On Being Human
a Meditation on Human Agency
I’m seated around a digital dinner table. It’s very large and round and I’m breaking bread with a group of people I’m coming to consider family. I’m introducing myself, not for who I am, but for what I feel part of. The Human Agency is a community incubating breakthrough ideas for humanity. The Human Agency is a fragile web of fledgling connections feeling connected by the same heartbeat. As part of our community development, we’re initiating a series of conversations, first with ourselves and then in smaller groups to better get to know each other and explore a stronger collective purpose going forward. The following is my contribution to the initial community conversations.
What’s your story? Tell us a bit of your background that will help us understand where you’re coming from.
About four years ago, I completed a month-long walking pilgrimage across Spain and a year-long learning program in Amsterdam inspired by the modern human potential and cultural creative movements we’ve been seeing spread across business and society over the last few decades. It’s what draws me to this kind of organization and I guess you could say I’ve been walking on this pilgrimage ever since. I use that term because at my deepest spiritual being, that’s how I consider myself- a pilgrim.
Fairly nomadic in my living patterns, especially as of late, I’ve been initiating projects with this new paradigm shift at their core which have given me opportunities to collaborate with a diverse group of people and work with clients who share the same heartbeat. I’m pretty proud of myself for taking a non-traditional route into the workforce. Being a fairly autodidactic person, I bypassed university. At least for now. That decision, along with my overall lifestyle, hasn’t always been an easy one to live with. And my decision not to enter higher education may change, but for now finding yet another “tribe” through the Human Agency is a sign for me to continue trudging along the path I’m on and continue creating awesome opportunities and experiences for myself and others to actively create the world we want to live in. For a more simplistic, down-to-earth, and professional explanation of my work, you can check out my bio here.
What are you motivated by? What gives you energy?
I actually think I’m motivated by people, but also derive a lot of energy from being in intense periods of solitude. I guess my biggest energy giver is when I’m “on the floor” facilitating group processes- which I think goes back to my earlier days doing theatre. It’s the same kind of adrenaline rush I get after performing.
What question(s) are you exploring right now?
I really like the question question. And once Alexa (one of the Human Agency Co-founders) shared her vision for a world where people are not defined by their positions or job titles, but instead by the burning questions that pique their curiosity, I liked it even more. For the website, I put: How do we build alternative infrastructure for working and learning in the digital age? Which sounds kind of heady and which I will definitely go in depth with through the Wisdom Hackers learning immersion. But it really comes down to how we can organize differently and with a different motivation and vision for the future. Which I believe we’re trying to do through the Human Agency. I think that question is at the core of what I’m trying to explore with all my projects.
If you could change one thing in the world what would it be? Is this something you’re working on?
If I could change one thing in the world, and this may sound idealistic, but I’d give everyone a basic income to slide us all the way up Maslow’s pyramid. Then, let’s see where we go from there.
What does human agency (the concept itself) mean to you?
I guess this question goes back to the previous point I made. To me, it’s a lot about bridging our own personal and collective interior worlds and making those a reality in our exterior worlds. And this is at the core of the Authentic Leadership movement I recently wrote about as I currently study the contemplative management science at the Naropa Institute.
Can you share any examples of human agency in practice? (Real, fictional, current or historic)
I want to share a moment I’ve felt human agency blow through the room like a soft breeze of a room I often “circled up” in at Knowmads. It makes me think of an Arundhati Roy quote.
We were all standing in a circle during our daily “check-out” and after one person spoke (in “popcorn-style” where you pop when you’re hot) a long pause enveloped the space. They say the average group can’t take any more than 15 sec. of silence before feeling the need to break it. I already think that’s a long time. I don’t know exactly how long that silence lasted, but it felt like a very comfortable eternity. I remember once everyone had their turn, we stood standing in that circle for a very long time. The energy in that space was incredibly dense.
Are there any frameworks, theories (and people) that come to your mind when you think about human agency?
In terms of theories/practices related to human agency, the Art of Hosting and Theory U from the Presencing Institute and their related social presencing theatre, are some practices where I’ve personally felt human agency, an emerging field being crystallized, taking place. The field of contemplative sciences also encompasses this.
What challenges are you currently facing?
As I mentioned, I’m literally living out of a backpack across continents at the moment- it’s an experiment in living a nomadic lifestyle, one of a Dharma Bum, who as my favorite author Jack Kerouac has been quoted as saying:
“See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier.”
I find putting this vision to practice incredibly trying personally and professionally (although I don’t differentiate so much between the two) for a few reasons.
One, it’s changed how I used to work for my clients which was previously very much place-based and usually on a longer-term basis. This new lifestyle has restricted my ability to work with clients the way I used to, at least, and this affected my income level considerably. Secondly, it’s hard to maintain a daily practice/routine when my external world is changing just as much as my internal world is- and, ironically, probably because my external environment is. So, there’s the catch-22 I’m currently facing.
What needs do you hope a Human Agency community can meet for you (big or small)?
Based on the previous post, I definitely hope this group can bring some grounding to my current challenges. Through support, inspiration, accountability. Basically through a structure bigger than myself with which to work with. It’s this innate sense of belong we all have as humans, to identify as an organism that aligns with the kinds of communities I envision as necessary for the kind of future we want to create.
How do we step away from the task- and deliverable-driven mental model of the day to day work to really think through larger meta issues relating to our work (and how it affects us and others in the broader social/ecological context)?
I think this is a super interesting question and goes into, again, the previous point I just touched upon. I think this is what the HUMAN agency is all about- working with human rhythms that are the “thermostat” for we really work and collaborate in a networked way (think Wikipedia). And I notice the rhythm dominating the working style in current projects/collaborations. Things may seem to go slow at times, but it’s largely based on a management principle I learned and really believe in which is based on the mantra of “going slow in order to go fast.” It’s based on the idea of organic growth and reminds me of the African proverb (fly alone, go faster, fly together, go further) How we step into that is the real challenge and where I see my personal learning curve as I learn to be more gentle with myself merge into a “professional” context collaborating with others in a more authentic context. I think experimenting with structures like Human Agency may be a key piece to the puzzle when trying to understand how to break through this shift in mentality.
This is also what I believe the Human Agency can achieve together in the bigger picture and a link to our larger purpose. I really believe in the direction we are heading to uncover that. Collating these individual responses and then collectively meditating on what these mean in the bigger picture makes a lot of sense. I’m comfortable with the ambiguity we’re currently in because I really believe we’ve created a strong enough frame with which to navigate from. In other words, I trust the process, and I think that building that capacity may be exactly what we need in helping ourselves and others get closer to their purpose. In fact, that skill may be very closely connected to our greater purpose as a community. .
Anything else that you would like to share with the group?
One final thing I’d like to share, and I think this comes from a need tht I’ve already heard from other members is a need for shared physical spaces (whether semi-permanent or temporary) to convene over these conversations and create future collaborations. I’m looking for more of these this spring and summer in New York, Greece, England, Mexico, and elsewhere. I think we have some tremendous potential to swarm in and create such spaces for ourselves and others. Nothing can replace physical space. I reflected on this last year after a fantastic retreat with the Sandbox Network, which is a community which has also been a key piece to my personal and a collective puzzle in experimenting with and prototyping new forms of community.
Other members of the Human Agency include @aengusanderson, @MaggieDePree, @frantastique, @alexaclay, @leesean, @bancia & other fantastic culture hackers in their own right. To learn more about the community, check out the page here.
