#007 Resonance, our relationship with others
A friend asked me: "So, Gust, are you planning to write daily for, like, how long? 13 days? Like, to explain the 13 tones? Or to do that for 20 days? Explaining the 20 archetypes?". And I answered my friend Nathan, a freelance journalist and also a time studious while calling him "amigo", as we say to each other in Portuguese: we just started a new 260-day cycle. I can't promise to write a 2000-word piece every day, but I will show up at least to say hi during the whole cycle." Is a long-term run. A marathon, not a sprint. So catch your breath. :)
Every combination of this learning is subtle, time is a language we are unlearning in order to relearn, and it took a while for me to not only understand but to find meaning and sense in my own life. So I can only bring the lenses and is your part here to see yourself not as an audience, but as a traveler recovering your memory and skills about time. Setting the expectations, as an "unlearner", don't push yourself too much. We are not Ph.D. students yet, now we are more like children in the kindergarten talking about colors, and the meaning of simple words and concepts, but soon we will be able to connect them and create our own sentences.
Last issue, #006 Beginnings, middles, and beginnings, I shared about the first part of my career as a researcher and strategist. I am proud of what I was doing for a living at that time. But I also have some reflections to share. Like everyone, I have the two narratives of the world also inside of me. One is about social change, culture, connection, and care. The one that made me choose to go researching sociopolitics instead of analyzing brand competitors. Or, as I say, I had chosen to focus on "protest" instead of "Procter and Gamble". (I was researching and strategizing for Dove at that beginning, rs).
The other narrative is about virtual landscapes, gadgets, niches, and their codes that are changing faster than anyone can follow. The "men's plastic shine toys" as Ailton Krenak, indigenous leader, says. When we are so focused to understand what technology will look like in 5 to 50 years in the future we are not noticing the opportunity to also learn from the 5.000 to 5 billion years of deep time history that brought us here. (Also, understanding that a lot was erased from this history by colonial violence. When a dominant culture kills and set apart the other culture and knowledge this is called epistemicide, as I learned with Boaventura de Sousa Santos).
Technology is not and should not be approached as the center of discussions about subjects like future, innovation, impermanence, uncertainty, change, and time. It is like the layers of paint that we use on reality but the substance itself is deep there. Of course, we can look to both levels – or directions, as you probably learned in the linear metaphor. That's why I am always mentioning in lectures that some of the best futurists of our time are history professors (like Yuval Harari and his trilogy of past, future, and present issues), and timekeepers (like indigenous leaders I mentioned previously and their ancestral wisdom). And that's why, since the beginning, I am decentering you of what you know you know to what you don't know you don't know. I am diverging the conversation from future (or futures) to time and temporality (or temporalities).
Ok, this was a great check-in, so I think we already properly started:
Today I would like to invite you to deep into the concept of resonance. The seventh tone is one of the tones of experimentation. Nothing is a one-way exchange. We only exist because we are resonating with each other. I affect you as much as you affect me. I can act as a channel of inspiration to you while I can be open to finding tune with what you can bring as an inspiration to me, traveler. In a cycle of 13, the 7 is in the middle of this circular time – we have 6 other tones around it. So we also can say that it is the tone about being social. If you are an extrovert or an introvert, remember, that there are many different forms to show up to your community and to learn not only from them but with them.
7. Resonance (attunement, to be a channel of inspiration for others, to do the collective work)
To your self-reflection:
How can I tune myself to my service?
In physics, "resonance" describes the phenomenon of increased amplitude when one object vibrates at the same natural frequency as a second object and forces that second object into vibrational motion. But don't go bananas with the scientific language. In sociology, Hartmut Rosa, a German writer, wrote a book I was able to buy in his own country, called "Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World". "Social Acceleration: a new theory of modernity" exposes the problem, this one is like the bible of resonance as a solution to the future. I saw some news media calling him "the next Zygmunt Bauman". But you know how these "next" things work on media, I brought this piece just to add some context... I love his work, although I understand it can be too academic
(synchronic note about recommendations: I am adding only GoodReads links for books, so no, I am not trying to sell you books with an Amazon-affiliated link. If you can, support your local bookstore. If you want to support my initiative, share it with a friend, sign up for a paid subscription, or buy me a coffee :)
Also, I know a lot of friends will mention the work of Nassim Haramein at Resonance Science on the matter of, well, resonance.
