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living with coherence - an exploration

It was a blurry image that resurfaced from my subconscious. But it came with a sentence that needed to be heard a second time. Someone on one of the various webinars and video calls I had taken part in in the months before had said something like:

“In systems thinking there used to be a focus on that one would have to find the right leverage point to start changing a system but now people focus more on that living with coherence in a system will stimulate change.”

That landed. ‘Living with coherence’ - second time round I heard this as a quietly comforting and encouraging concept of agency. Not that urgent call to trying to move, Sysiphus-like, that big boulder of societal values and paradigms but instead unashamedly live countercultural values and trust in the vibes. Quite the thing for the recovering economist in me.

Then, of course, there were questions, doubts - this is me after all. But the intrigued relief of that initial moment has been so enlivening that it removed some of my stuckness. I started taking decisions on what not to do and kept asking what ‘living with coherence’ might mean for me, might mean as an attitude in these complex and often desperate times.

Here was a weak signal I wanted to pursue and explore because I felt my life depended on it. There was a glimmer of possibility, an ember of hope, of relief, of healing, of human scale I felt encouraged to follow, to research, to nurture, to hold on to. Not much more than that but so much more than that at the same time.

I have been living in apprehension in the face of an disintegrating present for years. Overwhelm and helplessness, burnout and depression, and the deadlocked sense of an urgent moral obligation to act, to do something, but not just anything, something that could have some worthwhile positive effect.

Maybe the question is not ‘What should I do?’? This is too activist an attitude - and certainly so if I pretend to want to stop the climate crisis or the destruction of the biosphere.

Maybe the question is not even ‘What should I be?’? This is still too purposeful an attitude. It should not even be a choice. How could I pretend to want to be someone else than myself?

The question is ‘Who am I, really?’ and it comes not with the exhortation to act in the complex systems I am part of but with the invitation to live myself with integrity.

Is this just a glorified way of giving up? Or is there a ‘systems science approved’ way of living that starts from principled values instead of discouragingly unattainable goals for a better world?

Ahead is a search for a possible mode of living, an attitude to the life that was given to me and that I want to embrace.

Living this being that is me is what is called for. That is signal enough to change the system.

Living this being that is me is what is called for. That is signal enough.

Living this being that is me is signal enough.

Living this being that is me is enough.

Living me is enough.

Living is enough.

Living is.

November 27, 2024   #living with coherence