One day we won’t be able to.
One day, there’ll be a final “moving on” to make space for someone else here – maybe death is an ultimate act of humility, gratitude, and faithfulness offered to others.
Until then, though, we must keep moving.
Implicit to moving is letting go: sometimes this will mean moving from what we know to what we do not know, and from who we know to who we do not know, and from what we are doing to what we are not doing.
Our personal world views are made up of what we hold on to and what let go of, as Seth Godin puts it, ‘the set of expectations and biases you bring to a situation before any new data appear.’
Alex McManus suggests four things to let go of and four things to take hold of, when it comes to shaping the future; these appear relevant for people, institutions, organisations, regimes, religions, and more: Letting go of truth to take hold of trust,
Letting go of doctrine to take hold of direction,
Letting go of certainty to take hold of faith,
Letting go of cultural power to take hold of spirit.
Truth, doctrine, certainty, and cultural power imply arrival.
Trust, direction, faith, and spirit are future-orientated and imply movement, journey.*
I know I have to keep moving.
Can this be a trap? This need to keep moving? Sometimes, but I prefer this risk to keep moving from the smaller to the larger.
Every day, we’re moving into the noise** and clutter of modern-day life, but trust, direction, faith, and spirit help us to distinguish the weak signals of what might be. They are perhaps what Daniel Coyle calls soft skills – different to the hard skills built by repeating the same actions. Soft skills are the abilities needed to innovate and adapt again and again in response to the diversity and complexity of our environments, developed by ‘playing and exploring inside challenging, and ever-changing environments’.
While we can, we keep moving.
(*Here’s a little more thinking around this: as hard skills, truth, doctrine, cultural power, and certainty at their best they can take us so far, at their worst, they imprison us. They only make any sense if they lead to trust, direction, spirit, and faith. These will always bring us back to the “best” of truth, doctrine, cultural power, and certainty – but we may be surprised by how much has vanished whilst we’ve let go.)
(**When I google noise I get almost 55 million results.)
You must be logged in to post a comment.