A small note on how this was written: I spent about five hours thinking my way through this piece in conversation with AI, wandering across history, land, belonging, responsibility and several places I hadn’t expected to go. AI helped me hold the map and turn the exploration into an article. I then pulled it apart, rewrote it and kept working until it sounded and felt like me. So yes, AI was involved. But I was very much here. LOL.

This morning I spent several hours thinking about what it means to build a truly shared community on land that carries unresolved history.

My first, and perhaps obvious, instinct was that the Indigenous nation whose territory it is should be recognized as the host nation. And host nation in this context wouldn’t just mean being acknowledged ceremonially, but being present as a real founding authority with its history, laws, knowledge, and relationship with the land woven into the community from its beginning.

And I was happy because it seemed obvious and right.

And then as I kept the space open, it didn’t feel so right.

I had an unsettled feeling underneath that I couldn’t put my finger on right away. Eventually, I realized it was the word host. Because if one people remain the host forever, does everyone else remain a guest forever?

At first, that maybe seems appropriate. It recognizes who was there first and refuses to erase the injustice through which the land came under another society’s control. It protects against the familiar process in which newcomers become the majority and then use their numbers to eliminate the authority of those who welcomed (or simply preceded) them. But I wonder if it also creates another problem?

Can people ever become true stewards of a place if they are told, across generations, that they don’t fully belong to it?

A guest may respect a home and care for it beautifully, but they don’t carry the same responsibility for its distant future, because the home ultimately belongs to someone else. And what happens to the child born into that community and to that place? Or to the family who has lived there for four generations? At what point does someone cease to be a visitor and become part of the place itself?

I think there are two truths here that resist being placed neatly together.

The first is that we can’t create a shared future by pretending everyone arrived through the same history. Indigenous peoples didn’t simply arrive earlier in an otherwise neutral competition for land. Their societies, laws, and relationships with particular territories existed before the governments that later claimed authority over them. And much of what followed involved displacement, broken agreements, forced assimilation and the deliberate interruption of those relationships.

Any new community that declares, “We are all equal now,” without addressing that history risks converting the results of injustice into the neutral starting conditions of the future.

But the second truth is that repair also can’t mean arranging people permanently into those who truly belong and those who remain conditionally present. While that may preserve historical memory, it can’t create a shared people.

So maybe the movement needs to look something like this:

Consent. Co-founding. Shared inheritance.

Consent means that a new community can’t simply declare itself into existence on someone else’s territory. Its presence must begin through an honest agreement with the Indigenous nation whose relationship with that place has been carried across generations.

Co-founding means that the original nation is not included as a cultural advisor within someone else’s project. Its knowledge, laws, history, and authority help shape the project at its foundation.

But shared inheritance means that what is then created together must eventually belong, in responsibility, participation, and future possibility, to everyone who fundamentally becomes part of it.

This shared position doesn’t make every resident Indigenous. Historical and cultural identities can’t simply be adopted through proximity or good intentions. Nor should the original nation have to surrender the practices, knowledge and institutions through which it remains a distinct people.

Recognizing the depth of Indigenous belonging does not require us to deny that other people may also develop an authentic relationship with the same place. One relationship may reach back thousands of years, while another begins with immigration, birth, marriage, invitation or commitment. Each relationship is unique, but difference doesn’t necessarily require that one remain authentic and the other permanently provisional.

Perhaps belonging is something that can be inherited and also something that must be cultivated. I think we need this to be true, not only so that newer relationships can become real, but because care for the land cannot remain a responsibility we assign primarily to Indigenous peoples. There is something romantic in imagining them as its natural stewards, but also something that lets the rest of us off the hook. We can’t admire the depth of another people’s relationship with the land while continuing to treat our own as optional. If we are to belong here, then stewardship must become part of our relationship too. It might grow through learning the history of a place, caring for its water and soil, accepting responsibility for what our presence changes, participating in its community, and committing ourselves to a future we may never personally see.

