There is a feeling I have carried for a long time without quite knowing what to call it. It lives amongst the mundane. No drama, no loud thunderclaps of major decisions being made, just a zoom call on Tuesday afternoon, making decisions about words that go on a webpage.
The meeting moves on and then I’m left with this mysterious feeling.
It’s kind of like the feeling when you’ve lost sight of someone in a crowd temporarily, that small lurch of the heart when you realise the connection is gone.
I think it happens when I lose sight of the long view, the actual implication of the things we discuss. Not necessarily the logic of it, which has a way of always being annoyingly sound, but the living context these decisions would land in - not as abstraction, but as actual places,
bodies and
soil.
When I worked at Huddle, people would refer to me as context pants. Why? Because I was consistently asking the big questions, trying to build a wider context for our work. Asking the question:
“What are we actually doing here?”
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira lists 10 hallucinations of modernity and I think what I’m describing is how I sense the first one:
Separation is real.
The hallucination that we are sealed, self-contained beings busting around the place through a world of other sealed, self-contained things.
That what happens in the room and what happens in the watershed, our forests, deserts, and skies are different categories of events.
And somehow what we do, how we live and the impact that has weirdly belongs to different conversations, in different rooms, with different people.
Is this making any sense to you?
It is a remarkably effective hallucination; I guess that’s why Vanessa has chosen that word. It certainly doesn’t feel like one from the inside. Inside this hallucination it feels like rigour, and focus, and productivity and just getting shit done. And as someone with over functioning tendencies, it kind of feels good too. And at the same time, I have a feeling that’s like worry when I sense the thread go.
But underneath that efficiency, underneath the momentum of it, something else lives.
A loneliness I think many leaders would recognise if someone gave them a quiet enough moment to feel it. The loneliness of being severed from each other, the long view, from consequence.
Severed from this connection to kin, not as a poetic gesture toward the natural world, but as the most tangible reality we are a part of, the very substance we are made of, the thing we all share.
We come from Earth.
This feeling of connection lives in me like a yearning.
And I think this is where the work begins - not in a framework or a methodology, but in that slightly mournful, quiet, slightly embarrassing sense that something unnameable is missing.
The invitation, I think, is simply to stop long enough to feel it.
Not to resolve it but to just let it be there, so it can show you what it knows.
