What is life asking you to be? do? give? learn? create?
explorations of the existential & ecological
The Path of Purpose and Poetry
A quest for elegant solutions in response to the metacrisis.
Purpose
The drive captured by the left hemisphere of the brain’s orientation towards utility and practicality. It’s focused on categorizing, controlling, and applying logic to understand and shape the world. This pole of consciousness facilitates direction, goals, and quantifiable outcomes and contributes to a sense of progress and achievement.
Poetry
The draw captured by the right hemisphere's orientation to the implicit, symbolic, emotional, and holistic aspects of existence. Poetry transcends the literal and the immediately practical, inviting engagement with mystery, metaphor, and the profound depths of existence. This mode of being values beauty and the exploration of meanings that cannot be fully captured in utilitarian terms.
Complexity and Confusion as Context
We’re living through a digital revolution. The growth of the internet is considered “hyper-exponential,” which means that the rate of growth is itself expanding. Every two to three years, the data on the internet almost doubles. We can no longer keep up with what’s happening at a local, national, or international level. Without proper discernment, it’s impossible to take in all the information that exists about even a single topic.
Every day, there are new tools, terms, and tactics offered to us as a way to make sense of all this information. This adds complexity to our lives over time. And, increasingly, what matters to us becomes obscured.
So, how do we navigate this context with wisdom? How do we maintain the beauty of this world as it changes so rapidly? What does it look like to live a good life in these changing times?
The Wisdom of Roots: Beyond the Postmodern
The fruit of of wisdom is right action, but the beginning of wisdom is being rooted in the right context, in the right way. If fruit is right action, the branches represent right relationship to knowledge. To be wise is not just to know what is factual or true but to also relate to that knowledge in a way that brings it into greater integrity with other truths.
Wisdom is also the capacity to act in a way that is in integrity with what ultimately matters. This requires knowing what ultimately matters. The opposite of wisdom isn’t ignorance but the failure to account for what’s important in the grand scheme of things, whether that’s through narrow-minded focus, conceited neglect, or something else.
According to the experts on existential risk who set the Doomsday Clock, we are the closest we’ve ever been to catastrophe. Arguablely, we are in a wisdom crisis: we are failing to act in ways that honor what truly matters. This chaotic state is also a manifested in postmodernity, which is defined by the absence of grand, all-encompassing narratives or universal truths in the zeitgeist. In other words, there aren’t many agreed upon notions of what ultimately matters.
From this place of unsteadiness, the path to wisdom must start at the very beginning: being rooted in the right context (the realm of awareness), relating to that context in the right way (the realm of knowledge), and doing the right thing (the realm of virtue).
Holisitic & Human
Hi, I’m Aaliah.
Growing up as a third culture kid living in three countries before the age of 14, I’ve had to face a lot of complexity and shifting contexts from a young age. Being raised in a bilingual household, I had to make sense of the world in two very different languages and their accompanying lens of viewing reality. I spent six of the twelve years of grade school in self-directed learning, which further set me on a path of stepping outside the conventional approach in pursuit of deeper coherence.
My journey of seeking wisdom amidst complexity and confusion has included earning a degree in psychology, working in the field of theoretical and applied psychology research, and becoming certified in coaching change and personal energy literacy.
In my last seven years as a coach, I’ve learned that sustainable change doesn’t come from forcing new behaviors but from understanding and working with the patterns that already exist in your life. As such, my work draws from the approach of systems thinking and the wisdom found in nature.
I’m interested in the inner work that only humans can facilitate for one another. Beyond quick fixes or cliche solutions that AI can provide, what is possible through the gaze of an embodied being? What simple yet profound shifts in our way of being in the world could benefit the greater ecosystem of life?
Elegant Solutions
embracing the wisdom of nature
Elegant solutions are:
- simple without being simplistic
- meaningfully complex rather than complicated
- work with natural patterns rather than against them
- address multiple challenges at once
In nature, we see this everywhere: how the fractal design of a leaf allows it to capture sunlight, regulate water through transpiration, exchange gases with its environment, and serve as a habitat for microorganisms and insects that are needed for the larger ecosystem. The design of the leaf maximizes efficiency and resilience without redundancy.
By focusing on simple patterns and principles (such as through fractal design), living systems can accommodate complex, adaptive processes. By understanding the deeper patterns in nature and applying them to our own lives, we can learn to live in ways that are both personally meaningful and collectively valuable to the larger ecosystem of people and planet.
Purpose & Poetry is rooted in the intention of connecting the practical and the profound so that we may make wiser choices that nurture meaning and beauty in our lives.
Purpose
The drive captured by the left hemisphere of the brain’s orientation towards utility and practicality. It’s focused on categorizing, controlling, and applying logic to understand and shape the world. This pole of consciousness facilitates direction, goals, and quantifiable outcomes and contributes to a sense of progress and achievement.
Poetry
The draw captured by the right hemisphere's orientation to the implicit, symbolic, emotional, and holistic aspects of existence. Poetry transcends the literal and the immediately practical, inviting engagement with mystery, metaphor, and the profound depths of existence. This mode of being values beauty and the exploration of meanings that cannot be fully captured in utilitarian terms.
Notes for the journey of seeking:
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