Choose to renew patterns

 

Does the new year really begin today, a time ripe with opportunity to set new patterns?

While it’s no where near January 1, a new year starts today when a familiar pattern, or a new or renewed pattern, sets in. In my family and my city, kids go back to school today. How traffic moves changes. How families organize themselves changes. People are back at work from summer holidays. The reality of fall is setting in.

I feel liberated by the structure that comes in the fall, when I feel a surge of energy to hunker down and get to work after a summer pattern where work and relaxation seem to drift into one another. As the structure returns, so does the quiet I long for to write. Here is what’s wanting to be written:

  1. A complete draft manuscript of Nest City by December 15, 2013.
  2. Nest City blog posts every Monday and Thursday.
  3. Nest City News publications the first and third Monday of the month.

To pull off the above, I have to choose how to spend my time and energy within the structure in which I operate. I have to renew my commitment to my work, family, neighbourhood, city and planet. In my work life, I have to renew my commitment to my writing projects, to my clients and the day-to-day needs of running a business. I have to renew my commitments to my self and my Highest Self.

Here’s one of my choices about where I will be spending my energy over the next three months: a book circle exploring Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer’s new book: Leading from the Emerging Future. Eight colleagues and I have committed to read the book, journal our personal journey along the way, and meet after we have read each chapter to explore what we are individually and collectively learning. That will lead to a happy new year, with emerging patterns in life and work.

Happy new year! May the returning patterns refresh you. May your new patterns revive you.

What new patterns are emerging in you?

 

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This post is part of Chapter 9 – Be the Best Citizen You Can Be. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

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Integral city breath

 

I’m just home from attending the Integral Theory Conference – Connecting the Integral Kosmopolitan in San Francisco, taking some time to settle in at home. I just came across this poem I caught at the end of the session I held with Marilyn Hamilton, the first mini-prototype of an Integral City Learning Lhabitat.

Here’s what particpants had to say at the conclusion of our session:

183 - integral city breath poem

Thanks to all our participants! You played well 🙂

 

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This post is part of Chapter 9 – Be the Best Citizen You Can Be. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

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Understand the underground

 

A few words of Ben Okri’s Mental Fight stand out as I explore what it means to be best citizen I can be:

It is all in the air - poem, Okri

Cities are about connecting people and the ways we think, make and do together. This is how cities are formed, how they energize us, by giving us opportunities to follow our passions. In turn we energize the cities.

The quality of how we relate to self,  each other and our cities themselves in this city-making endeavour is essential. Everywhere, at all times, we need to listen to – notice – all the things forming, in the air and underground. This is a citizenship practice, of stopping to notice what and how we each show up to dance, and our relationship with the dancers and the changing dance floor itself.

The underground is the implicit, internal inner workings of the city that are hard to discern. Not the traditional, physical “underground” we think of as the network of pipes that serve the city, but the connections and conduits within, among and between us citizens in our social habitat.

If we want our cities to be different for us, then we must be different. For our cities to be different, we need to explore the underground within us, within citizens. Our underpinnings need to be tended to. We have to connect our souls before our work together, the very work that creates cities, will be different and result in different cities.

This is, ultimately both a personal and collective ‘mental fight’ to see, and understand, the underground.

What do you do to understand the underground in your self and your city?

 

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This post is part of Chapter 9 – Enduring Civic Practice. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

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Sleep is necessary

 

It is important to be awake to the world around us, and, perhaps counter-intuitively, it is equally important to sleep. This is the conclusion I reached in a very quick conversation last week with my community of practice about how essential it is to stop what causes harm and build on the things that are helping people (and other beings) survive and thrive.

At the time, it occurred to me that it is equally important to sleep and at this very moment of being awake, I am writing to figure out what this means for me. (One of my practices to figure out what I am thinking and feeling and seeing is to write. Its one of the ways that I endeavour to be ‘awake’ while I am awake.)

Two big thoughts stand out for me:

***

Sleep is necessary.

AND

We do not all need to be awake.

