Intentional Society: Connection and Intention
Newcomers can register for our next orientation video call on Friday, November 4th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).
This last week we did a "Connection Zone" day, and we're finishing the tour by looking at impact and work this week.
First, my synthesis of what we/I learned from doing three different strands of social interaction, a couple layers of interpretation upward from the experience reports. I'd summarize the most common outcome as "enjoyable but less satisfying" and I shared that kind of judgement myself, having enjoyed some degree of connection and a "different mode" with folks in conversation and playing games together — but having some sense of missing something too. I can easily see how the "miss" feeling arises: how it wouldn't feel as meaningful, as significant, as powerful, to be in a "social zone" compared to our usual practice-centered mode. I think there is some tuning possible: There is some amount of "could have been more intentional" I see regarding our concrete activities and how those connect to our meaningful desires for belonging, connection, wholeness.
I also remember times where we've felt a more visceral missing of the richness and completeness of being with people outside the focus/purity of our deep-human-to-human mode of connection. Building out the, I'll say embodied-ness, of our sense of others, has at times been meaningful. But much like how the "urgent vs important" is often in tension, how much is the [light, frivolous, humorous] in tension with the [intense, meaningful, serious]? Both are needed, though in different proportions to fit the balance of the context.
Someone said "maybe it's not a zone" and I'm on board with that by a matter of degree. Maybe "Connection" itself doesn't connect well, as a word, with what we value in that direction of breadth and/or wholeness-of-contact. Maybe e.g. laughter is a subset of comfort, security, secure attachment.
This leads me to my last thought about the zones themselves. Especially as we lean into these zones through this "tour" we're doing, they can feel like categories, like boxes. I view this as a temporary conscious competence phase to grow and stretch our conception of what Intentional Society contains and what kinds of activities it has space to encompass. But I also look forward to fuzzing the lines of the zones, letting them fade into the background a bit, and not getting stuck in a "what fits in these boxes" mode. "Aliveness" is a great dowsing rod for value, and I hope we let ourselves see the (now wider) space as one space across which we can spread and play (and work)!
Cheers,
James