Our Inherent Relatedness

What most excites me right now is collaboration. All the most beautiful, joyous, blessed things in life are celebrations of cooperation and collaborative ventures. Win-win relationships. Reciprocity. Mutualism. Sharing Economy. Flat management. All of these things speak to a way of working that cares about the heart and soul of business as well as business owners. It just feels better when everyone benefits and thrives, doesn't it?

With the current disruptions in the world it is clear that:

• We need our entire way of living redesigned, so that it supports health, well-being, creativity, connections, livelihood, learning, harmony with the environment and more.

• We need a safe and sacred way of relating to each other where we can put down our social masks and be vulnerable and real with each other.

• We need to bring forward ancient technologies used by indigenous cultures into modern society in order to heal and connect people.

Human beings are tribal by nature—we thrive when we feel as though we belong and fall apart when we become too isolated. Much healing and learning comes from social interactions, without which, we get stuck in our own thought loops and narrow ideas. Our relationships widen our lens significantly as we listen and gain insights from other people’s experiences. This wisdom brings clarity and clarity is medicine that can remedy confusion and open the way for new options. When others take a steps in a direction we’re afraid to go, it makes it easier for us to take that step because we see it’s possible and we learn from hearing others’ experience with it. It’s much easier to be brave and take risks when we hear stories of others doing it.

Here’s a beautiful passage about community from the book Doing Nothing by Steven Harrison:

“What we do to stop ourselves from community is myriad. Every concept we cling to divides us, every fear we identify with divides us.

We accept an ever-smaller subdivision of life as our community. We embody that shrinking world in our faceless housing unit, our gliding automobile with tinted windows, our communication through computer and telephones. This is the expression of isolation, fear and pain. We have stopped ourselves from communing.

Why? Community requires a radical simplification of our lives.

When our focus becomes our inherent relatedness, not survival, then what we do with our lives and how we do it drastically changes.

The expression of community is the reflection of community is the reflection of our collective realization. It is important to our children that they have loving parents. It is just as important that there is a loving community to receive them as they come into this life.

If we are to raise our children, we must also raise communities. If not, our children will continue to be patterned in the isolation we have come to accept in our contemporary societies.

These new communities can be free ideology, and instead be based on the direct perception of relationship. How will decisions be made? How will money be kept or distributed? What is ownership? How will the young be educated? How will the sick and old be cared for? The exploration of questions such as these forms the basis of such a community. Like the view of life itself, such a community will always be moving, changing and self-revealing.”

Relatedness is about playing a BIGGER game. 

It’s time we all being to recognize that none of us will make it through this global crisis alone. Each step toward cooperation and collaboration draws us closer together and empowers us to create a world that benefits all of us.

So instead of focusing on mere survival, why not ask ourselves these question: Is my current lifestyle serving the greatest good? If not, how can I shift my actions and behaviors toward that end?