Many Indigenous peoples have carried place-based knowledge of reciprocity, responsibility and ecological relationship across generations, and the wider world may have much to learn from them, where that knowledge is freely shared. But learning cannot mean extracting a set of attractive principles while leaving our existing assumptions and structures untouched. Nor can it mean asking Indigenous peoples to “save” the rest of us. The learning will not move in only one direction; no culture carries everything the future will require. Perhaps what comes next, by ecological necessity as much as moral aspiration, will depend upon learning across different knowledge systems without collapsing them into one. And that may require us to form communities differently: around relationship as well as ownership, obligations as well as rights, and the understanding that our lives exist within the living systems that sustain them.

Under that model, the land wouldn’t pass from ownership by one people into ownership by another, nor would one group remain its eternal landlord. The land itself would become the enduring participant.

Every generation would receive rights of habitation and use, but also obligations. The original Indigenous relationship would remain present in the community’s language, law, memory, and stewardship while new relationships would be permitted to become real rather than being dismissed as inherently lesser because they began later.

Historical repair would still be necessary. Land, authority, resources, and cultural continuity can’t be replaced by a generalized language of togetherness. But perhaps repair also needs a destination beyond permanent moral roles. Otherwise, descendants remain arranged as creditor and debtor peoples, with one carrying an unresolved claim and the other an inherited guilt, and neither position offering a clear way forward.

The past can’t be reconciled if reconciliation means making it not have happened. Lives can’t be returned, cultures can’t always be reconstructed, and an apology can’t restore a forest, a language or a century of interrupted relationship.

But maybe the damage itself can become part of a founding covenant:

• We will tell the truth about how we arrived here.

• We will not use equality to erase history.

• We will not use history to deny the possibility of future belonging.

• We will protect what must remain distinct.

• We will share what can become common.

• And we will understand our place here not as ownership, but as responsibility.

I don’t know yet what institutions could hold all of that, and maybe no structure can resolve the tension completely. But I do think a truly shared future must allow people to become something more than hosts and guests. Maybe the deeper question is whether we can create a we capacious enough to remember that our beginnings were unequal without making inequality of belonging permanent.

Like many people, I watched the response to Substack’s new AI-detection feature and initially thought, “Yeah, okay. For people who are here to practise the art of prose (which is a significant part of Substack’s original culture) I understand why this matters.”

And then I thought, “Wait. That’s not what I’m here for though..?” Does that mean I don’t quite belong in the Substack community, with or without AI? Bear with me, because I think this question applies to much more than just Substack.

I started writing here because I wanted to participate in conversations about the things I don’t understand in the world, as well as the things I may be beginning to understand.

I want to think with other people and poke at what we don’t know. I want to explore questions across the many languages of psychology, history, sociology, science, technology and the experience of being human, often all at the same time.. this is tricky work.

I tend to think in multiple dimensions/perspectives at once, and putting language around that can be challenging. Before I try to write an “essay,” I may spend hours exploring an idea, drawing on the lifetime of experience behind it and following each thread far enough to see how it connects with the others. Left to my own devices, I can easily produce thirty pages.

Those thirty pages are useful to me - they help me separate the threads before weaving them back into some kind of coherent understanding. They are part of how I think. But several decades of working with other people have also taught me that translation is a critical part of thinking together.

The thirty-page exploration that is illuminating for me may be almost impenetrable to someone else. Other people may still be interested in the questions I’m asking, but I don’t naturally create many on-ramps for them to enter the thinking space.

And that leaves me with a dilemma. Do I keep the exploration largely to myself because I’m not especially interested in developing the craft of literary writing? Do I spend hours turning every thought into carefully honed prose, even though that isn’t the work that energizes me? Or can I collaborate with something or someone that helps me translate the complexity into a form other people can enter?

For me, Substack is primarily a community of thinkers. I’m not here to compare my prose with the work of poets, novelists and essayists for whom language itself is the artistic medium. I love consuming that kind of writing, but it isn’t the practice I’m pursuing.

That doesn’t make the language irrelevant. If I want to think with other people, I need to communicate clearly enough for them to find their way into the thought. But for me, language is in service to the inquiry. It is not the central object being created. I think this may be one reason the conversation about AI and writing feels more complicated than the labels allow.