I really admire him, scientifically, I really do. While I also question his political partnerships and visions from the right-wing. Maybe you never heard about him, maybe you are a huge fan and will say that I am doing "boy's science" (I hate that term) when compared to him. I understand that, and I understand in order to survive as an independent organization, people find their alternative networks of support. The world is not red or blue and purity is a myth.
But I am mentioning this openly because I am trying to learn from every available source without losing my roots and values that come from social and cultural change, considering people and nature and not businesses and markets as the priority. Also, I come from the global south, where the neoliberal narrative of the free-market had crumbled already. So I think it was important to highlight that, just like I mentioned Hemingway quote before:
– Who is that on the trenches by your side?
– And does it matter?
– More than the war itself.
Changing winds, but not so much: once, the Brazilian writer Cris Lisboa, also my good friend, said that to be a writer is not a matter of how many books you wrote in the past, but if you wrote something today. Julia Cameron and Elizabeth Gilbert also say the same. Show up to your art and to your community. I've been thinking of that for a while now. Is something that heals me. And also heals others. I started an initiative about time studies, a Temporality Lab. I present myself as a Temporality Researcher and I am working on selling, delivering, and measuring different projects for companies, or also negotiating teaching in different lectures and classes. But there is a lot of bureaucratic work on that. The part that makes me feel that I AM what I am, is study time every day. It is sharing something about time every day. Is gathering and connecting people around time every day. And also that's why we are here together on the seventh day of this journey.
We have a lot of work to do! So we need to go to practice. The seventh solar seal is the Blue Hand inviting us to put some action on individual and collective accomplishments. But I would say more. Our hands have their own intelligence. If I decide to TELL you instead of WRITE to you what we are talking about, would be a completely different experience. In fact, it is to the participants of our community, since I record a different version – with no more than 10 minutes – of the learning I am also sharing in a different format and flow here. But the intelligence of our hands is better used when considering the intelligence of our minds and of our hearts, together.
Can I tell you about the archetype connected with the Blue Hand? The Healer. Yes, by doing we are able to find a unique type of knowledge. And this knowledge, of doing something together, is able to heal. Do you know when we say "fake it till you make it?". I say perform to be in order to learn to be. I will come back to the importance of performance and rituals in circular time that I all the theory I learned from African studious, potentially tomorrow, so wait for it. Today is still about collective practice. What we can do individually, collectively, to each other, for each other, for the planet, in favor of the cosmos itself? Think about the image of the cosmic dance again.
Temporality Lab
I used 75% of my time writing today until here, so I'll just start to share what I want to tell you about the shift in my work: is not about technology. Is about people. Humans and non-humans (or more than humans, as some deep ecology studious call the entities and events of nature). Living being. We need to heal our relationship with each other and with everything that exists. Yes, it is possible. I will write more about my experiences on that, but we are just starting our long counting 260-day trip together, traveler.
In the second part of my work career, the projects started to split into fractals on:
Business Partnerships
Brands and Industry Players. I continued to create projects together as a consultant but focused on opportunities to be working WITH them and not FOR them. Because of that I could map and publish cartographies of movements around the world covering global events such as Dmexco, SXSW, VidCon, Web Summit, and The Next Web. I honor these partnerships because they are all about how to navigate change, how to face impermanence, and how to deal with uncertainty. I became really close to some innovation studios in Brazil and Latin America, and I feel proud to say that they think of my name when they want to find and connect with different lenses of the world.
People and Communities
Courses, Events, and Experiments. Here is the place I can be a teacher, a facilitator, and a time traveler. The in-person and online editions of my Temporal Workshop, the seasonal events that we call Time Sanctuary, and all the online exchanges during the pandemic between the independent community I initiated called Sandglass are good examples. Eventually, I also invite people from these initiatives to become part of projects in business partnerships. I heard I was crazy the first time I said that instead of making people pay to be part of that I wanted to be able to pay people. I still believe in that.
NGOs, Institutions, and Governments
Advocacy and Democratic Lawmaking. Yes, this is one of my new focuses. As someone that came from a public university and arrived in different cities, countries (and continents) without any previous connection, I would not have access to what I am doing without a lot of people trying to take care (or to recover) this public infrastructure in favor of people. So I am intentionally finding ways to approach the time crisis we are living in this sphere. I see my proximity with Unesco and also with Time Machine Organization through these lenses.
Write me if you feel you can contribute to some of the steps of this part of the journey as well. Let's "tune our radios" and find resonance together. <3
