On Collaborative Infrastructure

        Just got back from a meeting with a Steiner teaching college for thoughts on holding a workshop facilitating win-win tools. My mind is spinning. I had no idea that there was a place that used a mutually beneficial  philosophy as a foundation for all disciplines. Talking about all of the different veins of collaboration and stuff like that, we reached a point where we said, “Hey, it seems that people are either with this concept or not. How can we (or can we even) get people that are not on board, on board with the win-win mindset?” As I was driving home, cooking, eating lunch, and going about my day, this idea consumed by thoughts. After a while it came to me. I was thinking about a history class I was in and how America’s growth through agricultural, industrial, and eventually consumer culture evolved and it hit me. Infrastructure! You can’t have anything with out the infrastructure to sustain it. That’s why the saying the teacher will appear when the student is ready is valid. America couldn’t have risen to industrial might without the political and agriculture infrastructure (and other stuff) to support its growth. We were the only place on earth that hadn’t experienced starvation because of a natural cause (political is a different story). This allowed us to sustain and develop into a world super power. The same is true with industry, and the same is true with consumerism. Tell you what, the same is true with love and collaboration.  So the question is, how can we build a strong infrastructure of collaboration?

     
      This conclusion came to me when I realized that everything that is growing or stable is balanced. Everything that is out of balance is either breaking or dying. When I noticed this, I realized that everything is a relationship in some context or another. The parts of your car’s engine are intimately connected and must be balanced to survive. Friends, lovers, families, communities, automobiles, even the world and the solar system have to be balanced in order to function. They are all sustained by the same thing…Love. This line of thought is congruent with Ken Wilber’s philosophy of Whole Parts. Ken says that since the beginning of time people have argued that a thing (like the atom, world, or whatever) was either a whole separate from the other or just parts of other things lacking individually, and that the truth is, they are both. We live in a binary universe with yin and yang inherent throughout. 

        I chose win-win because it is more main stream with less negative connotations than holistic. I guess it doesn’t spring up as many barriers and at the same time demonstrates value for the reader off the bat. I feel that the word love has the same problem. People tell me that it is impossible to articulate what it means, but I feel like it isn’t too hard. I feel like Love, balance, harmony, and the like, all mean the same thing.  The English language as well as other norms get in the way, but I feel like if you told someone “I love you”, it’s kind of like saying, “you help me achieve balance” or “I wish you balance”. When two people are in love, I see at as two people are balanced. Obviously an intimate relationship requires a deeper level of balance, but it also applies to relationships in all contexts. This theory is also congruent with an idea I found in the book "Mindfulness and Money" that says (loosely paraphrased) all that life is, is taking in things that help you, pushing out things that harm you, and maintaining a barrier to the outside world. So when I think about whats needed to facilitated more collaborative thought I need to remember to establish the infrastructure necessary  to facilitate it.

• more dots and connections to come (elaboration)