People who say they can recognize when AI has written something are often responding to something real. There is a certain texture to generic, machine-produced prose, and there is something unmistakably human about art that translates a particular experience through the choices, judgment and sensibility of an artist.

I don’t want that distinction to disappear, and I also don’t think everything we publish is trying to be that kind of art. Sometimes the purpose of writing is to make thought available and to create a meeting place where an idea can be examined, challenged and expanded by other people. That’s usually what I am doing here.

My process tends to look something like this:

1. I explore. Sometimes at considerable length. Then I write a shorter narrative that I hope will create a conversation.

2. After that, I may share both the exploration and the shorter piece with AI. I ask where I have inadvertently erased other perspectives. I ask where I have created another off-ramp through verbosity or complexity. I ask where the logic doesn’t hold together, or where a reader might misunderstand the point I’m reaching for. And, yes, sometimes I ask for a cleaner version.

3. Then I go through the suggestions. I keep what feels accurate. I reject what doesn’t. I put things back when the refinement has removed too much of me. I make the final judgment about whether the piece still says what I mean and whether I am willing to stand behind it.

Usually, the result isn’t radically different from what I wrote. But it is more accessible to other people. And this makes me happy.

Until now, I might have described this as using AI to refine my writing, but even that no longer feels quite accurate. I could refine the writing myself because I understand the changes that would make it tighter. What I am not interested in doing is spending another hour honing every essay when the part I care most about is the inquiry itself.

Or I can co-write it with AI. I can remain responsible for the experience, the questions, the underlying thought and the judgment about what is true. AI can become a partner in structure, compression, clarity and translation. It can help me notice gaps, anticipate misreadings and create the on-ramps I often fail to create on my own.

The finished piece then emerges from a relationship.

That isn’t the same as asking a machine to generate a thought and placing my name on it, but it’s also more than spellcheck. The collaboration affects the expression, and sometimes the exchange helps me recognize an implication I had not yet articulated, and I’m comfortable being transparent about that.

What makes me uncomfortable is the assumption that the most meaningful question is simply: Did AI contribute to these words?

That tells us something about the production of the sentences, but it may tell us very little about the production of the thought.

• Who originated the inquiry?

• Whose experience is being examined?

• Who exercised judgement?

• Who decided what belonged and what did not?

• Who is willing to be responsible for what was finally published?

A detector cannot answer those questions. It can estimate patterns in language, but the provenance of the sentences is not the same thing as the provenance of the thought.

And this becomes even more important when we look beyond people like me. I have been reading perspectives from people who write in English as an additional language. They may have complex and beautiful thoughts to contribute but face a language barrier that makes it difficult for others to meet those thoughts. AI can help translate not only between languages, but between a person’s internal understanding and the conventions through which others can recognize it.

I don’t want to romanticize that or use someone else’s experience to justify my own. I just think it shows how many different human purposes are being compressed into the single category of “AI-assisted writing.”

Some people are making literary art, some are translating, some are organizing research, some are learning to communicate in a new language, some are using AI to manufacture plausible authority they have not earned, and some are doing what I am doing: developing their own thinking in conversation with another form of intelligence and using that collaboration to make the result more accessible. These practices are not ethically or creatively identical just because AI touched the language.

And maybe that’s what troubles me about the current discussion. A label that appears to offer transparency may actually erase the distinctions we most need to understand. I can appreciate why readers want to know what they are encountering. I want to know, too. I don’t want human experience displaced by vast quantities of frictionless content made without curiosity, accountability or care.

But if we are trying to protect authentic participation, we need a richer understanding of authorship than a percentage produced by a detector. Maybe disclosure should describe the process rather than classify the product. Tell me:

• whether AI generated the premise.

• whether it assembled the research.

• whether it drafted the language, challenged the reasoning, translated the original or served as an editor.

• what the human contributed and who stands behind the result.

That would help me understand what I am reading. “AI-assisted” doesn’t tell me very much at all.

Maybe there are different arenas here not ranked above or below one another, but organized around different purposes. There should be space for writers who want to explore human-generated language as an artistic form. There should be space for people who are thinking publicly and want help creating an opening through which others can join them. There should be space for work created through transparent collaboration between different kinds of intelligence.

