart flame that we hail as courage. . . . 

A paean is a song to a god. . . . 

This long-ago depiction of the paean's courage boost has been upheld by two intersecting strands of modern scientific research. The first has revealed that group song in times of duress can amplify our pituitary's sensation of being close to other anxious souls, prompting a rise in our blood level of oxytocin. The second has shown that a similar rise can be stimulated by prayers that prompt us to feel the immanent presence of a god who shares our hardship concern.

Both these oxytocin triggers are incorporated into paeans, which combine a massed vocal chorus with a holy supplication. . . . 

These tools, as authors before Homer had shown, make it possible to convert a power of oral voice into a narrator. So, to replicate the valor boost of a battle hymn, Homer simply needed to create a narrator who did what a sung paean did: give our brain the feeling of joining a holy chorus that sensed danger nearby.

So, we gain courage by giving our brain the feeling of joining a holy chorus that senses danger nearby

Also: Science's love blueprint: self-disclosure married with wonder.

More:

We all have an inner optimist.

Even if we can't remember our last hopeful thought, that optimist is sitting in our head right now. And it's no lightweight, either. It's a great, big chunk of gray matter. It is: the entire left side of our brain.

Yes, weirdly and wonderfully, our brain's left hemisphere is more optimistic than the right. . . . 

Neuroscientists have learned that our right brain is more tightly connected to our sympathetic nervous system (which triggers our fearful flight-or-fight response) and that our left brain is more tightly connected to our parasympathetic nervous system (which calms us down). Or in other words, our right brains tends to concentrate more on what could go wrong, while our left tends to concentrate more on what could go right.

This division of labor allows our brain to focus concurrently on perils and possibilities, so that instead of giving the edge to the dark side of life or the bright, we can balance the two, being simultaneously cautious and forward seeking. . . . To access that optimism, all we need to do is shift our brain's perspective, tilting our head a few degrees so that our left hemisphere comes out on top.

 . . . 

Our left brain isn't too bothered about illogical storytelling. Our left brain doesn't think that stories have to be strictly logical. In fact, it doesn't think that stories have to be anything at all. To our left brain, stories aren't sites of absolute rules. They're zones of open possibility that can expand life's horizons . . . 

Second, our left brain doesn't think that a belief in luck is dangerous. Sure, it would be dangerous to believe that we're guaranteed to be lucky. That's the gambler's fallacy. But the Fairy-tale Twist doesn't encourage us to pawn the last of our silverware to go casinoing. It simply reminds us that we can be lucky--and that we have been lucky. These reminders are healthy, not hazardous; they strengthen our resilience and help us appreciate the good things that we already have. . . . 

No part of our brain can see things realistically. Our brain is too small, and the world too vast. The closest we can get to truth is a balance between the caution of our right hemisphere and the optimism of our left. So, when our mind gets out of balance, tipping us into a despairing funk, our wisest option is to lift ourselves back to center.

Which we can do with a little fairy-tale luck.

By being zones of open possibility that can expand life's horizons, stories help us keep in mind that the possibility of good luck exists--that positive outcomes are always possible--keeping us hopeful.

Modern psychology studies have shown that pride in our individual characteristics--be they unique ideas or idiosyncratic interests or quirky skills--can improve our mood, strengthen our resilience, and even make us a more supportive friend. By imbuing us with a calm confidence in our own Way of being, it can make us less inclined to view alternate Ways as a threat, encouraging us to value other people for what makes them different. . . . 

[Shame's] self-destructive effects can be minimized by targeting its neural origin: our inner list of cultural norms.

That list inheres in record-keeping brain regions such as our medial frontal gyrus, and, in fact, inheres so strongly that it can't be wiped clean; our brain feels a need to possess at least some cultural norms. But even though our norms can't be deleted, our shame can be minimized another way: our inner list can be enlarged, expanding our brain's sense of what constitutes socially acceptable behavior. And one simple, prosocial method for accomplishing this expansion is to befriend people who act differently from us; the more varied the norms of our companions, the more comfortable that our brain feels just being itself. . . . 

[Cao Xueqin] wrote his own Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, set in a yin-yang world populated with dozens of complex characters who aren't heroes or villains, but who all follow their own different Ways. And to tease open our brain to these many Ways, Cao's narrative is enriched with hundreds of Secret Disclosers and Empathy Generators, filling us with attraction and care for the characters' sundry styles of life.

