midwifing change

Death and grief are great forcing functions that collapse all of your false narratives. It’s a vacuum cleaner for a messy mind, especially in a culture where we let nothing die, which means nothing can be reborn. It is a gift for the living in that way.

The process of crossing the threshold is demanding for each and every one of us. When the cracks appear in a long-held belief, it causes anxiety and pain. As the certain world is replaced by great uncertainty, the risk is that we cling to what we know more than ever. The gravitational pull of the familiar exerts itself, no matter how dysfunctional

*“Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible.

This is good news for those of us intent on changing the world and creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our

A community of practice — creating a network of practitioners who can support civil society organisations to design their endings, and intelligently and carefully dismantle them.

The problem (or at least one of the problems) is that the twin edicts to simultaneously optimize your team and life and to be flexible in light of an uncertain future are in opposition to each other. Optimization presumes a kind of certainty about the circumstances one is optimizing for, but that certainty is, more often than not, illusory.

There’s a lot of alienation; a lot of disaster porn. We need grieving rituals so we can go through our despair together, so we can face the losses we know are coming.

“ The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. ”

— Antonio Gramsci, philosopher, linguist, journalist, writer and politician, in Prison Notebooks