Dear ho,
the cybergremlins did not interfere.
I received your message twice via OSLIST.
Stuff still seems to work.
Have a great day
mmp
Am 06.01.2020 um 23:21 schrieb Harrison Owen via OSList:
I tried this as a response… the cybergremlins intervened, so here goes
another!
ho
Sagit … I confess that my response to your note was equally, or perhaps
mostly… a response to the present moment. This is not the first time
that Planet Earth in general and/or your particular part of the world
has hovered on the edge of serious chaos. Each of us may hold whatever
opinion(s) we wish, and I certainly have mine – but several facts are
indisputable: Nobody really understands what’s going on, even less do we
understand where it might be headed, and most of all -- nobody has the
exit plan. Under these circumstances, and while we hold our breath, a
little conversation with our fellows might be in order. But how?
There are some 8 billion of us on the planet, divided at least 8 billion
ways … not all of them happy. Having a useful conversation under the
circumstances seems rather impossible. Doubtless there have been
processes, procedures and structures developed for human beings to
pursue their issues by less than violent means. But all of them seem
rather inadequate right now. We do not have sufficient facilitators,
interveners, therapists, parliamentarians, process re-engineers,
conflict resolvers, etc… for the job, and even if we did have the
number, the necessary time for positioning and preparation doesn’t exist.
Are we out of options? Maybe --- or then again there may be an option
we’ve had all along and never quite took seriously.
Some people call it Open Space, which could make it sound like a novel
procedure or process to be applied immediately and globally. In my
experience those words sound nice, maybe even comforting, but do not
describe reality. Open Space is nothing new, strange or different – it
is precisely what we have been doing for the past million years, or
however long it is that /Homo sapiens/ has been doing whatever it does.
From the very beginning we sat in a circle, posted our wishes and
dreams (sometime on the wall of a cave), opened a market place to trade
and share our ideas… and then we went to work. Sometimes these circles
formed on a more or less regular basis (weekly market sort of thing) but
the really critical and important ones happened when they happened … but
always when there was an issue that grabbed peoples’ attention, that was
so complex that nobody could figure it, involved so many different sorts
of folks that nobody could count their kind, stirred great passion and
usually conflict, and had to be dealt with NOW.
Over time there was a move to institutionalize this primal circle and
give it a name like Senate or Parliament. And it didn’t take long for
some to think they were in charge. Often this worked rather well and it
seemed like the established order was maintained. Every so often,
however, A BIG one would come along and suddenly we were back to basics.
Even in the 21^st century that can happen.
So how do you have a meaningful conversation with 8 billion people? We
have the means, and it comes with our genes. I suppose the issue of the
moment is to get out of the way, and let it happen. Doing that may well
open the door to a whole new understanding of who and what we are, where
we are going and how to get there. We even have an electronic assist
that our precursors could never have dreamed of. To all of this I can
add my own personal experience – that never in 30+ years, often in
extreme conflict situations have I seen any sort of physical violence
and ALWAYS witnessed the previous combatants in respectful relations
with each other… sometimes surprisingly so. They shed common tears,
danced together, laughed and even hugged each other. They did it all by
themselves with no prompting and no assists. Wonderful!
But what about now? How to get the ball rolling, so to speak?
Truthfully, I really don’t know. I can also imagine that it will happen,
if only because it has happened before. If anybody out there is
searching for a mission, something useful to do with their life and
talent … opening this door might well be a good place to start. Or there
are other possibilities I would really rather not think about.
Harrison
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--
Michael M Pannwitz
Draisweg 1, 12209 Berlin, Germany
++49 - 30-772 8000
[email protected]
Check out the Open Space World Map presently showing 489 resident Open
Space Workers in 76 countries working in a total of 142 countries worldwide
www.openspaceworldmap.org
At my publisher you find books and task cards on open space and other
treasures, most in German, some in English, some as ebooks, some
multilingual
https://www.westkreuz-verlag.de/de/Kommunikation
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