How would I start to tell the generative story of the world I know?

Notice and take seriously the good in whom and what you give your attention to across the week: what is life-giving, fruitful, creative, replenishing, healing, sustaining. Journal about what that works in you.

We are familiar with a story of our time of catastrophe and dysfunction, and that is real. But it is not the whole story of us. There is an ordinary and abundant reality in our world of people walking with forms that are broken, with a world that is in pain, with institutions that don’t make sense anymore — and finding ways to be of service, to have an edifying effect on the people around them, to be healers in so many forms, and to model and advance what it looks like when we rise to our higher humanity.

We are capable of beauty and joy and dignity and incredible creativity and community and care.

And, even with the magnitude of what is before us, we are equipped in a way previous generations of humans have not been with knowledge that can be a form of agency: to become more conscious, to become more aware, to act like the ecosystem the world needs us to be — sharing what we are seeing, finding ways to share what we are learning, joining our vulnerabilities, and joining our flourishing.

Calling out this reality, naming that there is a generative story of our time, is in fact a way to begin. Every time you take in the good, you are taking seriously the lifeblood, the raw materials of the generative story of our time. You are stepping onto that landscape more fully with your imagination and with your presence. And in so doing, you are making it more visible and more real in our world of so much pain and so much promise.

What is a question I am holding in myself and for our world now, that I might choose to live?

Begin to pay attention to the power of questions as you go through your week. Note the quality of answers they elicit and if the question invites an opening or closing.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

This passage of Rainer Maria Rilke has become a discipline woven into the community of conversation and searching and living that is On Being. Like us, Rilke was a citizen of a young century with spectacular potentials for creating and destroying. His wisdom has never felt more directly useful and relevant than in the post-2020 world — that when we are faced with questions for which there are no answers or solutions, we are called to hold and live the questions themselves.

Our love for this teaching rests also on a reverence for the gravity and power of questions in human life. In life and in science, it is a deep truth that we are shaped as much by the quality of the questions we’re asking as by the answers we’re prepared to give. Those moments when a new quality of question arises carry discovery and previously unimagined possibility.

The invitation here is to engage the adventure of a new curiosity and reverence for the questions that are alive in you, the questions alive in the world that you feel drawn to. This exercise is intimate and civilizational at once. It can become a life discipline, a spiritual practice, with tangible and redemptive effect.

How am I, or can I be, critical yeast in the world that I can see and touch?

Map your 200-Year Present

Map your 200-year present. Feel that in your imagination, and in your body.

Geological time, deep time, cosmic time, evolutionary time — all of those are interestingly akin to a religious, prophetic imagination: the long arc of the moral universe that Martin Luther King Jr. invoked. This is a way to speak of this young century we inhabit, this post-2020 world: we are in a Kairos moment as a species.

The beautiful and mysterious thing in all of this way of thinking and imagining, this way of cracking time open and seeing its true, manifold nature, is that this actually expands our sense of the possible in the here and the now. It sends us to work with the raw materials of our lives, understanding that these are always the materials even of change at a cosmic or a societal level.

This is echoed in many teachers and gifts of practice and of language: “evolutionary clusters”; “live human signposts”; the “quiet before”; “fractal emergence”; and “critical yeast.”

You might have to live the question of how to figure out what it means to be critical yeast in your world of friendship, neighborliness, work, community.

It’s waiting for you already in some part of the world you can see and touch.

The adventure is to make it more conscious.

What are the vocations — callings — that ground, propel, and animate me?

Imagine the Possibility of Wholeness

Open wide your imagination, your heart, your energy, your will, to the possibility of wholeness. As you do, note the emergent ecosystems and wisdom you find even amidst fracture.

Every surface of fracture in our world notwithstanding, all of life is being revealed in its insistence on wholeness: the organic interplay between our bodies, the natural world, the lives we make, the worlds we create. It is the calling of callings to make that vivid and practical and real, starting inside ourselves and with the lives we’ve been given.