Embracing Life as Decision-Making-Compass

The seismic shift to regenerative futures is more than a journey of holding space, remembering and reconnecting our capacities to steward life. This collective journey requires lots of hard and practical decision-making and action-taking that we can’t shy away from.

To heal the soil, rewild nature, clean the oceans, breathe life back into the rivers, reforest depleted agricultural lands, reduce carbon emissions, create circular supply networks and realize regenerative food systems means making different decisions.

Sickening Misalignment

We collectively lost the connection to our essence, as individuals and humanity. This disconnection fuels our misaligned decision-making as we don’t have a healthy aligned ground to help us navigate the world. Instead, the expectations, stories and “rules” of modernity are shaping our decisions whilst the misalignment of our suppressed essence is making us mentally, physically and systemically sick. It’s an uncomfortable icky feeling to live in misalignment. Knowing how to align ourselves bit by bit requires creating space to discover who we are under the thick layers of modernity.

You can feel the consequences when you eat something unhealthy that doesn’t nourish your body. Our body is telling us something isn’t right. Inflammation, bloatedness, fatigue, sugar rush and crashes are all clear indicators that can help us navigate our food choices. The same goes for jobs, nobody can say that sedentary jobs feel healthy. We buy ergonomic chairs, bouncy balls and standing desks to make the most of it. What if, we recognized that this way of working is a dead end? What would your day look like if you accepted a 9 to 5 sitting job is no option for the rest of your working life? Sitting and eating are two tangible examples of how we are continuously making misaligned decisions whilst feeling and often ignoring the consequences.

There are countless more examples; social media, loneliness, TV, lack of connection, supermarkets, mobility, commercialization of love, death, happiness and leisure time. We are constantly told what to want, need and do, all of course with the intent of financial profits. These messages, often widespread, intensely present and manipulative leave little room for dreams and decision-making compasses that fall outside of modernity. I want to invite you to ask yourself. Why do I want things? What or who is shaping my decisions? Why are my dreams the way they are? How’s influencing them? Can you get to what you deep down want? In my case, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the same for you. The more layers I peel off the closer I can get to the most aligned and grounded dreams (still a long way to go) the more the dreams are aligned with living systems. They become slower, non-commercialized, community-oriented, creative, and grounded in nature and flow.

How is the misalignment of your essence showing up for you? If essence doesn’t speak to you try thinking of a word that encaptures your deepest being, maybe your soul, spirit, being or heart.

Grounding our Decisions in Essence

How can we discover, reconnect, align, experience, embody our essence, and embrace her as the ground for our decision-making? How would this feel like? Can you imagine living life in a fully aligned way? For me, these questions open doors to future generations. In all dark realness, I can’t imagine that in my lifetime, I will live in a society in which it’s possible to live fully aligned with my essence. My kids and grandkids most likely won’t either. What matters is that each of them nurtures the conditions for this potential future alignment, that we all break destructive cycles, patterns and systems, and that we shift horizons to get closer and closer to alignment with each season, cycle and generation.

“Modernity harnesses our fear of disillusionment for its own ends. However, the interruption of illusions and delusions should not be viewed as negative. If we are not yet capable of holding space for disillusionment, this is precisely where we need to start building capacity.

Disillusionment is a condition for clearing the way for other forms of existence to be able to emerge without being suffocated by our modern desires, projections, and expectations. This clearing requires that we interrupt our satisfaction with what modernity offers and that we begin to crack our narcissistic mirrors so that we can open up for the “possibility of possibilities”: the sense that other forms of existence, not yet legible at this stage of the process, can indeed exist.'” - Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado De Oliveira

If we can’t live fully aligned now, what can we do? Where can we make decisions that hold the potential for change? How can we act in ways, that widen the cracks in systems upholding modernity? How can we create alternatives?

To steward life on earth means embracing and applying a life-aligned decision-making compass, in business, education, raising children, community building, housing, food and beyond. The journey of regenerative business stewards is a multigenerational cyclical journey of arriving. We will mess up, get lost, forget our alignment, and de-prioritize our life-aligned decision-making compass for short-term or material dreams. Don’t be too hard on yourself. The past of brutally breaking and dismantling connections and relationships has left deep marks. Hundreds of years of oppression and disconnection aren’t dismantled and healed overnight. The journey we are on is a journey that we share with the next generations and many more to come. The question isn’t how DO we FIX this NOW? Rather we are invited to question. How can we play a role in dismantling oppressive systems? How can we tell an alternative story? How can we play our part in breaking destructive cycles? What does resistance look like? What does healing look like? What decisions can we make that create the conditions for life to thrive?

