The heartbeat of evolution thrums in the chest of every parent. Another way to look at this is – in the words of author Bayo Akomolafe – “Children are the cracks that permit the universe to change, to become something different.” Evolution is at work in the specific makeup of our children. Their presence in the world brings hope to the human experiment even as their presence often screams, “to hell with business as usual!” They have a way of disrupting our ideas of how life should continue.
They “disappoint power” as Bayo would say.
The next couple months promise to be eventful, and evolutionary. In order for evolution to do its work, power will be dis-appointed. This power does not reside neatly in the places we think it does. It pools in vast swells of people and institutions and conventions where it once found fertile, evolutionary ground. It has taken up residence at the edges of our human development, in the largely unspoken and unquestioned fields of agreement we have knit together culturally, around what is good and true and worthy. We will be disappointed when that power spills out of our own lives.
Each of our lives will experience this dis-appointment/ this displacement at the moment of death, as power moves from us to our descendants, just as at our birth, the power of our ancestors moved to us. This is evolution. We are constantly, kaleidoscopically, evolving. When viewed from this perspective, it is easy to see the beauty in the process. Not as easy, perhaps, when our separate identities suffer as a result of the old power structures crumbling.
Our collective evolution has everything to do with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens next… what we do when power shifts, when we lose the old forms of power we had, how we adapt, how we locate and identify our true power as humans.
I recently listened in on a conversation between two bright humans, Daniel Foor and Bayo Akomalafe. They were speaking about weaving healthy culture when the topic of parenting came up and Bayo shared a touching story. As he put it, he was having a tough time being present to a meltdown his son was having. His wife said to him, “Don't think of this as a meltdown. Think of this as an altar. Think of this as a call to worship. Think of this as a pause, that allows you to do something different than just trying to get back to [what was].”
Feeling spun around is part of the evolutionary movement at work. If you knew exactly what to do you would not be evolving. Evolution requires navigating uncertainty. When the terrain changes and the old navigation instruments no longer work, you are in evolutionary territory. It seems that only when we are unmoored like this, do we have the reflex to really arrive in the moment, to prostrate as we would to an altar, to be in wonder at the reality before us.
Though it is not comfortable to be disavailed of the old forms of power, it is a feature of evolution. It is a holy place to be.
The virtual book launch party is still to come. Stay tuned…