Conscious Closure

A few thoughts about moving on!

There is a practical reason for writing this post. Yesterday was my last day at CoLab.?The last day doing a job that I’ve loved – that has absorbed my daily thoughts and efforts for the last eleven years.?As I leave to take up a new role, (with Collaborate CIC) and begin a new chapter of my life… there is such a strong feeling of wanting to make a good ending:?of wanting to honour the people I’ve worked with and give thanks for all that we have been through and achieved together.?But it’s more than that. There is also this sense of wanting to mark the passage – consciously cross this threshold of change, so that what has been, feeds and fertilizes what comes next.?

I was thinking about how to express why this change felt necessary, when there is obviously still so much work to do.?When the work we do will never be done.??As often happens, something came to me, that resonated – that helped me understand my own contradictory thoughts and feelings.?I’d like to share this TEDx presentation by Social Innovator Vanessa Reid about Conscious Closure here.?Because it’s felt like a perfect lesson in how to be with the discomfort of painful change.?To not look away, or judge ourselves when we need to do something different, but instead to take the learning and use it to navigate the bigger changes we face now in human life and society.?I guess it has helped me resolve my own sense of having to do something - at the same time as feeling paralysed by the constant loss of agency or control with how things are. I know this is something we are all grappling with now.

In the presentation, Vanessa talks about things people felt back in in 2016.?She talks about the turmoil and revolutionary spirit of the Arab Spring – the contradictory changes that rippled through each life, and the wider world at that time, as we began to feel the beginnings of the struggle between collapse and revolution.?I remember that feeling of disbelief and turmoil.?I remember Brexit, Trump, fake news – I remember thinking things could not become any worse.?

Vanessa talks about her struggle with what she describes as “creative destruction”, or the deep letting go that sometimes needs to happen to move on.?She admits that she finds it easier to focus on creativity and growth. When things need to change or end, she experiences a loss of energy, and a sense of failure when endings come, or good things die. Yet in embracing those endings consciously, she found she was able to apply what she learned not only to her work, but to the enormity of facing something as profound as her mother’s death. ?I love what she says about this, it is roughly...

Being sustainable, means knowing when to die, or to let go of the form that you are currently in” ?“ It is about releasing that energy – so it can find the new form – eventually…

I am so grateful for this insight.?What an amazing thing to recognise at such a time.?What a gift to all of us navigating uncertainty, loss and transition.?It is so helpful and inspiring to see that there is a way to be in the chaos, in the unknowing of the decline phase of many cycles, small and great.?

Being consciously in that process – not fighting it – but holding the ending, the passage into rest before the emergence of a new beginning, is a practice she called conscious closure. This is deep medicine for me right now, so I thought I’d just share it here, now, to feed any one else navigating transition, because as Vanessa observes,???

When we share our truth – the truth of where we are – there is an invitation for people to witness the change, to share and to honour in the way that they feel most called to… and this “plumps up the soul” of the person who shares the struggle, or the fears about the journey.?It fills the person with courage. And gives people a way to be involved, and to be transformed.

Isn’t that perfect??

Thank you to everyone who has been part of the journey, I hope our paths cross again. As someone very wise said to me recently.?May you walk in beauty.