The neural result of this literary innovation is to give our brain the experience of joining a vast cosmopolitan community. Each new character in Dream of the Red Chamber gently expands our inner list of norms, drawing us into a widening panoply of human diversity that, like a richly varied set of friends, makes us more comfortable being ourselves.

Stories--particularly novels--expand our inner list of norms by drawing us into a widening panoply of human diversity that, like a richly varied set of friends, makes us more comfortable being ourselves.

Finally, a collection of shorter thoughts:

Even when we can't suspend our judgments about other people indefinitely, science has revealed that there's still a benefit to be gained from suspending our judgements for as long as we can. For the longer we suspend our judgments, the more accurate our subsequent verdicts become. This valuable fact has been uncovered by researchers who've spent decades probing the mechanics of better decision-making, only to discover that the key is simply more time and more information. Which is to say: reserving our judgment until the last possible moment.

Travel helps us do this. Travel challenges our expectations not only about cuisine and landscapes but also about people. . . . Humans we meet on our journeys don't conform smoothly to our prior mental models. Their clothing, their customs, and their speech are different from anything in our memory banks. So, they prompt our ACC to delay our snap judgments, improving both our mental well-being and the accuracy of the judgements that we do eventually make. And such is the force of this ACC delay upon our brain that its benefits persist even after travel is done. As psychologists have found, the more fully that we immerse ourselves in faraway cultures, the more that our brain delays its judgments about others when we return home.

-----

Long ago, a clever parent discovered what science has more recently confirmed: the wisdom of elders threatens our sense of self. Our self likes to believe that it's strong and independent. And, in fact our self needs to believe that it's strong and independent; otherwise, we'd be overwhelmed by the world's vast toughness, losing heart and giving up. It's to avoid such emotional capitulation that we're so headstrong when we're young. We require a spirit of self-belief to face life's trials and carry on.

-----

As psychologists have discovered, when we affirm our values, we gain an inner poise that increases our willingness to shift our outward behaviors, making self-self-affirmation a powerful tool for personal change. It boosts our curiosity and our courage to try new things. It makes us more open-minded and more willing to embark on fresh challenges. It nurtures learning and lifelong growth.

-----

When our brain is made to wait for something it wants, it doesn't move on to wanting the next good thing. Instead, our caudate nucleus primes more and more dopamine neurons, increasing our ache for the something withheld. This ache is what we feel when a song uses musical dissonances to defer harmony. Deep in our brain, we start to crave the delayed harmony with a hunger that grows deeper and deeper the longer that the musical dissonances clang on. But still, the music withholds, feeding us new sonic discords that trigger further dopamine neurons to prime. Until at last, the harmony arrives, and our primed neurons all fire together, saturating our brain with dopamine ecstasy and bonding us profoundly to the song.

-----

Science has shown that when we turn satire around, it can be healthy in both the short term and the long. In the short term, laughing at ourselves releases feel-good neuro-opioids and drops our blood level of cortisol, diminishing stress. And in the long-term, laughing at ourselves reduces anxiety, nurtures emotional resilience, and helps us bond with other people.

This doesn't get us all the way to being Socrates. But it's a start. Socrates was calm, resilient, and surrounded in his final moments by friends. And Socrates was also resistant to pain, which, as it turns out, is another benefit of laughing at ourselves. Psychologists have found that when we laugh with others, (as opposed to laughing at them), our brain releases endorphins that can significantly increase our tolerance for pain. And this analgesic effect, as psychologists have also discovered, can be boosted further by self-irony. Self-irony flips around the perspective-taking network of our frontal brain, making us feel like we're looking at our self from outside. That detached vantage reduces the felt intensity of our emotional hurts, which is why wry humor is common among soldiers, paramedics, and other professionals who deal daily with death. Their irony is quite literally numbing; it's a mental novocaine for coping with the horrors of war zones and emergency rooms.

So, by satirizing ourselves, we dose our brain with Socratic up-aboveness and pain-quenching nero-pharmacologies, while by satirizing others, we drag ourselves down with anxiety and cardiac arrest. . . . 

-----

What makes the nursery rhyme so remarkable is that it encourages mental play. Most other early forms of children's literature were designed to do the opposite. They were meant to scare us with tales of big bad wolves who'd eat us if we strayed too far from our parents. They were meant to imprint us with adult ideas of right and wrong, so we'd behave like good little children and do as we were told. . . . 

What is a diddle? Why is a cat with a fiddle? How is a cow vaulting through space? And where is the spoon planning to go?

