We are Tangled Wires

We have power, we have power, we have so much power.

How many rooms I have been in, full of beautiful minds not listening to one another. Like this one I'm in now.

How many neighborhoods I have been in, every one, with so many beautiful minds, hearts and wills and resources, people doing so much work, coming together only to fall asleep at the droning lecture or to clash in difference of opinion. Like this one.

A part of us knows that, if we could orchestrate these energies in some different way, somehow the outcomes could be so different. Our meetings could be joyous, our neighborhoods beautiful. Life could be musical. The dirty, empty street would undoubtedly be shaded with trees, lined with benches full of people talking.

The question for me then is: how do we disentangle the mess? How do we unlock the power in the room, the power in the neighborhoods, the power in the nations?

Look at a computer. Look at the extraordinary delicacy of its components and microcomponents. Open up a microchip. Look at it with a microscope. You will see hundreds of thousands of tiny filaments, all exquisitely organized, like the plumbing of a house all orderly, only on a much finer and more complex level, exquisitely orderly.

But scramble just a few of these filaments and the whole thing breaks down. It's a heap of junk. Toss it.

Or take an analogy with a software application. Miles and miles of delicate code, all working towards one unified purpose! But introduce only one tiny bug, or the smallest bit of "corruption," and programmers and users alike are sent into paroxysms of frustration.

That’s how it is with humans and our society. Each of us is a fine filament of power. If we could only align with one another, what we could do together would surpass any supercomputer on earth. We could transform the planet so that every neighborhood was a marvel of truth and architectural beauty, of human friendliness and celebration and love and wonder.

That's the sort of imagining, no doubt, that gets dictators to salivating. It's true, a lot can get accomplished when some Generalissimo commands all to be soldiers and to line up in one, same direction. The trouble with the bargain is that all the soldiers have to sell their minds and souls, which unfortunately means they are liable to do the unthinkable. Another, related, trouble is that this arrangement puts the single Generalissimo at the top, where he and his counterparts issue the commands, and then others are arranged to occupy successively lower layers, one above the other all the way to the bottom, where someone has the job of scraping horrid things off the floor. This likely creates resentments and imbalances and unfruitful ambitions to climb upwards over the backs of others.

The more beautiful dream, instead of this, is for all the parts to coordinate with one another in a marvelous dance. The way to realize this is to create the conditions of the self-organizing dance, where all the parts find room for their individual vibrations to resonate with the larger whole. This admits of much more complexity and creativity. Over the long run, more productivity and efficiency is likely, though it may be less visible due to the overwashes of surplus power spilling out everywhere sloppily and extravagantly, causing consternation for some.

The poor woman working to clean toilets today is someone’s grandmother with the most delicate imaginings and a heart and stories to tell that could make us weep. I spoke to a woman in my neighborhood - at the gathering we organized on our street - and learned that she had come here from El Salvador during the war, years ago. She had found work and had struggled to get by, saving whatever money she could along the way. Little by little she had saved enough to bring her whole family to be here with her. And there with us across the table sat her aged mother, silent, not knowing the language, deferential to me, feeling out of place, dressed in her indigenous costume.

I marveled at what this woman had accomplished with few resources, with determination, love, commitment. And yet I was struck too, by how little she expected to be noticed, how she had become used to not being seen or noticed in our community, at least by the likes of myself. Her avenues of power were her own, hidden, not written up in books, developed in an immense underground labyrinth that our "public world" does not know how to acknowledge or embrace. In the caves and tunnels of poverty are beauties and powers we do not know how to discover.

Why don't we seek to invite the love, skill and knowledge in these hearts so that it flows into our communities? Why do we not have a way to unleash the productive, loving energies that abound in our world? We are locked into a system of scarcity that does not know how to open up our inherent abundance.

So many fine filaments, conduits of electrical energy, yet tangle up a only a few of them, or just one, and the whole thing is junk. That’s like us. We are such finely wrought instruments, and yet ... often it only takes one person in a room with a gripe, a loud voice, an angry insistence, to stop a meeting cold.

We are so finely wrought that our potential to clash is great. We prefer to dumb down our system rather than risk unleashing energies that we fear uncontrollable.

Our whole culture is such a messy tangle, because of its extraordinary diversity and also its everywhere connectedness. We are a very bad mess of spaghetti knotted up. Everyone is everywhere and nowhere. Everything is in motion and change. It is so complex. To act, we need to simplify. We need moments to coordinate. We need the patience to listen largely. We need to make room for all to show up, before we impose our impatience to act.

Each strand needs room and appreciation.