What we have to do. | economic letters #3
We have to embrace the mess, embrace our not-knowing and the unknown to find a path into the opportunity that lies in our situation.
To see and to use the opportunity that lies in our current mess, we have to embrace a few things.
1. Embrace the mess.
There’s no way out of our situation as humans unless we fully acknowledge it, with all its contradictions, tensions, paradoxes, violence, and destruction, and with all that it tells us about ourselves as humans.
2. Embrace the unknown.
All the things we have done and learned before have brought us to our current situation, and they won’t help us out of it. There is something that will help us, some solution, but we don’t know it yet. To realize the path we want to take, we have to open up to the unknown.
3. Embrace not knowing.
We always cling to what went well to solve a challenging situation. We think we know the solution, but that’s not true. We need not fear that we do not know. Instead, we should embrace our not-knowing because it opens the door to unknown resources.
4. Embrace our true humanity.
We are spiritual creatures in a physical body. We have consciousness; we are a finite intelligence embedded in an infinite intelligence. We need to embrace this as our true humanity: we are embedded in an infinite intelligencene we never could understand fully, but we are an essential part of, able to work with and use. If we open up, this infinite intelligence will support us on our journey to new forms of community. But that requires us to accept and use our full capacity as humans and integrate our spiritual and physical being.
Every one of us is a natural-born leader; we only have to discover and nourish this leadership:
- We must be humble and accept that inner transformation is the key to every outer transformation.
- To open up to infinite intelligence means to have faith and trust, and to build persistence.
- There’s no change without action. So we must be courageous enough to act wisely and in a timely way, to learn and reflect, and to embrace the mess, the unknown, the not-knowing, and our true humanity
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