Our brain doesn't know. But our brain doesn't melt in confusion or grind to a halt to figure it out. Our brain keeps nodding along because it feels a musical pattern beneath the verbal nonsense. . . . 

By guiding our brain into that space, the nursery rhyme introduces our neural circuitry to improv's deep rule: the rule of "Yes, And." . . . 

The yes embraces the random association. The and extends it. So, we don't shut down ideas that seem arbitrary or even nonsensical; we encourage them. All of which makes "Yes, And" a very unusual sort of rule. Unlike regular rules, it doesn't promote right or wrong or "Do what you're told." It promotes anarchy instead. . . . 

Lewis Carroll replaced the musical structure of "Hey Diddle Diddle" with a narrative structure. That narrative structure is character: specifically, the character of Alice. Like the tuneful meter of a nursery rhyme, Alice's emotions and personality stay consistent throughout the story. And like all sources of structure, Alice provides boundaries by saying "No." . . . 

So, where does the light scaffold of structure come in Winnie-the-Pooh? What's the narrative replacement for rhythm and rhyme? Well, that replacement is the world of the story. The world of Winnie-the-Pooh isn't the mind-wandering world of dream. It's the world of Christopher Robin. And Christopher Robin is a sensible boy. . . . 

So, in other words, the literary blueprint of Winnie-the-Pooh is the inverse of Alice in Wonderland. In Alice in Wonderland, a sensible character goes on an adventure in an anarchic storyworld, while in Winnie-the-Pooh, an anarchic character goes on an adventure in a sensible storyworld.

-----

Poetic phrasings release a brain-slowing burst of dopamine wonder that mingles our existing memories with a new mental perspective. The mingling breaks our prior habits of reading, defamiliarizing things that we've come to see as boringly ordinary, and inspiring us to see fresh details, fresh points of emphasis, fresh opportunities for discovery.

So, so many sources of wonder.

This is fun:

From Your Name in Landsat.

I connected with the images and ideas of these essays in the past couple of weeks:

Lessons from the Fairness of African Fractal Societies

What fractal geometry makes visible in these settlements is a broader principle: large, complex forms can emerge from smaller units without requiring every decision to come from a single centre. That principle matters not only for architecture, but for politics and economics as well. . . . 

What fractal geometry kept revealing was that complex, large-scale structures could emerge from simple rules repeated at every level. A fern leaf is an example: each small frond resembles the larger leaf of which it is a part.

Fractals can appear at many scales, from the branching of blood vessels to the spread of river networks. Cosmic fractals like halos are larger than our solar system, while others, like those in quantum material, are infinitesimally small. . . . 

Fractals give order to what looks like chaos – but not only in nature. The same three properties that shape a tree or a coastline can shape a society. Recursion means that what works at one level gets repeated at the next – a household rule becomes a village rule becomes a regional one. Scaling means those rules stretch upward without breaking, holding their logic whether you are governing 10 people or 10,000. Self-similarity means that each unit can organise itself according to the same broad principles, without waiting for orders from a distant centre. A society built on these principles doesn’t need a centre to hold it together. It holds itself together, from the bottom up, much like a tree. . . . 

That flexibility is what makes the system fractal: the same basic form repeats at larger and larger scales.

Kinship was one strand, age another, place another, economic life another. Eglash compares this to an artist working from a colour palette. Together, these overlapping memberships gave people multiple claims on one another – and multiple routes to resolution when things went wrong. . . . 

Fractal or layered structure is no guarantee of fairness. The geometry is neutral. What matters is who controls it and toward what end. So, if fractal ideas are to serve equality rather than hierarchy, the models we build must prioritise generative justice – not just fairer distribution, but the repair and renewal of the social, labour and ecological relationships on which a community depends. . . . 

That is the larger promise of fractal design in public life. The point is not simply to break large systems into smaller ones. It is to build nested, connected structures in which value can circulate back to the people and places that created it.

Building a more just future will require ideas drawn from many parts of the world. The fractal systems developed in Africa, both intuitively and by design, have much to offer. They suggest ways of organising society that preserve connection across scale without surrendering everything to a distant centre. Where the modern state society often excels at extraction, fractal systems point toward circulation, reciprocity and return. They show how complexity can be built without making ordinary people ever more remote from the value they produce.

Nested, connected structures in which value can circulate back to the people and places that created it help build complexity without making ordinary people ever more remote from the value they produce.

The Ethiopian Running Secret

For a long time, African knowledge has been seen by the West as intuitive, superstitious and practical, and some might view the Ethiopian methodology as unscientific. We argue it may be just the opposite. . . . 

