It’s the classic story, told throughout Human history: the protagonist finds him or herself ousted from a familiar world and into a new reality by some inciting incident.  They must stop trying to return to what was (and has gone forever) in order to emerge.

This is about reality and grief and hope, and some Human genius.  Grief must not be avoided because it helps us let go and then to take hold.

Otto Scharmer tells of a personal and unexpected experience when he looked on the smouldering remains of the three hundred and fifty year old farmhouse his family’s generations had lived in for two hundred years:

‘I suddenly felt released and free to encounter the other
part of my self, the part that drew me into the future –
and into a world that I might bring into reality in my life.’

Moments like these are thin|silences within which our worlds change.  Joseph Jaworski describes this well: ‘In that special silence, you can hear or see, or get a strong sense of something that wants to happen that you wouldn’t be aware of otherwise.’*

We can find our future Self in unexpected places and occurrences.  What if I were to admit to not being very good at the role I’ve been in for some thirty years.  This would certainly be a hard reality I’d need to grieve over, but I also find myself free, as Scharmer puts it, to encounter the other part of my Self which calls me into the future .  And maybe if I try and deny this reality I might miss what James Carse identifies as the ‘genius of myself’ (with which we can originate something right and good and beautiful into this world).  This Self only exists with the acknowledgement of this genius in others.

Then, to face reality and grieve what cannot be, or never was, or cannot be again, is so important, turning ousting into opportunity, perhaps uncovering  the other part of who we are, our genius expressed in a courageous and generous life.**

Please feel free to use this post as an inciting incident.

(*Joseph Jaworski’s description isn’t the original source for the idea of  thin|silence, but he captures the very dynamic of an emerging future which we had not foreseen.)
(**Both courage and generosity are expressions of selflessness.)