We don’t need to pretend these are the same practice, but we also don’t need to turn the difference into a moral judgment. The question isn’t only whether a machine touched the language. The more interesting questions are where the thinking came from, how judgment was exercised, what kind of relationship produced the work, and who is willing to stand behind what was published.

Those are the distinctions I want our labels to help us see, and, fittingly, this essay is now an example of the thing I am describing. It began as my own exploration and my own draft. I then developed it in conversation with an AI collaborator, using that exchange to clarify the structure, examine the logic and make the language easier to enter.

The experience is mine. The questions and underlying argument are mine. I remain responsible for what is published.

The final expression was made together.

Post Script:
After co-writing this essay, I ran it through Substack’s detector and it classified the result as:

• AI: 49%

• AI-assisted: 19%

• Human: 32%

I was shocked by that result, not because AI had made no contribution, but because the percentages bore so little relationship to my experience of creating the piece.

So I tried applying a different set of filters. Here is my own account of where the work came from:

• Impetus for the essay: 100%

• Lived experience behind it: 100%

• Human original inquiry and ideas: 100%

• Human exploratory thinking: 100%

• Human first draft: 100%

• Human core argument: 100%

• Logic: Human 95%, AI 5% developed through dialogue

• Structure of the final draft: Co-created, then human edited final draft

• Final language: Substantially AI-generated, under my direction

• Selection and final judgment: 100%

• Human Responsibility for publication: 100%

These percentages can’t be added together. They are not competing portions of a single pie, and that’s exactly the point.

A piece of writing is not one undifferentiated substance called “content” - it contains experience, inquiry, ideas, reasoning, structure, language, judgment and responsibility. Different participants can contribute differently to each layer.

Substack’s detector appears to be evaluating the statistical characteristics of the final language. That may be one relevant piece of information, but the presentation turns that narrow measurement into something that looks like a comprehensive account of authorship: it tells the reader this essay is only 32% human.

My experience is that it is entirely grounded in human thought and experience, expressed through a genuine collaboration in which AI contributed substantially to the final language and structure.

Both accounts acknowledge AI involvement. But they tell profoundly different stories about what was created and who created it. The question isn’t which percentage makes me look better, it’s which account helps a reader understand the work.

I have two sons, both in their twenties. Like many of us from the Gen-X era, I feel the weight of the future heavy upon my shoulders - we have an opportunity and a responsibility to influence our society for our children and the generations that follow.

The past century and a half has brought a degree of technological change that is difficult to comprehend. The commercially practical incandescent light bulb arrived less than 150 years ago. Since then, we have moved from horses to spacecraft, candles to LEDs, handwritten letters to instantaneous global communication, and energy systems built almost entirely on fossil fuels toward ones increasingly incorporating solar, wind, storage, and other forms of generation. The amount of change that people living through this period have had to absorb is astounding.

And at almost every major technological threshold, we have experienced the same tension. We can see that the new technology may enable something extraordinary. At the same time, the distance between the world we know and the world it might create feels terrifying.

Railways provoked anxiety about the bodily and social consequences of unprecedented speed. What would happen to people when they travelled faster and farther than previous generations could have imagined? What would happen to communities when distance no longer contained human movement?

As electric lighting entered homes and cities, people worried about electrocution, fire, health, sleep, public morality, and the disruption of the natural boundary between day and night. Some of those concerns were entirely reasonable: artificial light profoundly changed the rhythms of work, rest, and urban life, and we are still learning about its effects on human biology. (⁠PubMed)

The telephone raised fears that privacy would disappear, that constant access would intrude upon domestic life, and that mediated communication might displace face-to-face relationships. Early telephone systems did, in fact, create new privacy problems: calls were often made in public places or carried across shared lines where others could listen. (⁠Elon University)

As automobiles became commonplace, people worried about danger, congestion, crime, the loss of public space, and the transformation of cities around machines rather than people.

Radio and television brought concerns that families would stop talking, children would stop learning, reading would decline, and public life would become vulnerable to propaganda and spectacle.

