Beginnings - Edition 14 of Exploring, Inviting, Pondering

Welcome to this edition of my monthly letter. Here I'll be focusing on Beginnings, a topic I've been exploring inter-related to endings, the topic of my previous letter. As well as unfolding my exploration, I’d love to invite you into your own examination of beginnings and ponder a prompt towards the end of the letter if you are called to do so.

I've been exploring a sequence of beginnings directly in my lived experience recently, and as I've done so I've been striving to view my experience through the Panarchy framework, as well as introducing colleagues and clients to this approach and guiding their examination. In 2023 I began a corporate journey, having led an entrepreneurial existence for almost a decade, our youngest child has just started her school journey in the last week, and I sit here a little over a month into the new calendar year and in the midst of the Lunar New Year festival. Myself I sit at the beginning of a year of promises beyond ableness and inviting the awakening of untapped potential in all facets of my life and work.

Every day brings a new beginning of course, new conversations, interactions, events, opportunities and challenges, and I can perceive Panarchic beginnings over weekly, monthly and longer arcs in the garden, in products in corporate and entrepreneurial life and of course in the cycles of the broader world.

They key insight I've gained through Panarchic examinations of beginnings is that can be appreciated as generatively extractive - the Panarchy term for beginnings is exploitation - and acknowledging this I have been inclined to resource the beginning I'm nurturing or creating in a more complex way. I am coming to understand that all beginnings require more sustenance from the greater world (or company, community or system) around them than can be hoped to be returned in the immediacy, and that our care, commitment and courage in sustaining ourselves to support, enable and intentionally nurture the new emergence requires particular thinking, processes and practices. The aim is to reorganise the resources from previous cycles so that space, structures and energies can be released to provide for the new and early beginning, so that growth and maturity can sustainably be reached. I can think of no better examples in my life and nurturing my children and my business ventures.

My invitation here, for now at least, as in my last letter, is to begin your own examination of the beginnings of year past, the begins you recognise emerging right now, and those you sense are soon to reveal themselves. As you do, consider has, or soon must end to create space, energy and capacity for these beginnings to evolve to growth and beyond.?

If you'd like to, I'd also invite you to open space to ponder the prompt below, and as always if you'd like to, feel free to share your reflections in the comments below...

What is possible when I create space and resources to nurture the beginnings I’ve initiated?

As always, thank you for your time and attention with my words here today.

I wish you well for all you have begun, are beginning and will begin.

?Until my next letter, farewell.

Tim