“What if you find motivations and responsibilities you won’t be able to ignore, but no one around you will understand you anymore?” - Hospicing Modernity - Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

Reflections on our shared decision-making alignment journey

How can we find clarity or momentum in a time that invites us to accept uncertainty and dance with life? What does this transitional in-between time look and feel like? What kind of signals can help us to sense make and navigate without falling back on the need for artificial control and short-term false certainty? How do we “know” we are nurturing the “right” conditions? What does right mean? Do you have an understanding, for now, of what conditions you believe need to be nurtured for life to thrive?

How do we trust the process? How do we trust life? How do we become comfortable with uncertainty? How do we let go of control without becoming aimless?

• Celebrate small and big steps. Working on a multigenerational dream that isn’t widely carried can be confrontational and hard.
• Be kind & honest to yourself and others about your journey, struggles and insights.
• Connect to place & community. All of the cycles of the cyclical journey of arriving, including decision making are collective endeavours. You are not alone in this, even if you feel they are “individual decisions” that you have to figure out alone. There is no such thing as alone.
• Dream of the future you want to nurture. Grief and acceptance play a role in a centuries-long human and more than human collaborative project that surpasses time and generations.
• It’s not about realising an “end goal”. It’s about nurturing the conditions for life-aligned generations to be born and thrive.

Jamie’s Reflections on the Cyclical Journey of Arrivin

I absolutely love this diagram. Minou has captured something that resonates very deeply with me--a representation of a journey that both wounds me at my core and propels me forward. Words on my lips that I otherwise could not find.

It reflects not just the non-linear rollercoaster of my journey so far, but the more expansive and interconnected system of flows encountered when exploring regenerative stewardship--in both business and my life: a simultaneous resistance and surrender, a journey of profound learning and unlearning.

I can crudely map my life's journey onto this spiral, tracing the moments of coiling inward and times when it has been ripped outward once more. Yet beyond the linearity of these stages lies a deeper truth--the non-linear parts of the journey that feel most visceral. The parts that stretch you to your limits. The parts that break you apart, even as they stitch you back together.

These are the moments where logic collapses under the weight of complexity, where anxiety folds in on itself, leaving you suspended in a strange, weightless clarity. It’s in this suspension that new paradigms emerge. You reach a “eureka” moment, only to watch everything you thought you knew dissolve into myth. It’s like opening yet another Pandora’s box - not a reset, but an expansion. A new world of edges and fringes to explore, where logic falters, and only the languages of play, poetry, and imagination feel real.

And yet, there are times when the spiral snaps you back into the present, a moment when the journey feels like a fantasy, and survival demands you ground yourself. But the places to ground begin to feel increasingly synthetic and untrue, even as the mechanistic theatre of the so-called “modern world” clatters on. A herd seemingly oblivious to the rising glitches in their matrix.

Wide-eyed child of the tides

For me, this has been a journey of thirds. It began as a sheltered, wide-eyed child of the tides. I grew up on a small island, spending summers on an even smaller one, surrounded by a tight-knit community on a humble campsite and immersed in the wildness of nature. The tides were my playground, and my community lovingly called me “20 Questions” because I always had an endless list of “whys” to ask anyone I met.

Besides my fellow campers and campfire storytellers, I was a wild low-tide forager, sea swimmer, and fisherman, learning from the scaly, slimy, and spiny creatures of the deep and the shallows. They taught me lessons no textbook could, lessons of flow, balance, and reciprocity. I took it all for granted at the time, steeped in the privilege of being born into such a wild yet safe place, with a family who could afford the camping gear and fishing tackle that allowed me to explore so freely.

The reluctant programming of formal education

Then came the “learning” phase, the reluctant programming of formal education. From public school to private school, I was eventually cast out of my island bubble into the vastness of the city. I had a talent for design and engineering, so I left the tides I had come to know as brothers behind, plunging into London’s venture capital-fueled startup scene. I sought purpose in the shape of a career, finding new friends in machines and mechanics. Yet it never felt the same.

It was intoxicating, a whirlwind of “impact,” “action,” and “green growth” fantasies. Here, I encountered real design thinking, a higher caliber of education, and an entrepreneurial trial by fire. I carved a name for myself in London’s circular economy and sustainable design spaces, pioneering bold ideas as a young upstart. But it also hurt me deeply. I lost the child in me, the child with far more wisdom than anyone seemingly ever knew he had. A child who never knew how to pass on what the ocean had taught him, something he himself started to forget.

