1. Today’s world is Quantum.
2. Persons do not automatically adapt to Quantum.
3. Failure to adapt leads to loss of vitality.
4. Persons do not necessarily know they’ve lost vitality.
5. The drive to adapt depends on contact with vitality.
Elaborations
1. Today’s world is Quantum.
I don’t claim special knowledge about “quantum.” About six months ago, I was drawn into
a Conference on Quantum
Storytelling, developed a paper for the conference, and continued to
develop it as the proceedings are becoming a book. Getting background included reading closely Karen Barad’s
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum
Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. My involvement in these projects helped
me make sense of many experiences that were just off-tilt in the dominant
paradigm; helpful concepts include indeterminacy (instead of uncertainty),
diffraction (instead of reflection), agential cut, and timespacematter/ing. See
Barad and my previous blogs for elaboration.
2. Persons do not automatically adapt to Quantum.
Living with indeterminacy is not comfortable. Neither is holding multiple
perspectives and accepting that more than one is simultaneously true. To live within, and even more so, to
lead from a quantum orientation requires letting go of the pretense of advance
organization as if authentic outcomes can be engineered outside the lived
moment. That’s hard and feels
vulnerable. Even when persons suspect that the dominant paradigm isn’t working,
dulling out is easy and losing power hard.
3. Failure to adapt leads to loss of vitality.
The costs of persisting in a dead paradigm are increasingly
evident. In education, persons
becoming teachers have too little authentic experience with the joy of
learning. Having been stunted in
16 years of dull curriculum, driven by external assessments, they lack the feel
needed to inspire. A recent critique
of the latest big assessment for teachers nailed the problem: “These conditions
negate the importance of relationships in the development of teaching,
preferring the pretense of objectivity over trust, authenticity, and cultural
responsiveness.” The pretense of
objectivity points directly at the old paradigm; trust, authenticity, and
cultural responsiveness distinguish the quantum paradigm.
4. Persons do not necessarily know they’ve lost vitality.
Everything is “great” (like Tony-the-Tiger’s cereal that’s full of
scary-bad corn) and there’s nothing better (even if the hero is fake &
“education” has never been joyful).
Persons do not automatically know what they’re good at, capable of, or
what really turns them on. If Micky
D is the norm and it’s considered great, where’s the taste to drive the
dedicated training needed to become a master chef?
5. The drive to adapt depends on contact with vitality.
While persons come into the world pretty charged up, the battery
runs down without dedicated engagement with the life force. The search for passion comes from a
person’s inner core; no one else can name it but some can tell when it’s
burning or burnt out; finding it takes risks and sacrifice.
We can go quantum.
We’ll have to risk leaving perceived comfort and security, but that
train’s going over the cliff. Time
to take a chance.
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