The Pulse

The heart muscle contracts and then dilates. That surge of blood through our body, our pulse. We breathe in; we breathe out. Each sunlit day, plants produce biological energy through photosynthesis, then use that energy to power growth and maintenance. Like kids pumping themselves higher on a swing or twirling a hula-hoop, a pulse of work can lift the system when the timing is right. The periodic pushing of the foot upon the treadle keeps the spinning wheel spinning with little effort. Moving upstream against the flow towards entropy is possible but it requires work. Thanks to the steady flow of solar energy over billions of years, life has done the work of raising the biosphere to wondrous magnificence.

A resonance of reciprocating actions lies at the core of this magnificence. A gradually rising oscillation expresses this resonating pulse.

The oscillation begins with a downward movement because the Second Law of Thermodynamics requires work before play. But the energy expenditure of that work reciprocates with an upward movement thereafter and, thanks to solar energy, gradually lifts off into new possibilities.

Ever since last year’s massively destructive snowstorm, my mind has been thinking about climate change and what we need to do and what can I do? This has brought back into mind something I read during my college anthropology course in a textbook chapter about the several roles of culture. The one role I still remember (because it was a fascinating idea for me at the time) was for culture to define for its members’ what it means to be alive and how one should accordingly live one’s life.

But our culture has been seduced into a virtual world. The most prominent feature is the way money, a symbolic creation that has no value other than that which we are willing to invest in it, shapes much of our life, activities, and institutions. Beginning thousands of years ago with slavery, we’ve practiced “internalize profits, externalize costs”. That leads us to split the oscillation into the “down part” (work) and the “up part” of enjoying the harvest. If we are “smart”, we push as much of the “down parts” of work onto others and harvest as much of the “up parts” for ourselves. But breaking the connection between the two throws off the timing so that there is less resonance, less mutual reciprocation. We have vast amounts of electrical energy sustaining all the servers that form the “cloud” but at the expense of greenhouse gassing our actual atmosphere. We spray insecticides to maximize our harvest and lose the pollinators that make harvests possible. Student loans enrich banks but reduce the next generation to debt slaves, resentful of politicians and government who enabled and remain complacent with the resulting consequences. Multi- generational farms fail, undersold by factory farms that flush massive amounts of manure into the rivers. We are receiving overwhelming feedback that we are navigating by a misaligned compass. Our culture has been shaping us in a way that is increasingly unviable. Suicides of despair increase. How do we change course?

Part of the work is definitely political; be sure to campaign and vote this year. But another part is restoring the resonating reciprocation between the up and down parts of the oscillation and taking on more of the work that sustains the entire system, not just our own bubble, and experiencing the gardening joy of tending the growth that responds to our work.

In her essay, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System”, Donella Meadows writes that “people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.

“You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter — they resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.”

That is the challenge we face. Societies resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else. But it’s time to replace a paradigm based on maximizing profit for oneself to one of nourishing all those working for a world of more possibilities.

Chrysalis, in its beginning years, had a motto of “Give more than you take.” It was aspirationally nice but when we tried using it to structure the relationship between families and the school, it didn’t work. It assumes that all our activities can be fitted onto a one-dimensional number line of value. This action you are giving has more value on that number line than the action you are receiving so that is good. But actions can’t all be assessed and placed on such a number line. Like Alysia points out, the cost, the effort, the worth of our teaching – from our point of view – is low because we love to do it. It’s usually play for us. But for a parent with three kids who are struggling in school, the worth of our teaching is incredibly high. How can their taking the school’s towels home to wash each week ever compare to that? “I want to give more than I take but am I giving enough?” created stress. Though money was not involved, we were still stuck in our culture’s paradigm of value. The monetary price of things can easily be sorted along a single number line but the world is so much more multi-dimensional than that.

“Societies resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.” But I sense that this pandemic has weakened that resistance and there is opportunity for a new paradigm. A prime example for me is Trump’s daily press briefings. The reciprocating resonance is not there. Because it is not there, he tends to talk more, promise too much and then have to talk more defending what he said or denying that he said it. The paradigm of president as leader of a nation of citizens is fading. Does governmental money flow to the desperately now-furloughed/unemployed or to the corporations to restore their stock prices? What should the role of government ideally be? What is our role within this gift of our life within this culture at this time?