## Resilient Koan 12 - Being and Becoming ### _Koan_: "How do you gain the energy for becoming, while expending all of it on being?" ### _Discussion_: Being in transition sucks. We expend energy gaining distance from the old while needing to find energy to explore the new. It feels self-defeating. Transitions are like pushing out of a pool as opposed to swimming in it or running around. We have to expend all the energy being half in and half out and doing neither effectively. ### _Inquiry_: Is a strategy to involve the mind in simply engaging with the new without reference to the old? But what happens to the new when you return to the old? Can it be held? ### _Insight_: Perhaps when I write about the future as if it was existent, the existent-now will just flow there. Where no-one is asking, but will be asking soon, how does one answer the question and speak about it as if already answered? ### _Resolution_: I am not solving a problem that exists, I am solving a problem before it occurs. And that means before it exists in mind. That is why bringing it into mind as a problem makes it unsolvable, but bringing it into mind as a solution, or a future state without a problem, there's a natural transition to it. The future must be attractive on its own merits, without the absence of the problem as its attractiveness. ### _Practice_: The trick is, instead of expending the energy on being, instead exist by making the Becoming the present being. ### _Reflection_: If you have to expend energy in solving a problem, as an apithologist you have failed, because you should have got there before the problem even came into mind, or even before the need for the problem's creation and causation came into mind. Our theory of change is then not a lightbulb effect, but a natural process of evolution, so we anticipate that progression and simply live into that path. --- This is one in a series of 25 'Resilient Koans' documenting "an apithologue into the koans of practice discovered while creating resilient sustainable communities", in 2010.