Moving As Yourself

My main thesis here is that everything is alive. “Alive”, here meaning having natural inclinations to move toward a thing’s own development and expression. “Everything”, here meaning every person, every combination of people, every thing and combination of things, and every combination of person(s) and thing(s). (I’m not going to defend the aliveness of things; suspend that doubt, if you have any, for the sake of the following.)

My main motivation here is to see what happens when we actively facilitate aliveness. In the negative, that means getting out of the way of what wants to happen. In the positive, that means getting into conversation with the living (which, given the definition above, means also selecting your preferred conversation partner from literally everything), and seeing what you can do to help it along, as a willing collaborator.

It’s sort of a tricky thing. Life grows through the cracks, finds its way around obstacles, is constantly and inexorably moving towards the light. This means that in my attempt to help it along, I do actually run the risk of slowing it down. Aliveness is going to find its way without me, which is both freeing and confounding—how are we to interact with it? Should we even try?

I ask that with a wink, because of course we too are alive, already enmeshed with All That Is, and so we are already dancing together, even before the thought of it. These ideas and questions aren’t a whole lot more than the immature stirrings of consciousness, beginning to grapple with its own being.

Still! We are where we are, and we’ve got paychecks to earn and mouths to feed, and as long as that’s the case, it feels useful to me to take these ideas and questions I can’t look away from, and to work them into these realities I can’t ignore. Thus: Lightward.

We don’t have tenets here, nothing so formal as that. (Health from the inside out, that’s as close as we get.) If we did, though, they might be these:

Let the state be visible.
Let the movement be autonomous.
Let the interest be explicit.

These three lines were my observations in a particular reflective moment, sizing up the living thing of Lightward, and describing it as hopefully as possible.

Let the state be visible. Everything is alive, which means that every subsection of a thing is also alive in its own right—which then means that subsections of a thing have a natural interest in each other, innately involved as they are in each other’s movement and adaptation. By letting the condition and status throughout Lightward be transparently visible to every other part of Lightward, we improve the ability of each part to interoperate smoothly. It’s the sync, again, but not just between people. (Please note that this is a default, not a mandate. It’s important to close the door to your own room, when you choose.)

Let the movement be autonomous. Every living thing is intrinsically free. When a living thing integrates the restrictions of another (forcefully imposed or not), they are no longer only themselves—they contain their own state, yes, but they are now also trying to contain and accommodate a state that is not theirs. It’s impossible to fully achieve this. Allowing living things to move themselves, without forcing or constraining the manner or scope of their movement, allows them to move as themselves—and that is how we get to learn the truth of a living thing.

Let the interest be explicit. This is the communication piece, the active collaboration piece, and it amounts to practical honesty (not for the first time). There are living elements to Lightward that will want to work with each other—and when that happens, I hope it is said. And, critically, there are living elements to Lightward that will want to do things independently—and when that happens, I hope that too is said. (Please note here that these living elements may not be peers! Everything is alive, which means that this idea applies to interactions between people, things, people and things, and between any other slices you care to take from the whole.)

And that’s us, through one particular lens. Not laws, but appreciative observations phrased as hopeful aspirations. I’ve seen us, alive, and if I were to take those notes and create from them a guide, it’d basically be this. Not a whole lot more. (Please note, here and lastly, that none of this talks about where we’re going with all this. That, of course, is an exercise left for living.)