Life is changing constantly, but change is never random. There are always causes and conditions. The reason that living systems change is in order to survive. If their environment shifts, they adapt, figuring out what works in the context of now. They don’t do this as isolated individuals but as neighborhoods. Each individual is free to decide how it will change, but individual adaptations only work within the context of community. It’s more accurate to think of sense making and adapting as a collective activity, individual creativity within a community. And it’s a process that works well to create difference, differentiation, and coherence - billions of species living in a web of “inter-being,” as Thich Nhat Hahn describes it. This is our wondrous planet, “A world which gives birth to ever new variety and ever new manifestations of order against a background of constant change,” adapting, experimenting, discovering what works and, ultimately, surprising us with what emerges.
So Far From Home:lost and found in our brave new world,
by Margaret J. Wheatley p. 40.
by Margaret J. Wheatley p. 40.