on unfolding

Two truths approach each other. One comes from inside, the other from outside,

and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.

—Tomas Tranströmer

Henrik Karlsson • Relationships Are Coevolutionary Loops

For me, this is Johanna. We first met when she was 21 and I was 22 and later became a couple. What is me in me has unfolded primarily in her company. This has been a mutual unfolding; we spoke each other into being.

Henrik Karlsson • Relationships Are Coevolutionary Loops

By this, I do not mean that you can’t have long term goals. A goal is a tool that can create coherence in your life, and make the things you do add up to something bigger. My goal is to write a few good essays. The problem is when a goal becomes more than a direction, when you start to visualize the specific design you want to end up with. You want... See more

Henrik Karlsson • Everything That Turned Out Well in My Life Followed the Same Design Process

The context is smarter than you . It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.

If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what

Henrik Karlsson • Everything That Turned Out Well in My Life Followed the Same Design Process

If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding .1 Put simply:

I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people

Henrik Karlsson • Everything That Turned Out Well in My Life Followed the Same Design Process

recent Banksy piece, I want to be what you saw in me, completes the thought. Between Karlsson’s shaping and the reality of our becoming lies the quiet work of intimacy: to hold someone so they can grow into the silhouette your love sketches for them, and to feel your own edges soften and bend beneath the steady pressure of their gaze.

Henrik Karlsson captures the mechanism simply: relationships are co-evolutionary loops. Beyond sociology, it feels like spiritual physics. Who we choose to orbit defines, over time, the texture and colour palette of our becoming. Love becomes a technology of transformation, a living interface between selves. To love well is to take part in someone... See more

We all carry endless hidden selves and latent worlds, waiting for the right gaze to bring them to the surface. I’ve felt this in my bones: relationships that have remade me, expanded me, taught me. Time and again, people have been the most transformative engine for becoming I’ve ever known.

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