Year: 2020

For many of us, it feels like we’ve entered unprecedented times, with change now occurring at an accelerated pace. In reflecting upon this all and putting it within the context of my life’s work, I’ve suddenly realized what we are being asked to do and how it gives this unfamiliar, epic experience a sense of familiarity to it.

What we are being asked of by life is to be the explorers and pioneers of our time, just as our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents may have been, yet within a completely different contextual realm of experience.

In effect, instead of exploring, pioneering, and settling new lands at the edge of our world around us (like my parents did taming the northern frontier of Manitoba back in the fifties), we’re being asked to explore, pioneer, and settle new “lands” at the edge of our “world“ within us.

For many of us though, this is going to be an exceedingly difficult adventure to undertake. Why? Because we aren’t even aware that these inner worlds exist and don’t understand how they fundamentally help us (and also hinder us) in perceiving our world and our very sense of self.

Therefore, until we can accept that there is a much larger “world” beyond the horizon of our conventional minds, we will continue to lack the capabilities and capacities to tackle these wicked problems which are much like dragons emerging from off the edge of the known world to wreak havoc upon it.

This is going to require us to have great courage, authenticity, and creativity going forward. That’s because we need to be real creative to openly step towards the very things we normally defensively step away from and avoid. In the process, we need to learn to drop our shields, armour, and masked helms, giving us the mobility and broader vision to make possible what previously seemed impossible.

In effect, the way forward isn’t about trying to know everything, having the certainty that we know all of the answers. Rather it’s about being comfortable with not knowing everything and embracing the uncertainty of the unknown by asking the right questions. In doing so, our questions become quests that lead us on an adventure within a wilderness that we truly want to step into and explore, pulled along by something much greater than ourselves.

In reflecting upon my last post, I was reminded of how someone once described me as a “canary in a coal mine”. In effect, I have the ability to see social patterns (i.e. culture) that can be jeopardizing to an organization and its people in turn but are often invisible to them because they don’t have the sensitivity and awareness to see them.

Of course, they joked, the canary unfortunately “dies” in the process.

And for the most part, that was symbolically true with regards to my own life, as I often reached a point where if these negative patterns weren’t addressed by the company, I found it soul-crushingly hard to stay there and see how it was affecting people, so I often quit because I couldn’t take feeling and sensing that pain on a daily basis.

In other words, the longer I stayed there, the more I had to internally shut down and compartmentalize almost my entire self, my humanity, otherwise I’d go nuts in the process. It was like being on a raft on a river approaching a huge waterfall but the people steering the raft were “navel-gazing” to a specific point in the distance, completely unaware of what was happening right under their very noses.

For the most part, this is what the past two decades have felt like for me, not just with regards to being within organizations, but with regards to being within society as well. Reality has been changing continuously, giving us warning signals, but many of us have been stuck in our bubble of beliefs, our constructed reality, oblivious to what’s been going on under our very noses.

Nevertheless some of us have been seeing these signals for some time that a new world is emerging, and communicating with others of similar vision that we need to update our maps and social constructs (i.e. institutions) to better align with the present reality of this new world arising before us.

That’s why we all need to start breaking free from our own constructed cages now, no matter how safe they may seem to be, and start learning to independently fly into the greater wilderness of the unknown.

That’s because life is no longer scripted like a superficial TV commercial but rather is now a deep, unscripted adventure. We each need to craft our own nest now, a safe sanctuary within the wilderness which we can launch our explorations from to get a broader view of this new world’s landscape before us.

Social contracts are just social constructs that we’ve collectively created. They are often invisible to us, working within the background of our lives, providing us with a stable foundation that allows to makes sense of and navigate our world collectively together.

Yet when our world changes around us, we need to update these social constructs we navigate by or else risk going off course and crashing into a reality we didn’t see in front of us. In effect, our world has changed but the maps we’ve created to navigate them by haven’t.

And just as we have created them before, so too can we recreate them again. We just have to make the conscious choice to do so.

The hard part is recognizing and realizing that these social contracts aren’t permanent truths of reality that are sacred and untouchable but rather social constructs crafted to help visibly manifest our collectiveness within reality. Until we can make these seemingly invisible aspects of our lives visible, shifting them from something we’re subjectively immersed within to something we can stand back and objectively reflect upon, we won’t be able to let go and unlearn them, allowing us to construct newer ones in their place.

And of course, even more difficult to recognize and realize is that our perceived identities are entwined with these social constructs as well, being social constructs themselves. In effect, we are not our jobs. We are something so much larger than what we currently believe we are. We just need to see that our perception of ourselves is just a belief, one that once empowered us long ago but now limits us today. By letting go of that old belief, as a relic of our past, we can learn to step out of it and see a larger belief (and Self) we can step into in turn, thus empowering us once again.

To sum up, we’re in a time now where so much doesn’t seem real anymore because we actually lost touch with reality a long time ago. To realign ourselves once again, we need to get real, seeing and listening to reality as it truly is now rather than how we once believed it was and expect it to be. This is how we will collectively traverse and converse our way into the new world emerging in front of us.