Back in April I made a commitment to myself to post pieces of my unpublished book, Nest City – The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, here on my blog. I called it a slow release, posting Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday every week.
It’s now August 1 and I have been sharing my writing publicly here for three months. I have covered the first three chapters that constitute the first part of Nest City. I have also covered the three chapters that were the tightest, the most ready to share.
My challenge now is that I know where I am going with this. But not quite. The irony of this is striking, for that is what I will next write about in Part 2: that we are entering a new era of organizing for emergence that calls on us to have a destination in mind (chapter 5), but recognize that we can never know exactly where we will be going. This is an uneasy journey (Chapter 4). The truth is, we will never know exactly where we will end up anyway. The future is emerging (Chapter 6). Our work as we organize ourselves, at any scale, is about tapping into known and unknown possibilities.
So as I start to flesh out these next four chapters here, publicly, I acknowledge that I know how the chapters will be organized and the ideas they will explore. What I don’t know is what exactly will come up as I write them. What new ideas will emerge? What will I learn about myself as I write? What will I learn about my city as I write? What will I learn about city patterns as I write.
I fully anticipate that I will find things along the way that will cause me to reorganize my thinking and my work. And then I will be in a mental scramble to figure out how to make my new understanding fit into the framework of chapters I have created. I may find that I have to reorganize the chapters as I am thinking about them. My declared destination may even have to change.
I am in the middle of a learning journey that has a destination that may change along the way. Learning always comes with tension, so my goal is to keep the tension in play always, and notice what the tension is and see where it is pulling me. (It always pulls me somewhere I need to go, even if I do not want to.)
New ways of thinking, making and doing new things are always emerging. I aim to notice.