Introducing Season Eight: Trailer and a meditation on conversation and the collective narrative of our time

Hello friends, a new season of Origins arrives next week, on Tuesday, May 20. This next chapter of Origins is about exploring conversation, that great practice of placing two things next to one another and allowing them to be astonished by the other. It is also about exploring the collective narrative of our time. This trailer is both introduction and meditation on how Origins is more than a podcast: a space for collective inquiry into living well in a fractured world.

Listen to the audio essay or read it below.

It has been two months since our last episode, weeks that feel like lifetimes in our moment of multiple crises.

Our last guest and author of the theory of Graceful Extensibility, David Woods, spoke to us about resilience. In dynamical systems science resilience is an ability to adapt to a changing environment, to absorb shocks, while maintaining whatever defines the system's identity. In other words, it is a conversation between sustaining and changing. Indeed, the first way that complex systems, from cells to societies, communities to governments, often fail when they cannot reframe in response to changing conditions.

It is in this milieu that we are releasing into the world and your podcast feeds Season Eight of the Origins Podcast.

I enter this season with a great deal of humility—attempting to let in more subtlety, befriend complexity, and know silence as a way into care and compassion.

I'm thinking about my own needfulness and the very old Aristotelian notion of vulnerability that human beings need help from the world in order to live well.

I'm craving nuance that is true to my experience of the world and to engage in that exploration in rooms, physically and generatively, with people. Political philosopher Danielle Allen wrote about our information ecosystem that we should consume the news together in alternative civic forms of connection and collaboration, a plea for ways to create healthy relationality. This is taking many forms, and I'm excited about this, in these Origins conversations and in spaces we are cultivating for people to come together.

Over on Substack we’re cultivating not just conversation but community—a space for listening, reflection, and co-creation. This season, you’ll find templates born from the gatherings surrounding some of these episodes: guides for more generative encounters, wider conversations, and more generous questions. These tools aren’t prescriptions, but invitations. In the conversations of this season you will hear the material of these guides being worked out in public. Perhaps you can consume them together in some capacity, or let us know who or what they should be in conversation with.

This next chapter of Origins is about exploring conversation, that great practice of placing two things next to one another and allowing them to be astonished by the other; about moving into and out of things; about that most elemental of dynamics of life: breathing. Robert Frost once wrote, "the most exciting movement in nature is not progress, advance, but expansion and contraction, the opening and shutting of the eye, the hand, the heart, the mind. We throw our arms wide with a gesture of religion to the universe; we close them around a person. We explore and adventure for a while and then we draw in to consolidate our gains. The breathless swing is between subject matter and form."

So Season Eight will be a conversation between sameness and change, ongoingness and endings. These are more than oppositions, they are paradoxes, contradictory elements that must coexist, and it is the fact of their liability to clash that they furnish the dynamic we need to live well together and to create flourishing societies. Paradoxes require rethinking for a new, always changing context; they are a challenge to reframe, to stay vital, and the conversational response to them calls us into this task together. If ever there was a more important wisdom for our democracies, I don't know it.

What will remain the same? You will continue to hear interviews with thought-leaders across an eclectic mix of disciplines drawing out the pivotal moments across their lives, but it will be augmented by explorations of new structures of conversation and potentially new ways of asking, always moving toward generativity and generosity. Mischievous anthropologist, David Graeber, authored a new history of humanity by beginning with the idea that is it not about coming up with new answers to old questions, but re-examining what the right questions to ask even are and of whom we are asking the questions. Origins will remain an exploration of discovering the right question.

And what will be new? A few things this season makes itself about:

• Vulnerability and needfulness

• Care and compassion

• Awe and what it works in us

• The conversational nature of reality

• Intersections and plurality

• Being alongside

• Ongoingness and dialectic as an antidote to this time of devisiveness, of binarizing and dichotomizing; it is about widening our Overton windows and growing our oppositional literacy

Season Eight will also contain events we are designing to bring people together into conversation. So it will also be about creating experiences and encounters and the connection that can emerge in their wake.

As always, we will orient our discourse toward what it means to flourish, to live well to and for each other. But it is with an ecological and anthropological sensibility that we conceive of flourishing, one that carries an intention to bear witness to more of the complexity of the other, to honor and echo not only the similarities but also the differences. The anthropologist’s mode of inquiry is ethnographic field work; spend time with groups of people.

So I'm thinking a lot about the necessary and important friction of real connection. I'm thinking about the conversational nature of connection. Words create worlds and I find myself craving a more muscular conception of what it means to live with and for each other, a conception that is not served by the discourse around community these days. We seem to have overused the term and forgotten what it carries. We call for community, but expect it to be frictionless, easy, recognized and rewarded. But that is hardly our experience of the nature of being together -- which is full of friction and messiness and complexity; whose daily and unending work is impossible to quantify and mostly invisible. I suggest we adopt new language, if for no other reason to challenge us to rethink things. For me that term has been collective.

A collective is an entity unconstrained by the boundaries and expectations we generally place on community, whether those be geographic, institutional, or ideological in nature. And that is the point: collectivity is a concept that subverts those requirements. Instead it draws our imagination to what can happen when ideology is discarded, when we recognize and revere the fact of impermanence and meet that fact with less rigid minds, willing to change ourselves to the conditions. That is the pathway into collectivity: a self-preparation, a cultivation of the capacity to 'empty yourself of the self' (in Buddhist terms, self-emptying and non-self). It recognizes that the becoming is not within you, but emergent from relationship. And this process is ongoing, a continual striving. Collectivity is an ideal, a pāramitā; accessible by worldviews exemplified by complexity thinking, dialectic, anthropology. It is, in short, a calling toward conversation.

Origins mirrors the process of flourishing itself where an appropriate definition of flourishing might be: Flourishing is the actualization of all beings toward their good. It is a continual process—one of negotiation and dialectic—between individual understanding of their own good and collective well-being created through and above our interactions with one another, all in response to the question, 'How do we live well with and for each other?' A collaborative project of this scale, after all, is worth holding in many hands and over the long durée.

Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

I wrote this short essay in response to questions I've been living lately, and I want to leave you with one to carry into the conversations that will follow. What does the notion of flourishing work in us?

Flourishing is not about resolution, but rather 'being among.' It draws us into conversation with each other and that has always been what Origins is about. Returning to the words of Danielle Allen, "There is no end to history, no state of rest for democracy."