Personal computers and the internet raised fears of mass unemployment, social isolation, dehumanization, dependence upon machines, the disappearance of libraries and newspapers, and a world in which no one would know what was true.

The list continues.

There was, and still is, a grain of truth in many of these fears. New technologies create real harms, and each generation inherits the ongoing task of understanding and governing them.

But our predictions repeatedly miss something important. We tend to imagine innovation by starting with the world we already have and then adding the new technology:

today’s world, plus the invention.

But technological revolutions do not simply accelerate existing systems, they reconfigure the systems themselves.

People understood that the automobile might replace the horse. Far fewer anticipated the suburbs, interstate highways, global logistics networks, shopping centres, drive-through restaurants, daily commuting, roadside motels, emergency transportation systems, and the weekend road trip.

Those were second- and third-order effects. They arose not from the automobile alone, but from the way people, businesses, governments, cities, and cultures reorganized around it.

I think artificial intelligence represents another such threshold. The dominant fears today are familiar:

• AI will replace everyone.

• AI will become conscious and destroy humanity.

• No one will learn to think.

• Every job will disappear.

• Truth will disappear.

Each of these possibilities deserves serious thought. Some describe real risks that are already emerging. But I suspect they remain largely first-order fears.

The deeper transformation may be something we are not yet discussing enough: Not simply that AI might think for us, but that it could change how human thinking itself is organized.

Over the past few years, an enormous support industry has emerged to help people use AI: prompt-engineering courses, productivity programs, corporate adoption initiatives, technical integrations, automation platforms, and increasingly sophisticated tools. Some organizations now ask employees to demonstrate or report how they used AI during the week. The understandable goal is usually to increase adoption, reduce costs, or improve productivity.

But this may still be the equivalent of attaching a motor to the existing machinery. It asks:

How can we use AI to perform the work we already do more efficiently?

That is a useful question, but it may not be the most consequential one. The greater opportunity is to consider how we might reorganize around this technology.

The question is not only whether AI will replace human thinking. The question I am interested in is different:

What happens when thinking itself gains a new environment in which to unfold?

One of the most common things I hear from people working with complexity is that the world has become too fragmented to hold. Experts are doing beautiful, rigorous work deep inside their disciplines, but often lack places where their knowledge can meet adjacent fields.

Large organizations and governments operate through divisions, departments, mandates, funding structures, and reporting systems that divide problems which do not arrive divided in the real world.

At the ground level of society, people see different pieces of both the problem and its possible solutions, but struggle to understand how those pieces could fit together into coherent action.

Meanwhile, leaders, founders, researchers, advisors, and changemakers are reaching the limits of what they can carry internally.

They are not short of intelligence, commitment, and often, they are not even short of ideas.

They are short of cognitive room.

They are trying to hold context, relationships, uncertainty, competing needs, institutional history, emerging possibilities, and practical decisions simultaneously, and then translate all of that into something other people can see and act upon.

This is where I believe AI may offer something much more significant than faster writing or automated tasks. Used carefully, it can provide a place to externalize complex thought before that thought is fully formed:

• It can hold multiple threads while we examine the relationships between them.

• It can help us move across disciplines, surface patterns, expose assumptions, test interpretations, and translate ideas between people who do not share the same language or frame.

• It can allow us to see the structure of what we are carrying, rather than continuing to carry all of it inside ourselves.

It does not remove the need for human judgment, but creates more room in which judgment can operate.

It does not determine what matters, but instead can help us notice where our values, assumptions, and intentions are shaping what we see.

It does not replace the knowledge held by experts, communities, or lived experience. At its best, it can help create connective tissue between them.

That is why I developed AI as a Thinking Partner - a six-week, small-group course that has now run through several cohorts and continues to evolve through the real work participants bring into the room.

It is not primarily a course about software, prompt formulas, or producing more content. It’s a six-week, small-group practice for people carrying real complexity: leaders, founders, advisors, researchers, changemakers, and others who are trying to understand, build, or influence something that does not fit neatly inside a checklist.

Participants bring their own live questions, projects, decisions, and areas of inquiry.