Finding my way back to play

Thanks to brilliant mentors, forward-thinking colleagues, and a wonderfully grounding partner, I began an unlearning journey alongside it all. I found my way back to play. I was called back to my regenerative roots, to the tides, to my granite home, to reconnect with the powerful place that raised me.

Here, I now hold space for others as they hold space for me, even if they, too, have forgotten the lessons the land and sea have sketched into our deeply innovative and hardy heritage. Yet everywhere, on the fringes, I find people who see, in some form, that things are not as they seem. Things are breaking apart. Together, we live the new questions, creating outcomes that once felt out of reach, catching threads of possibility before they slip away.

We are working to untangle the systems of our island--systems consumed by the degenerative ways of the wendigo: a cold, mechanical hunger that devours endlessly but grows emptier with every bite. The curse of a self-commodifying economy, a virus consuming itself, void of context, intuition, and imagination.

For me, this “decision-making compass” is ethereal. It’s not a tool; it’s a coming home, not on a surface level, but on every level. It represents something deeply complex, unquantifiable, and immeasurable, a pursuit without form. And yet, this diagram, in being “a tool,” feels like a balm to the logical part of my brain. It translates something deeply interconnected and nonlinear into a shape my mind can hold, at least momentarily. It reassures me, reminding me that even if logic alone cannot comprehend my purpose, I am, in fact, on the right path.

It reminds me to keep remembering, to bring others along, and to let them guide me in return. Together, we can leave this paradigm behind for a wilder one that calls to us a world that flows, cycles, takes away and gives back. A world brimming with life. A world as natural as the tides.

This then begs the next question: if I can hold space for you and, in return, you hold space for me, we create change through reciprocity. So, in seeing this to be true, it asks again, what other gifts can I pass on, and in doing so, what will I receive in return?

Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to find out. Come and join us on our collective journey as we share what we can with each other. Let’s create a space outside the one that keeps us divided, a space that’s vibrant and full of thriving. A new space where new outcomes can emerge.

In my work as a consultant and coach at Make Honey Ventures, we incubate these very questions. For me, this isn’t just part of the work, it is the work. This sense-making is our act of regeneration, our way of turning “the now” into fertile ground that allows a new kind of future to emerge.

It’s a different way of doing, one that doesn’t demand relentless energy, resources, or immediate results, but instead invites us to sit, to think, to truly make sense of the systems we are caught in and the systems we want to create. It’s counterintuitive to the way we’ve been taught to “grow” or to relentlessly pursue “progress.” Yet, in this space of stillness and inquiry, we’re witnessing real ground being made, ground that feels steady, alive, and full of potential.

For some, this process of sense-making takes only moments; for others, it may take months or even years. But for everyone, the act of pausing and holding space to connect deeply with their purpose yields clarity that transforms them. This is the moment when a new kind of movement begins, not one driven by external pressures, but by the internal alignment of values, vision, and reciprocity.

Eco-system space holders

The next step, once this deeper clarity is found, feels surprisingly natural. It’s about taking what we’ve uncovered in this space and designing an enterprise model around it. This model doesn’t just support the founder’s vision; it mirrors and amplifies it. The enterprise becomes a space-holder itself, a living system that creates an ecosystem of opportunities, relationships, and shared purpose.

Here, reciprocity thrives. Each participant in this ecosystem finds themselves not only supported but also called to contribute their gifts. They become space-holders for others, creating a cascading ripple effect that amplifies abundance and connection. These enterprises don’t compete within the degenerative, mechanical systems we’ve long relied upon. Instead, they transcend them--not through power or might, but through nourishment.

They feed the deep hunger within us--a hunger not for more productivity, profit, or control, but for relationships so full of life and gifts so uniquely complex that they leave us feeling something we’ve long forgotten: satiation. A kind of satiety that quenches not just the logical mind but the soul--a contentment that allows us to dissolve once more into the flow of life itself.

This is where we witness the transformative power of reciprocity: as each new participant enters these spaces, they bring their own gifts and insights, weaving new patterns of belonging, creation, and exchange. Together, they transcend the limitations of divisive, linear systems and step into something far greater--a thriving, interconnected ecosystem where every contribution builds upon the last.

So, the invitation is open. Let’s share what we can. Let’s hold space for one another. And in doing so, let’s co-create new spaces that heal, inspire, and thrive. The tides are shifting, and I, for one, am ready to dive in. Are you?

Spade holding at Taste The Shift

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