What’s relevant you, what’s relevant for me, but what’s relevant for us a group?
We naturally seek relevance. But what’s the trick for doing this as a group so that we can continue on this quest and collaboratively find the clues. This requires some active agreement.
Whilst we were still following an urge, it became clear that the values were the shared combination of what we, as a trio, felt was important (value) and therefore what became relevant to us three (not just individually). This was particularly important since we need something to help us navigate the unknown circumstances that we would encounter before us.
It would be easier to do nothing, and the chances are great that many endeavours amount to nothing. Of all the millions of potential outcomes, only a few are optimal. How would ensure that we can continue? How would we ensure that we’re paying attention to the most interesting things that we encounter. And how would we make sure that once we had encountered something interesting, that we would respond in a way that is constructive, positive and beneficial towards our vision?
The answer for us lay in the writing of the values. Writing the values brought our urges from the visceral into the domain of the known and agreed. They also needed to be aspirational, exciting and memorable. They needed to discount the things we won’t be doing. They needed to be coherent so that when we step back, we can see a constellation of aspirations that are all linked – and neatly linked up together.
As we continued thinking about these ideas, we also became aware that this is a sort of natural process that we believe is wanted by nature, if we just allow it to happen. With the increasing complexity that manifests in the universe as it cools down and entropy increases, humans are unique that they can continue this process of continued complexification – a process that takes place in the sweet spot between order and chaos. Our values needed to allow us to let this happen by taking us to that magical place between order and chaos.
It seemed that as we went on this journey, we were, by default, bringing complexity, beauty, intricacy into being. But perhaps in a way that we didn’t yet realise. Not necessarily in the immediate physical form of a creative output, but something more spiritual or perhaps even in a different realm.
It seemed almost as if the trail we took would leave a trace, the path itself was a creative output: glistening and novel, when seen across space and time. Like a movements of a fertility dance but spread over many years, which prompts something new to emerge. The emergence of something in time itself.