## Resilient Koan 18 - Ebb and Flow ### Koan: How do you choose between effort and acceptance? ### Discussion: Objects and awareness seem to ebb and flow: move towards, move away, move strongly, move weakly, are present and absent. I perceive and experience a choice about how carefully I observe the ebb and flow, how I orient myself to it, and therefore what I decide to do and how I act. The currents of culture, time, money, resources, and energy are not just operating on an individual level, but at the scale of communities, nations, planets and beyond. Often my orientation has been towards always making effort to slow the flow, or accelerate and energise in the ebb in service of generating change, and based on an assumption that positive progress should always be hard work (because hard work is love made visible). ### Inquiry: If objects and awareness are both in flux, but in a range of directions relative to one's intention, how does one know when to exert effort or when to accept the ebb and flow? If one's intention is towards sustainability, or aligned with sustainability, is there any guidance on how we can intelligently and effectively to support systems to move in that direction? Some scenarios: 1. If sustainability, resilience and health of a system/organisation/community are framed as destinations and the energy and resources to get towards that destination are unlimited then the logic would be to always be 'pushing' and making 'effort' and never accepting an ebb or flow back in the 'wrong direction'. 2. If the framing as a destination remained, but resources are limited, then the strategy may be to accept when things slow down, but make efforts at the right time to accelerate flow in the right direction - like timing when you push on a swing in a playground to maximise the impact for limited resources. 3. If sustainability, resilience and health are not framed as destinations, but rather states or conditions that are enacted, emergent and evolving then the question and answer are different again. In that case effort or acceptance are not simply considerations of the practitioner in relation to some external circumstances, they are also choices that reflect and create the experience of the practitioner and likely the system with which they are interacting, in the moment. ### Resolution: Any sort of effortless power in facilitating healthy shifts or next-level catalysing of sustainable development is likely to require simultaneous acceptance and effort: * Acceptance of one's experience and context to orient towards it, and * Effort to stay connected to one's intention, the most enlightened perspective, and to make decisions take action that are most conducive to both positive experience and positive development. The effort required to see and accept things as they can be substantial (if it requires practice and conscious setting aside of one's desires, filters and distractions) or none (if you just let everything fall away). Perhaps the view from the non-dual and the broadest perspective is of absolute acceptance, and yet the experience and observation within the relative universe is of constant striving and effort to reach towards perfection? Perhaps the test of whether one is making 'right effort' in service of the whole can not be the either experience (of practitioner) or observation (in the system) of ebb and flow. Perhaps ebb and flow are ebb and flow, they are neither signals or health nor alerts to make more effort, rather just characteristics and 'moods' of complex systems. ### Practice: Choose both and neither acceptance and effort, in service of one's intention: a sort of action-inquiry relationship to more and more healthy experiences and system' states. Have the humility to accept the ebb, flow, state and stage of experience and the system, but refuse to accept that it could or should stay the same. Have the boundless energy and temerity to make constant effort in service of the emergence of the more complex experience and system, but also know that if you are really making that much constant effort then it might nor really be contributing to either your or the system's health. --- 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.