Intentional Society: Facing choices
when every choice represents conflict or confusion...
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Help me clarify the topic of exploration for this Sunday's Community Practice Session, will you? Thanks.
Let's see, there's a juicy swirl of words like choice, commitment, coercion, conflict, confusion — gosh, I don't know why these all start with the letter C. Anyhow, these are relevant and active topics for Intentional Society when it comes to how we relate to each other collectively and individually, and the things we might do together using our trust and connection.
Commitment feels like a loaded word, like there's a coercion-of-future-selves that's built into the act of "making a commitment". Choice seems simpler but turns out to be similarly loaded: does every choice contain within it a confusion or conflict of some sort, that makes the choice be a choice?
When we know what to do, it doesn't feel much like we are "making a choice". Malcolm writes similarly here. If a course of action feels right, you just do it — unless there's some conflicting reason not to, in which case you don't have that easeful feeling of integrous rightness.
Does that mean that all choices can be dissolved or resolved by finding the course of greatest integrity? Or maybe it's just the suffering or distress that needn't accompany a choice. If there truly is "no bad choice" in a scenario, then we could feel fine and free whichever way we go, in theory.
But maybe there's some grieving built in to any choice, even when all options are good, just due to the loss of optionality? Taking one path always means not taking another. Even small choices like "who's going first in this exercise" can feel hard when we're trying to optimize (and we don't know everything relevant, because that takes too much time).
How can we feel good, and/or prevent regret, about our choices? That seems like a good high-level question to ask ourselves. What hard choices have we or are we facing? Is there a way of "embodied knowing" that can steer us through conflict-y choices? How can we tune into our full wisdom? How can we help each other in finding acceptance and choosing from integrity?
That's getting there! Smells like a good lead-in to a fruitful exploration. This topic will then lead us into our year-end reflections and any choices we sense about what we want to do together next season and next year.
Cheers,
James