It’s just 3 weeks until Beyond Paradigms, and I’m taking a moment to reflect on the intense year of preparation and growth, inside and out, that it’s taken to get here.
The first half of the year, while we dreamt and ideated and created and programmed and formatted and invited, I didn’t even know whether I was going to be able to stay and see it all through; fortunately, and after some rather fancy dancing, the visa gods smiled upon us. I’m here for a spell, and so grateful. Australia in general, and Western Australia in particular, is such an amazing, gorgeous place. I continue to pinch myself that I get to be here and do what I do.
And… I’m surrounded by an even more amazing, gorgeous group of humans (a “mob” as they call it over here). Along with reconnecting with some beautiful friends who were already here, I’ve had the rare privilege and pleasure to become part of a network of innovators, futurists, makers, wildly creative creatives, activists and gamechangers, focused on changemaking in virtually every sector. Together we comprise a bold living lab, experimenting with modeling prototypes for positive, humane futures — everything from designing structures and systems to allowing emergent processes to evolve, all serving that eventuality. It’s a positive, open-to-possibility, playful, yes-oriented space, and has been such a welcoming and nurturing place for me to contribute.
And the people involved, well, each and all are brilliant, quirky as hell (and just as opinionated, lol). Uniqueness is honored; members of the group are simultaneously respectful and fond of one another. We look for opportunities to just be together (and laugh. A lot.). Not that there are never disagreements — there most certainly are!—; we’re very much like family. For lack of a better description, I like to call us “a puppy-pile of polymaths” (but that falls short, too). It goes without saying that I’ve made friends for life here in WA.
I am also blessed to have discovered the New Economy Network Australia (NENA) and attended the annual conference last year in Melbourne. It was a galvanizing experience for me. Through it, I understood that the “blessed unrest” that Paul Hawken speaks of so eloquently is alive and very much flourishing here. I also learned about a tribe of people around the world who are identifying as “apocaloptimists.” That’s my posse! (Though I’m probably more aptly described as an apocaloptimystic, ha.)
Apocaloptimists know that it’s going to take a lot of us, working in and on every imaginable aspect of our humanity and our planet, to bring about the changes that are required so urgently now. And while we may not know exactly how a positive outcome will come about — especially with what’s hitting the proverbial fan at present — we have an overarching sense that it will, ultimately, work out.
That’s not so easy a spirit and intention to maintain, though, especially given the complications our species is facing at the moment — not to mention the dystopian orientation and distortions of our information ecosystems. Machine learning appears to be gearing up to colonise our entire consciousness (Mindspace: the final frontier).
My own sense is that the trick to landing on our feet, both socially and environmentally, lies in upleveling the calibre and quality of our relationships, by cultivating harmony within ourselves and with each other, human to human. This is why Doug Rushkoff’s wonderful Team Human meme so inspires us.
Creating this conference has been like an extended songwriting/musical jam session. In developing our programme themes, we covered all kinds of territory in getting our arms around how we could best serve this community. Collaboration is the name of the game and yet… after 5,000 years of competition and dog-eat-dogma, while we understand and really want to collaborate, we don’t really know how. There are still so many things in the way. So we distilled it down, and identified what we felt was the clear and present obstacle to harmony and moving together cooperatively to create positive change: our respective worldviews. And in particular, attachment to and identification with those worldviews. (Who would we be without our -isms and -ists? Eek!)
Well, they’re just paradigms, sets of beliefs and assumptions, lenses of differing colours. We can take them off, and try on someone else’s for awhile, without any harm done. Our ideasphere doesn’t have to be binary, polarised, oppositional. What if we could actually receive one another, and consider what life experienced through this person’s lens might be like?
Becoming flexible and adaptable in the face of overwhelming change is an essential skill for communicating and cooperating in this portentous time, surviving it and thriving into the future. So we, a group of collaborating organisations, thought we’d invite you to join us as we begin to build this capacity.
Together.
It’s time for a new conversation.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
— Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi, 13th century
See you at Beyond Paradigms.
— JP
*This is written with a very deep bow to my chief collaborator and co-conspirator on this particular jam, Karun Cowper. It’s been a joy and an honour to serve with you, dear friend. And it’s only the beginning.
And to our beautiful team: @Jacs, @Maggie, @Adam, @Andy, @Tim, @Karoline. Heartfelt thanks for all you do and are.
