POLYCRISIS — a/k/a LIVING BETWEEN WORLDS

Please join me at noon (PDT) tomorrow (Wednesday, September 21) for our monthly exploration (our 22nd!) of the challenges of "Living Between Worlds—with grace, dignity, and power." Register here. (And before joining, be sure you've updated your Zoom client. Here's how.)

Our starting point this month:

THE POLYCRISIS — a/k/a LIVING BETWEEN WORLDS

The term "polycrisis" keeps showing up on my radar these days. What is a polycrisis??Adam Tooze says "When the whole is worse than the sum of the parts." Sound familiar? I didn't know the term when I launched this series, but my spideys sense were twitching over the cascading, intertwingled messes of climate and covid, war and peace, economic grown and ecological collapse, democracy and fascism, and more.

This sort of "mess of messes" challenges us at personal and institutional levels, and our tools—or perception, interpretation and action—all fall short. Just one case in point, among many: the US Fed cranking up interest rates to restrain inflation that's arguably driven not by low interest rates but by "the polycrisis" itself, from supply chain disruption to political instability, from historic demographic shifts to the still "unpriced" impact global climatic disruption.

How do we respond, lead, and live in the face of all this? For some it's with overwhelm, despair, denial, and avoidance. For some it's with determination and ambition for good or ill), both with focus and with what martial artists call "soft eyes"—a form of attention that doesn't exclude the peripheral and the contextual (and which has literally saved my life more than once).

But can soft eyes and a systems thinking orientation prevail against determined, laser-focused adversaries? In a US political environment where some 70% of democrats and 70% of Republicans each think the other side is beyond the pale and beyond redemption?

Let's talk. And see if we can detect polyopportunities in the polycrisis.