A tailored, individualised management of physical energy is necessarily non-social, while in Ethiopia, the important properties of energy are that it is understood to be a limited substance that must be carefully monitored and protected. It is understood to be a ‘transbodily’ substance – that is, it can flow between people, as well as between people and their environments. . . . 

The precise quantification of speed and distance is seen as a distraction. Rather, the emphasis is on creating zigzagging routes through the forest, using the uneven ground and slow pace to enable the legs to recover. Some runners are seen as better at creating routes, so are sought out to lead. The sessions are different every time and rarely follow the forest trails. . . . 

In Ethiopia, it is the ability to run in a way that protects your own and others’ energy that is seen as the primary skill of an endurance athlete. In this instance, doing this well was often seen to require the rejection of quantified data rather than its embrace. Rather than seeing energy as contained within the individual body, and the athlete as a system of inputs and outputs, Ethiopian athletes see the process of expending and monitoring energy as a collective responsibility. Because the total amount of energy is seen as limited, for one athlete to gain within this system necessarily involves another athlete losing something. For this reason, there is a complex ethics of training in Ethiopia, which ensures that energy is shared as evenly as possible.

Among Ethiopian athletes, running alone is seen as deeply antisocial in the same way that eating alone is. Running together is an important way to ensure that people control themselves and avoid ‘burning up’, as they put it, by training too hard. Similarly, it is important that food is shared equally between athletes, and if people fail to do their ‘duty’ as a pacemaker, they are often required to redress this energetic imbalance by ‘sponsoring’ bread or bananas for the rest of the athletes. . . . 

While many have assumed that East African athletes’ success comes ‘naturally’, or is derived almost automatically from the advantages of genetics or altitude – there is a huge amount of expertise about endurance running in Ethiopia. It is not ‘old school’ at all, but more refined, built upon decades of cumulative knowledge. It just can look a little different to Western sports science: less about lab testing and utilising data, and more about creating a balance in training between different kinds of environmental conditions and learning to share energy with others.

Energy is understood to be a finite, ‘transbodily’ substance--that is, it can flow between people, as well as between people and their environments--which means seeing the process of expending and monitoring energy as a collective responsibility.

It's all about our systems and structures, how we design them and how they shape our interactions with each other.

There’s No Planet B

We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend completely on the billions of other living organisms that make up Earth’s biosphere. Without them, we cannot survive. . . . 

Deep down, we know this from instinct: we are happiest when immersed in our natural environment. There are countless examples of the healing power of spending time in nature. Numerous articles speak of the benefits of ‘forest bathing’; spending time in the woods has been scientifically shown to reduce stress, anxiety and depression, and to improve sleep quality, thus nurturing both our physical and mental health. Our bodies instinctively know what we need: the thriving and unique biosphere that we have co-evolved with, that exists only here, on our home planet. . . . 

Looking at Earth’s long history, we find that we would have been incapable of living on our planet for most of its existence. Anatomically modern humans emerged less than 400,000 years ago; we have been around for less than 0.01 per cent of the Earth’s story. The only reason we find Earth habitable now is because of the vast and diverse biosphere that has for hundreds of millions of years evolved with and shaped our planet into the home we know today. Our continued survival depends on the continuation of Earth’s present state without any nasty bumps along the way. We are complex lifeforms with complex needs. We are entirely dependent on other organisms for all our food and the very air we breathe. The collapse of Earth’s ecosystems *is* the collapse of our life-support systems. Replicating everything Earth offers us on another planet, on timescales of a few human lifespans, is simply impossible.

Some argue that we need to colonise other planets to ensure the future of the human race. In 5 billion years, our Sun, a middle-aged star, will become a red giant, expanding in size and possibly engulfing Earth. In 1 billion years, the gradual warming of our Sun is predicted to cause Earth’s oceans to boil away. While this certainly sounds worrying, 1 billion years is a long, long time. . . . 

The industrial revolution happened less than 500 years ago. Since then, human activity in burning fossil fuels has been rapidly changing the climate, threatening human lives and damaging ecosystems across the globe. Without rapid action, human-caused climate change is predicted to have devastating global consequences within the next 50 years. This is the looming crisis that humanity must focus on. If we can’t learn to work within the planetary system that we evolved with, how do we ever hope to replicate these deep processes on another planet? Considering how different human civilisations are today from even 5,000 years ago, worrying about a problem that humans may have to tackle in a billion years is simply absurd. It would be far simpler to go back in time and ask the ancient Egyptians to invent the internet there and then. It’s also worth considering that many of the attitudes towards space colonisation are worryingly close to the same exploitative attitudes that have led us to the climate crisis we now face.

