(this week’s Open Space Sunday theme)

Health lives in the middle space between activity and rest, talk and silence, being out and being home, being available and being alone, work and play, poetry and the mundane, being critical and appreciative, growing and sustaining. The middle is the space that allows each in its own time.

In my corner of the world, people are abuzz and anxious about our local rankings - in economic and other metrics. We justify our self-criticism on the basis of not being in the top 10 in everything. And I’m not sure low self-esteem is a useful condition for passion and growth.

In the Accidental Conversations chapter on Fitness, I explore how nature seeks what works. In the ecological sciences, fitness is a species’ capacity to adapt to changing conditions - not it’s ability to develop characteristics superior to other species. Larger birds for example, are not necessarily more resistant to extinction, or more apt to be sustainable.

The lesson: we need to stop assuming that characteristic comparisons have anything to do with creating what works. We need to start measuring our capacity for sustainability in terms of our being adaptable to emerging niche conditions - which may or may not have anything to do with how anyone else is being in other geographies.

In the Buddhist tradition, giving thanks (gestured with the bow/”gassho”) is at the heart of practice. Gratitude is the authentic indicator that we understand interdependence and wholeness - that nothing in the universe exists separate from the whole. That, as Thich Nhat Hahn expresses it, there is no being, only interbeing.

So today is a (just one more) good day given to us to realize how we exist because of an infinite web of conditions and resources given to us. One more good day to base our happiness in gratitude for all we’ve been, what we are, and all we’ll become. Happy interbeing.

This week’s Wiki Wednesday question, naturally, is: What are you most grateful for?

Celebrated entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil now has a patent on software that takes in poetry and design specs and cranks out original “poetry.” It is an innovation that will be a useful tool for those who want to see new ways language can be repurposed into packages that resemble poetry written without algorithms.

It may not be an adequate substitute for those who define poetry as writing that comes from the muses of personal experience.

Open Space is a way of facilitating conversations - and living - based on four universal intentions: 1. show up 2. be present 3. speak the truth 4. let go. It’s what’s asked of all of us as we, sans leader, self-organize into new spaces of personal and communal being and becoming.

(this week’s Open Space Sunday topic)

Emerging from conversation today at the Cool Cleveland senior leadership meeting (definitely more a valley than summit): innovation occurs at the intersections of communities. This has been true in ecosystems for billions of years, and it’s not going to change in this generation or those to follow.

Sometimes the way through pain is to go through it. Pain is like smoke. Resistance traps it and builds pressure. Seeing it as it is creates a space for it to expand and in doing so, it dissolves. Pain then becomes a path to enlightenment.

Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you. Rumi