June 13, 2024

IS: Long game on a short field

Upcoming open events:

• Friday, June 14: Open-to-all Office Hours
• Saturday, June 22: Exploratory Series session #6 — Gendlin Focusing with Jessica Fan

all start @ 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC). S14 Core Calls on Sundays for members run every week through June 23.

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I've started to receive more frequent comments about the longevity of Intentional Society and my persistence - and it hasn't even been four years yet! I guess my younger self would scoff at that "hasn't even" frame: high school, college, and grad school (coincidentally) were all four-year stints for me, and they felt pretty darn long from the inside!

And it's true that I can think of several nearby communities or projects that have come and gone since those early-pandemic days. So yeah, a lot can happen in a few years.

Yes, I'm playing a long game. Perhaps you are too. A "long game" is a calling, a path, a long obedience in the same direction, obedience to the tug in one's own heart, the draw towards that next right step in resonance with meaningfulness and life.

The persistence and "showing up" part seems easy when:

This characteristic makes the long game sustainable, because every step is self-sustaining and right for its own sake, not some far-future payoff.

But, make no mistake, "for its own sake" is not solely about the present moment. The whole timeline connects to the present moment, and the present moment is in service of every future moment. The universe in a grain of sand.

The big picture, accurately spotted by Dee Hock, the founder of Visa:

Intentional Society inhabits this new story. This story is also the Second Renaissance, Integral, Game B, call it what you will. We are called to grow the wisdom to contain our power, to stop solving our problems by replacing them with even bigger problems.

How long do we have for the long game to unfold? Frankly: How long do we have before we, humanity, destroy ourselves? We. Don't. Know. We don't have any proof that a superintelligent AI won't paperclip us by 2027. Or that a lab leak won't kill so many that societal infrastructure collapses, or that the geopolitics of the climate crisis won't unravel everything, or any number of other event horizons.

The world is speeding up, and getting weirder, and the next decade is going to be wild. (That's a prediction, not a citation.) Does playing the long game make sense if the field is short?

Well, if the game really ends then I guess that's a no. But the game will keep going if the field as we know it ends and changes into some other kind of terrain. A friend helped me with an analogy earlier today: It's like a Mario game, where you beat one level and the next one shows up and it's totally different, like an underwater level or something and all the physics are different. We will be called to adapt to the unknown, probably over and over again.

I believe that getting ready for the unknown looks a lot like becoming our biggest selves. Our capacity to handle everything that's going to come at us as the future unfolds, that's the same capacity that we use to handle life every day and the challenges of each moment. Everything is connected, and everything unfolds one moment at a time.

We might not have the cards to win, we have no assurance that we're clever enough to find the right combo to play, but if we learn to play our cards right in each moment now... the unfolding of the future may reveal more positive domino cascades than we can yet see.

Trying to sum up: The short game loses. To win the infinite game is to keep playing. The field may be short, but the long game is paradoxically the way that just might work.

Words are hard, but I'll keep going and say it better next time...

Cheers,
James