I’m giving much attention these days to paradigm shifting. In thinking out loud. In writing. In receiving, that way in which things just seem to arrive when an intent is set. Together with colleagues, and in particular with fellow traveller, Teresa Posakony, I’m welcoming insights on tools, practices, advice for shifting paradigms.
A receiving today was in an email quoting the British Philosopher and Writer, Alan Watts.
“In music one does not make the end of a composition the point of the composition.
If that were so, the best conductors would be those who would play the fastest. There would be composers who would write only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord, because that is the end.
When dancing you don’t aim at a particular point in the room where you should arrive at. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.
But we don’t see (…) something brought by our education in our every day conduct: we thought of life by analogy with a journey with a pilgrimage which a has a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end, success whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead.
But we miss the point: the whole way along it was a musical piece and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music is being played.”
So it is with paradigm shifts also? Is the end the desire? Yes, I suppose. Yet it misses much along the way. It sounds trite to say it this way.
Perhaps the more significant point of paradigm shift is learning to be in the shift. In the energy of it. So as to build capacity not only for the current shift, but for the unknown others coming. So as to know it in muscular memory and in energetic memory that can be recalled. So as to enable a deliberate participation in shift, rather than a passive enduring. And perhaps better yet, so as to enable an ability to create shift.