The Four Waves
“Energy moves in waves. Waves move in patterns. Patterns move in rhythms. A human being is just that energy, waves, patterns, rhythms. Nothing more. Nothing less. A dance.”
-- Gabrielle Roth
Introduction
The SIX Wayfinder Movement No. 2 - ‘Ensembling’ presented itself to us with such a force of nature, quite unlike the gentle unfolding of Movement No. 1. Over the course of 35 days, we experienced dynamism and motion within and around all of our X activities, yet the Dine Around+ Closed Ensembles had a unique quality to them. Their purpose was to reflect back the topics we heard in the first movement and bring together a select group of individuals from different parts of the world to share their approaches and actions around these topics going forwards. We hoped that this effort would continue to drive the sector: create an impetus for further conversations, relationships and learnings, possibly even forge new avenues for collaboration.
At least, that was our intended goal. It was hard to foresee how these Closed Ensembles would actually be inhabited as space for the participants to enter into and use according to what they felt they needed to bring. In each conversation, participants showed a generosity of presence and vulnerability that created the conditions for deep and meaningful witness, for grounding the social innovation movement on the inside, and for amplifying the tensions and flows ‘out there’ in ways that could be grasped and shaped in these urgent times.
Lots was in motion in and around these calls, but more than motion-as-flow, it oftentimes felt like people were weary and needing a place to come after wrestling their daily struggles, complex and opposing forces, the commitment to what really matters (which remains an ever shifting goal post). Where there was a clear sense of place in these dialogues, there was also the recurring theme of the liminal, of the invisible, of the work that occurs behind the scenes and on the ground. Where there was a feeling of weight, there was also a feeling of weightlessness, as new events kept unravelling and individuals kept adapting. Where there were many time zones connecting at any one point and in the virtual realm, many people spoke to the tensions of being rooted in space (countries, communities, homes, workplaces).
We held seven sessions in total, on Living and Working with Integrity, the How Matters (Demonstrating Value in the Midst of a Pandemic), the Changing Role of Public Servants (Making the Unusual More Usual) and Making this Moment Count (How to Reinforce the Efforts of Civil Society in Asia). Each session deserves attention (as individual waves and patterns), and yet we still wish to give energy to the abstraction for a better sense of - to maintain the metaphor - the ocean.