In a world divided by a grand canyon of perspectives I am pondering how we can transcend the polarity and divisions, or perhaps design a healthy ecosystem in which the polarity fits? Or even, if natural design has done this work for us and what we are seeing and experiencing in the world now, with breakdowns between leaders, government, finance, community, power, immigration, the have’s and have nots..is a perfect foil for the next evolution of humanity? But if the latter is the case, does that mean I go back to a passive state, versus one where I act with others to invite change to a more humane world?

In my own world I have had a week of bitter…the taste of hash polarity both directed towards me, and circling around me. In one case, where a brilliant colleague, working in the arena for the good of all humanity, who is by his own nature a polarising person as genius are often, being superficially dismissed by a small section of my community because of his polarizing nature. And in this dismissal, the closed-to-all-possibility thinking that steps right over the golden opportunities that my polarizing friend brings. Right there, in a community working to lower the walls of collaboration, we have insistence on division. Which has me pause to wonder, if we cannot heal the division between us, do we have any hope?

And in another instance, it is sexism that is the divide. The ‘boys club’ against the girls. For this I do have a wider field of compassion, for in my experience of this, sexism, perpetrated by both men and women, is so inculcated that most of us do not even know we are being sexist. Me saying it is Ok to be ignored, dismissed, not noticed for my opinion and value other than in service to male order, is as equally sexist as the originating dismissal.

As someone who has spent a lifetime contemplating relational synergist design, how to have people collaborate together in a way that enables the synergistic response of 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 10000, I am asking how we intentionally design polarity into the system, as a natural stabalising force. This is after all what nature does.

But in our politically correct and over sensitive world, we now find robust debate and healthy polarity as something to avoid at all costs. Indeed my experience this last week, being totally surprised on one hand by overly sensitive men, and of the other observing the rise of the polarising zero politically correct politicians, I am sensing that the suppression of our polarising nature is causing a backlash that might have extremely dire consequences.

Which leads me to the conclusion, guided by laws of nature that have worked for some billions of years, that any healthy system has polarity. And that as Bucky said, Unity is Plural, at minimum two. To have up we have down, to have good we have bad, to have small we have large…while these look like polar opposites, they are in fact whole’s where the requirement for the whole is the polarity or at minimum twoness.

The human longing for endless peace in all of our relationships, for no conflict, no difference of opinion, for sameness, like mind, is in fact the state before Eve ate the apple in the garden. It is exactly that…nothingnesss. No light to the dark. No beautiful sunrise. No passion. No thing at all.

That the magnificence of the human is exactly the polarity. The interesting. The difference. Trouble is we have not grown up enough to embrace this. To love it.

To design it into everything.

We fight with it within ourselves. Then take that fight to every area in our life.

I need my counter foil to enable my wholeness to be evident. The wild angry child is me. The quick to feisty is me. The one who cries at any injury to an animal is me.

When we reject these parts of us we are rejecting the whole. When we do not invite polarity as a necessary condition there is only one direction. Implosion. Collapse. This is what Bucky meant when he said, “Space has shape.”

This is challenging work. It requires that we learn the advanced forms of navigating human communication as I teach in Speak the Truth and Dare to Care. It also requires that we build opportunity for polarity into our organisational design.

And in my work with entrepreneurs and leaders, it is the long form conversation of embracing the whole of self, the rough, the frightened, the uncertain, the confused, the lost aspects of self..all of this..with love, as a full recognition that they make us US. This does not give us permission to be an arsehole, or bully. To refine some of the blunt edges is human evolution. But to demand perfection, bland, sameness, no conflict, no messy human stuff..this is the dream doomed to fail, for nature cannot and does not hold its shape for this ever.

Equilibrium and stasis is death. Aliveness is found in the animation of the polarity.

My personal inquiry…how to love the polarity. Invite it. Design it into the system. Recognise healthy and unhealthy versions. It is a constant learning edge.