Footer
the presencepulse
— a newsletter for conscious minds. Every Sunday morning, you'll get 1 guiding tip to recognize, understand, and accept the power of your presence in less than 4 minutes.
Enter your email and sign up for free right now.
Enter your email and sign up for free right now.
Change stagnates in the vacuum of dissension.
I wanted to say you are wrong but instead, I said nothing. When the discussion sits at extremes silence reigns. We stop afraid it will break while broken is already what it is.
It runs wild
as if it owns the place
It calls the place its own
and in that it takes prideIt misbehaves all the time
And it never takes the blame.
It is intrusive whether we want it or not.
We need it but it’s not necessaryIt likes to plan
It likes to make its own
We hate its torment
Even when we don’t believe it.Thoughts are an escape
They are a release
When the mind fails
It resolves in thinking.
I wrote all that but did not share it. At least not all of it. And not at first. It felt probably too poetic. Didn’t exude intellectual potency possibly. Either way, eventually the last verse made its way into the discussion.
This question came to be as part of a community book writing (LABs) facilitated by Katrijn van Oudheusden as we created a new book called: “The Unbelievable Joy of Not Needing to Be (a) Someone”.
And for a question that you can say is philosophical, you can imagine the array of intellectual drama that tried to answer it. But what was most fascinating was the intense need felt as an undertone for everyone to answer it definitively.
The convergence was fierce.
It is extremely rare these days to find conversations that do not want at the outset to converge, align, and resolve in a synthesized agreement. We are conditioned to the latter.
But are we missing something in our incessant need to agree? The session ended and we didn’t agree on a definition. And that was the most impressive thing we accomplished.
Taking a leap of faith into an empty abyss below me I took a dive and hit my head with a mild concussion as a reward. Whelp! I wish that’s how it happened but in reality, it was nothing this fancy.
All it took was being 6’ 2” (188 cm) and missing a low beam at an old house for me to meet the fragility of my brain. The hit sounded loud as I was told but in that moment didn’t feel that bad.
The tipsy drowsed mind might have had something to do with that.
The second day came and with it some interesting observations that marvel at the daredevil shenanigans which I hoped would have gotten me into this dilemma in the first place.
My head stopped working. I mean I had a lot to say — a lot was going on but nothing could come out. No thoughts. Nothing. I was there fully conscious and aware of everything but couldn’t talk or think.
The processor took a break and I was witnessing the show live with no commentator —quite scary and interesting to reflect on that. What happens in the absence of the thinking mind? When language stops and we sit idle?
I didn’t disappear. The same intellectual load that I wanted to divulge was there but simultaneously inaccessible. And that was baffling.
Broken I was for a few hours even though seemingly I was fully functional.
Feeling the need to conclude while none is there is no less broken than reaching a breaking point and starting anew. Change stagnates in the vacuum of dissension because without tension we stop creating.
And even if the desired outcome is to agree eventually. That isn’t the first step. Not the second nor the third. It might be the 11th and only then we can break out of the already broken cycle of needing to converge.
Until next time,
Carlo