Shaping a Syntropic Future: Embracing the Polarities of Darkness and Light
One of the laws of Universe we teach in the Syntropic Enterprise Masterclass is that – Unity is Plural, at minimum two. Buckminster Fuller introduced me to this and many other laws (or lores).
Unity is Plural at Minimum Two means that polarity is required for existence, for life. In contrast, singularity is no-thingness, a deep, dreamless sleep. Buddha Mind.
To reach this place of singularity is not an aspiration of mine. I love life. I love the grit, the roller coaster, the dark to the light—the whole of life.
Our impulse to reduce everything to a singularity equivalent is a trap that turns a rainbow into no thing, no colour.
To everything, there is a complementary pair. Up-down. In-out. Forward-back. Youth-age. Birth-death. Yin-yang.
A fully lived life is all of the scales and ranges between polarity.
And like Goldilocks porridge, we desire an equilibrium. Not too hot. Not too cold.
Yet Nature does not reach equilibrium in her life expression. Instead, she dances between the equilibrium point. Reaching equilibrium is to stop, and to stop is to die.
Life is the dance – from joy to pain, from tears of laughter to tears of grief.
Society considers darkness bad—something we must avoid, destroy, and deny.
The Instagram feed should be all love, all beauty, all success, all perfection.
Which is not life. It is a facsimile of life.
Life is cycles within cycles of the seasons of everything.
Including darkness.
This work of building Syntropic World, which now delightfully takes up my cherished time, was born in the crucible of darkness.
For years I struggled with so many things.
Including, but not limited to, the following.
- My value.
- My worth.
- My relevance.
- My seeming endless failure to find any form of culturally approved success.
- How hard it seemed for me to progress in any of my endeavours when others seemed to have such luck.
- Endless confusion and questioning.
- Multiple attempts to find my purpose.
- The demon episodes with my body and image – reconciled quite early in my life.
- My seeming inability to find enduring partnership and love.
Do you relate to some of these?
Growing up and embracing the whole of us is not a skip down the yellow brick road throwing daffodils. Instead, it is light and dark interwoven, often with long periods of drought in between.
As a single mum, raising a daughter mostly solo, and a self-employed entrepreneurial business owner, I used to down spiral with some version of the words – what is wrong with me – cycling on repeat through my brain.
Eventually, I ended up in a very dark place. The answer to the question – what is wrong with me – guiding me to continue to focus on my fault and lack.
My wish at this time was to roll over and go back to sleep. To enter the deep, dreamless sleep and not wake from it. There was a disappearance from all of the pain and confusion that called to me, a Siren song.
In choosing to re-engage with life, to place my bare feet upon the ground and take that first step into life’s embrace, I made a soul-deep commitment. Indeed it is easy to make a soul-deep commitment from a zero point. There is nothing to lose.
That commitment was simple. I would no longer spend my days trying to polish the guard rails on the Titanic. Instead, I would turn my love and attention to building new boats that make the existing obsolete. Moreover, I would do this without a care for potential ridicule and trolling.
What became Syntropic World was forged in the crucible of despair.
Syntropy requires entropy. Entropy requires syntropy. They are complementary pairs, eternal partners. Like it or not, my mind is Syntropic, and my body is entropic.
Our current business models and financial and monetary systems are entropic. Greed eats everything, leaving nothing, and like cancer, eventually consumes not just the host but its own potential for existence.
We must embrace the dark in us. Peace cannot exist until we do. Our rage is not bad. It is more likely ill-directed for so many reasons.
Our enterprises must know where the incentive to violate their Pattern Integrity is, well before the temptation to do so.
We must know who we are, what matters most, why we exist, and what is our undoing. Our insecurities are our teachers.
Governance needs to consider its shadow elements. What are the temptations? Where does corruption potentially lurk?
Where is our lie – to ourselves first and to others second?
What needs to be reconciled in our identity? What pieces of us do we deny, ignore, dislike or hate? Are they driving our decisions, or are we?
How will we know that the purpose of our enterprise has been achieved? Specifically? How do we check in with this forward sight regularly to recalibrate the path towards it?
Where does fear live, and what harm or preventative role does it take? Does it rule our existence? If so, how must we retake the reigns from its control?
What needs to die? In us? In our business? In our belief system? In our relationships?
How do we bring the conversation about aging, death and dying into the central rooms of society? To know its story without it ruling over our life, overtly or covertly?
What is our relationship to rage, anger, and withheld words? Is something happening in the world that enrages us if only we allow it to?
What about grief? Oh, I grieve for the animal loss. It hurts when I think of what we are doing to our creatures.
Can we love completely and still be as mad as hell? I adore this question.
What I know now, with the glorious benefit of hindsight, is that my time lost in the darkness was the time to mould the clay of my being, to burn everything that was not me away, to reach that very clear juncture of decision, where compromise was no longer acceptable in the vital areas I wanted to spend the rest of my days animating.
It is so hard to speak of the future to those lost in the darkness. Yet we must. We must throw a line, a rope of hope. And keep throwing it until it is held tight.
In our enterprises, we must create space for our humanity to be present. Imperfectly perfect. Not drama. Not victimhood. But raw and real humanity, taking responsibility, not blaming.
We must speak of death. Death of an idea, a project, a tightly held belief, or people, close and far.
We must find spaces for grief to be present.
A Syntropic Enterprise is a living system activated by dynamic and diverse life and people. All the colours and polarities of existence will be found there.
Anything less is a simulacrum that continues the hollow story of work, life, meaning, existence and contribution we are surrounded with now.
Give me life. All of it. It’s a messy, glorious tumbleweed collection.
Give me a Syntropic Enterprise, where together we move to a higher order for an externally regenerative Universe, polarity built in by design, love the field, and the spaces and places for the full spectrum of our being to emerge.