## Resilient Koan 07 - Holding and Receiving ### Koan: This might read: "How do you offer a substitute philosophy when the recipient doesn't even know they have one, and therefore don't feel the need for a substitute." ### Context: There is an old parable about the monkey [trap](http://www.godlessinamerica.com/monkeytrap.html), where if we grasp something we have to hold it within our clenched fist and in not wanting to let it go, we remain trapped by the vessel that contains it.  The Koan this week was slightly more subtle, where until we are offered a new gift to receive, we do not know that we have our fist in a monkey trap. Sustainability conceptions are the monkey traps. ### Reflections: Karl Popper said the only excuse for the modern discipline of philosophy is to know that you have one. I wonder if not knowing that we have a sustainability philosophy is prompted by an inquiry whether we would like one. Each person and organisation does have a sustainability  ethos even if this is tacit. Can asking them for a new one, prompt a useful no, but awareness of the one they have? ### Context: I have a personal ethos of not projecting my values without first inquiring. People ask 'What do you do?' or 'What is sustainability?" and I usually ask 'How would you like me to answer the question?" - which seems obtuse, but really its simply respectful, as by their answer you gauge how the question is being framed and what makes sense in their meaning making. (Some subtle intuition is also involved). ### Learning: I do this is because meaning and its coherence is paramount. Having it alter in my own image, opinion, desire is secondary. I'd rather a sustainable something than a confused nothing, as within coherence is the potential for emergence, and within emergence is the potential for greater capacity and more life. In confusion inflicted by me, there is only self-affirming conflict and frustration. ### Insight: I think there is no paradox here. The offering is otiose. The prior question is to formulate the mind that helps find the sustainability vision they have. Only then can one inquire as to whether it is adequate, to them, for them. Bringing into mind the philosophy is always necessary before we try to ram home our own version. Only then can one see what it is they have and how it serves them best. Nothing can fill a filled space. Let the other first find what it has, to decide if it is this that they want to keep, for now. --- 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.