Intentional Society: feelin' good vs gettin' stuff done
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When we tried out "Circling with Clean Language" last week, we ended up with two breakout rooms having quite different experiences. There's a deep tension there regarding how Clean invites you to “keep yourself out” of your questions while Circling invites you to “bring yourself in” to connection, so now we understand about how it's hard to do both of those! (Certainly at the same time, but also in-rapid-sequence switching is difficult.)
There was something in the meta layer also, about how the breakout room groups related to the rules/structure. The group that tried harder to follow the rules ended up much more frustrated (as I understand it, leaning heavily in the Clean direction and feeling far away from a Circling experience), and the group that held the rules loosely and followed their impulses more found their time more enjoyable. But, did "more enjoyable" also mean "less learning"? Hard to say, but: if we didn't have the less enjoyable group, I think we wouldn't have understood that deep tension above nearly as well IMHO.
This leads me to my wondering today, in this moment, around the relationship of... I'll say "experience" and "accomplishment": How we feel, and what impact we have. Sometimes they line up (it feels good to accomplish or succeed) and sometimes they don't (learning a lot sometimes come from our painful experiences). In that case, my understanding is that most often most of us value the valence of our experience, and the learning is used to console ourselves: "Well, that sucked, but at least I learned these lessons from it."
Actually that's just one category, where we're trying to accomplish something, we fail at it, but we accomplished something else (which is, what we learned). Sometimes we're trying to accomplish an experience, yeah? "Follow the aliveness" is often a guiding rule-of-thumb in relational practices, where people are pretty explicitly optimizing for how they're feeling in each moment. Yeah, there's the integration of the paradox, similar to "being and doing". The thing to see here is that every accomplishment is an experience, and every experience is an accomplishment.
Experience is often associated with the inner/interior world, and accomplishment is more associated with the outer/exterior world. To caricature it, "having fun" vs "get stuff done". That seems like the dichotomy that leads to the polarity/tension I started with above. But if we're weaving across these scopes, dancing with the both+and of our experiences and our accomplishments, well, so much seems possible if we're dancing/holding loosely (with spaciousness)!
We have many aims/purposes (i.e. desires to accomplish certain futures). We can recognize that sometimes "the real treasure was the friends we made along the way", pointing at an interior transformation accomplishment as valuable independently of the exterior accomplishment. The two feed into each other: we get more done when we're having fun, and we feel good when we accomplish the things we care about accomplishing.
TL;DR: Having a very much not fun time trying to do some thing? Loosen my/your/our grip on the thing, steer back toward fun. Having an un-impactful and purposeless time trying to have fun? (Which, to be fair, sometimes ruins the fun when we notice it.) Loosen grip on the fun, steer back toward what matters.
The latter sounds more strange/foreign to my (protestant-work-ethic heritage) ears, since we have the parable of the prodigal son and other cultural mores already trying to ensure that we stay productive and avoid wireheading. Wise folks I look up to would say that embodied, holistic knowing does integrate over all our values and factors, so, maybe this just helps us refine the kinds of aspects of our "experience" we can reliably steer by.
Is there a right answer or relationship when it comes to accomplishment or ambition? One pomo-ish frame might say "of course not", or another action-logic would say "yes of course achievement is the whole game", and another would say "no but we care anyway", and one might say that evolution itself has some sort of opinion it's been selecting for. But this is getting long already, so I will leave further exploration to another time.
Cheers,
James