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To start, some definitions. First ‘awake’, from Merriam Webster:

  1. to cease sleeping
  2. to become aroused or active again
  3. to become conscious or aware of something

Definitions of ‘asleep’ from Merriam Webster:

  1. being in a state of sleep
  2. dead
  3. lacking sensation: numb
  4. inactive, dormant
  5. not alert: indifferent

There are levels of awake/sleep in these definitions. Our bodies first need sleep to biologically function. A second level of awake is around being activated to stimuli, and a third is around consciousness and awareness. If “awakeness” takes place at all three levels, its opposite, sleep, is mirrored in all three levels. Biologically, I can be asleep or awake. When biologically awake, I can be actively engaging with my surroundings, or I can be inactive. When actively awake I can be deeply aware and conscious, or not.

The second and third levels of awakeness depend on the first, the third on the first and second. Being biologically awake means I need sleep, and being actively awake depends on being biologically awake. Being consciously awake depends on being actively awake. So where does sleep come in?

The discussion that got me started on this thread was about how all of humanity needs to be awake (second and third levels of awake) to the challenges the world faces and the denial – ie the sleep – we seem to enjoy.

If sleep serves a biological function, what is its metaphorical function to being an active and aware citizen? Do we all need to be awake all of the time? No.

A negative view of sleep is that I am missing out, or simply unaware of what is happening around me, and unable to take necessary action, all of which can take place with all three levels of sleep. An appreciative view of sleep is that it allows me to more fully see when I am awake, and to more fully take in the world and more wisely take action as well. Further, what if I trust that I will see what I am meant to see, when I am ready to see it? Further again, what if I trust that others will see what they are meant to see when they are ready to see it?

The desire to always be awake, or to compel all of humanity to always be awake is unreasonable and unhealthy. The real danger is oversleeping, to the point where we miss way too much, feel lethargic, confused and misjudge.

Here’s what we need to trust, while allowing ourselves to sleep: the work to be done isn’t for each of us to do, but for each of us to take a part. If I trust that as I pursue my passions, there are others pursuing theirs and cumulatively we are changing the world . We are not compelled to all stay awake and all take the same actions.

In our diversification of passions, we give ourselves the opportunity to sleep, digest, adjust, process and learn. Stay awake for what calls you and trust that others are looking after the other things. As they should trust in you.

Take time to sleep – it will serve you, and all of us, well.

Who’s awake and working hard on things so you can sleep?

 

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This post is part of Chapter 9 – Enduring Civic Practice. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

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Civic practice starts with questions

 

nestworks all in small.057
The Nestworks

How we show up, acknowledging that life is a journey at every scale, is a critical part of city making. Part of that journey is trusting that much of what comes us in life is not what we could have known. In the poem that has helped me shake out the structure of Nest City, John O’Donohue’s ‘Time for Necessary Decision’, these words stand out:

Feel the deeper knowing in us sure

Of all that is about to be born beyond

Access to deeper knowing is through having a willingness to learn and grow, a critical capacity to build and create the city habitats we need for our emergent journey. More specifically,this capacity is about a willingness for intentional learning, but this doesn’t mean choosing what I want to learn, but being intentionally open to what I need to learn. We do know know what is in the depths of each and all of us. We just know there is learning to be done, endlessly.

The 4 principles and 6 practices that end Chapter 8 – The City Making Exchange for now, form a solid foundation on which to begin exploring Chapter 9 – Enduring Civic Practice, the relationship between our individual and journeys and emergence. Questions play a big role in this exploration of civic practice. Here are a few I am holding as I write today:

  1. What does it take to be brave enough to invite ‘deeper knowing’?
  2. What does it mean to feel ‘the deeper knowing’?
  3. How much ‘deeper knowing’ can I accommodate in my being?
  4. If tension is an evolutionary driver of cities, what is my relationship with tension?
  5. As we emerge to new destinations, how do I explore my relationship with the thresholds I face?
  6. What are my personal practices to look after self, others and our places?
  7. How can I trust what I do not know?

Here’s the question at the heart of this next series of posts:

What do you do to find deeper knowing in your life and work?

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This post is part of Chapter 9 – Enduring Civic Practice. Here are some plot helpers of Nest City: The Human Drive to Thrive in Cities, the book I am sharing here while I search for a publisher:

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