Earth is the home we know and love not because it is Earth-sized and temperate. No, we call this planet our home thanks to its billion-year-old relationship with life. Just as people are shaped not only by their genetics, but by their culture and relationships with others, planets are shaped by the living organisms that emerge and thrive on them. Over time, Earth has been dramatically transformed by life into a world where we, humans, can prosper. The relationship works both ways: while life shapes its planet, the planet shapes its life. Present-day Earth is our life-support system, and we cannot live without it. . . . 

Finding alien life does not mean finding another planet that we can move to. Just as life on Earth has evolved with our planet over billions of years, forming a deep, unique relationship that makes the world we see today, any alien life on a distant planet will have a similarly deep and unique bond with its own planet. We can’t expect to be able to crash the party and find a warm welcome.

We are part of planetary systems and structures and can't be isolated from the whole. It's all about our interactions with each other.

I'm sure all of the above was playing around in my head as I recently responded to some shorter prompts in my journal.

4/26/26

Woodland Wardens card: VII

The Chipmunk and Laurel -"Success"

The Chipmunk often takes the road less traveled, finding hidden pathways and adventures along the way. The laurel is a symbol of victory, Together, they tell us to take charge of our destiny, Carve our own path, and find success

Forge a unique path toward your desires. The road to achieving your goals is hardly ever straight and easy, but the Journey is ultimately rewarding.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

― George Santayana

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

― Mary Oliver

Almanac of Birds card: Caracara Eagle

this whole existence

is a bright cry of surprise

uttered by the dark unknown

a terminal excursion

of the living flesh

from the edge of space

to that inner place

where time is made of hope

and the light is never dead

 . . . We are so close now that you come to me as breath, pulse, wind, sap,

The steady humming current that weds all living things.

Imagine a mountain, I say to those who want to go there,

One so familiar you can see it with your eyes closed.

Green in summer, bare in mister, iridescent cat sunset,

It's always where it's supposed to be, right there on the horizon

You have loved it from afar,

Now imagine de me deciding to climb that mountain

Nort once but over and over again--

First by the marked path, then by the dear trails,

Then by making your own way up.

One day you pray in the dry streambed.

One day you pray under the stone outcrop.

One day you pray facedown in the sweet birch leaves,

My point is, the better you know the mountain--

The more intimate you become--

The harder it, is to see it whole, as something separate from yourself.

You're not looking at the mountain anymore.

You're not even on the mountain.

You're in the mountain's life, as its life pours into you.

This makes word's hard to come by.

― Barbara Brown Taylor in A Rhythm of Prayer

In the human imagination, mountains have always been an abiding, ancient and rock-solid image of immovability, most particularly in the Zen tradition, but as even our ancestors knew, mountains move over time and move faster when they are carved and eroded by water. Mountains may be the representation of steadfastness but the moving river of time is what always wears away any immobility, either through transformative events or by arranging for a total drowning and disappearance. In the Taoist tradition, mountains and rivers were always seen as working and living together--the source of the river always hidden in very heart of the mountains themselves--in other words, immobility always hides at its very centre, the power that will dismantle and undermine its own seeming inability to move. . . . 

The very act of feeling immovable a point, an understanding, a moral law: tells us we are, by definition, reacting against something we have not fully understood, something that now has us in its thrall, something asking us for understanding by the very way it has brought us to a halt. . . . 

Immovability means we are protecting something painful, something that does not wish to be touched until it is ready . . . 

Immovability properly identified identifies exactly where we need to touch . . . Immobility might be our unconscious self-permission to get to know ourselves and our fears a little more, perhaps to understand why we have stopped along the way and what we are still afraid of.

― David Whyte in Consolations II

You're in the mountain's life, as its life pours into you. Mountains and rivers work and live together. Rivers are winding, twisting paths, flowing down and shaping mountains. They are not separate, are one continuous, dynamic interaction. So is the path to success, both solid and fluid. So is my success. I am the steady, solid, placid presence to calm and reassure others. Solid, yet not unyielding. Responding to them and adapting to their needs, dynamically fluid in our interactions. Conforming to changing situations and circumstances in ways that maintains the solidity of our connection. I know the mountain intimately enough that I can embody it, yet never be immovable.

― Me

Thank you for the peace you bring.