What binds together our personal, interpersonal, and planetary evolution?
What binds together our personal, interpersonal, and planetary evolution?
Whether you’re lonely or in a relationship (or lonely in a relationship), nurturing a friendship can be your ticket to a richer, more fulfilling life.
You don’t need to be a conscious evolutionary agent (although it helps a little bit) to appreciate the gifts of a special kind of relationship, the developmental friendship. It’s that kind, in which we do not only accept each other as we are but also, deeply care for and support realizing each other’s fuller potential
When we befriend someone (not in “Facebook style” but in reality), we open a door to infinite and sometimes surprising possibilities. One of them is discovering a shared concern about our planetary future and a desire to do something meaningful evoked by that concern.
If one dares to feel deeply both that concern and desire, then the question naturally emerges, What Can I Do?
Out from that grows the 2nd question, What Do I Feel Called to Contribute?
Each of us will have a different answer to that question, which will make us feel better about ourselves and probably, also connect us with others whose contribution is on the same domain. In the shared work, friendships may grow that have a special air of camaraderie.
When friends engaged in action addressing any of our multiple crises, and they’re are also working on their personal development, then their relationship may grow more easily into the developmental friendship mentioned earlier.
Reaching the stage of evolutionary consciousness on one’s journey, the most exciting, life-giving inquiry is not “What Do I Feel Called to Contribute” but focused on the 3rd question, What’s the Most Strategic Thing I Can Do?
As we explore that question with those, and only with those, who are similarly passionate about that inquiry, our developmental friendship may grow into evolutionary friendship. That’s because the defining context of our relationship is not the next-stage you and next-stage me anymore but the next stage on humanity’s evolutionary journey.
In the progression of these three questions, there are fewer people who can ask each subsequent one in an authentic, embodied way, ready to act on wherever their inquiry takes them. It is even more so with the 4th question, How Can I Live My Life So as To Be an Optimal Instrument of Service?
(These questions are illuminated by 10 principles that we need to honor if we want to contribute the most effectively we can, in a wise guidance for evolutionaries, “Calling All Integral Practitioners Responding Effectively to the Crises and Craziness of Our Times”. You don’t have to be an “integral practitioner” to benefit from it, but reading and acting on it could “risk” turning you into one… 🙂)
This roadmap for our relational evolution, like any map, is not the territory. What I outlined here is a sketch of a possible path. Our individual journeys will greatly vary. However, one of their common characteristics is that we can’t walk the path alone. We are fortunate to have each other in the first cohort of the Protopia Learning Expedition, where we grow our future with evolutionary impact.
As we embark on the next leg of the Expedition, focused on the Interpersonal Shift, let’s get ready to welcome and extend our friendship to those who will join us on this new segment.
As we embark on the next leg of the Expedition, starting on 29-Apr-2021 and focused on the Interpersonal Shift, let’s get ready to welcome and extend our friendship to those who will join us on this new segment.
If you’re one of those, who want to reserve one of the few places left, contact Anna Betz at your earliest convenience at anna@campus-coevolve.org.