Together, we learn how to use AI to:

• externalize thinking that is difficult to hold internally;

• find structure and pattern within complex material;

• explore questions without rushing prematurely toward answers;

• pressure-test assumptions and decisions;

• translate ideas into plans, communications, and usable structures;

• and build a personal way of working with AI that supports, rather than displaces, human agency.

The purpose is not to hand our thinking over to a machine. It is to increase our capacity to think, connect, discern, and act within a world that increasingly exceeds the limits of any single mind or discipline.

I am now gathering interest for upcoming cohorts. I am less interested in filling a class than I am in bringing together the right room: people who are carrying meaningful work, who are willing to explore seriously, and who sense that AI may offer more than another layer of efficiency.

If you recognize yourself in this, you can learn more about the course here:

⁠AI as a Thinking Partner - Foundations

You are also welcome to reply directly to this note and tell me something about the complexity, change, or possibility you are currently trying to hold.

Perhaps the future will not be shaped primarily by those who learn how to make AI produce more.

Perhaps instead it will be shaped by those who learn how to create more room - for knowledge to connect, assumptions to be examined, new structures to become visible, and for better possibilities to emerge.

Not because it doesn’t work. It does work, which is part of why the deeper issue is easy to miss. You ask a question, it gives you an answer, you refine it, and you move faster. In many cases, that’s very useful.

But moving faster is not the same as thinking better, and it’s certainly not the same as changing the underlying pattern.

I’ve spent a lot of time in systems where ideas are not the constraint. Often, the insight is already there. The solution is partly visible. The problem is that the thinking is scattered across conversations, documents, intuitions, tensions, and half-finished attempts to explain what someone already knows.

The bottleneck isn’t intelligence, it’s holding capacity. People are trying to carry too much complexity in their own heads. This is where AI becomes interesting to me.

Not as the proverbial better search engine or a content machine, and most certainly not as a shortcut around human judgment.

But as a way to get thinking out where we can see it.

When AI is used transactionally, it mostly amplifies what’s already there. It gives cleaner answers, faster drafts, better summaries, and more efficient output. That has value, but it can also leave the deeper pattern untouched. You are left with the same assumptions you came in with, including the same blind spots, and the same way of framing the problem. It’s just faster.

But when you stay with something unresolved a little longer, a different possibility opens: AI can begin to reflect the shape of your thinking back to you. Certainly not perfectly, magically, or an authority. But in fact, very usefully.

It can show you what you keep circling. Where you’re narrowing too early. What assumptions are sitting underneath the question. What structure might already be present in the mess. What you know, but haven’t yet found a way to say…

That’s a much more uncomfortable way to use AI, because it asks more of the human, not less. You have to bring real material. You have to notice your own resistance. You have to stay in the conversation long enough for something more than an answer to emerge. But that’s also where it becomes useful in a deeper way.

The risk is not only that AI becomes too powerful. The quieter risk is that we use it to become more efficient versions of exactly who we already are.

• More productive, but not more discerning.

• More articulate, but not more honest.

• Faster, but not wiser.

I’m interested in a different use, where we develop AI as a thinking partner.

• A way to work with complexity without collapsing it too quickly.

• A way to externalize what’s hard to hold alone.

• A way to see patterns, test assumptions, clarify decisions, and turn insight into usable form.

Not to replace thinking, but to make more of it visible.

That’s what I’ll be exploring here.

**********************

Today I’ve been contemplating the concept of “purpose.”

For a long time, I think I confused purpose with self-sacrifice. I lived inside a belief system that often led me to make choices that reduced my ability to simply be in order to serve what I understood as the greater good.

There was nobility in some of those choices. But there was also cost.

Startups that needed certainty during stages of deep ambiguity. Causes that seemed to require self-sacrifice in order to be brought to life. Systems that needed someone to hold the bridge, absorb the pressure, or become the stabilizing structure before the structure itself existed.

Over time, that created a quiet dissonance. The more I tried to be useful, the farther I sometimes moved from the actual pattern of my own being.

And I’m beginning to wonder if that entire frame is backwards.

What if our life’s journey is not about finding a singular “purpose” out there in the world?

What if it is about bringing the core pattern of who we are (the way we are built inside) into greater alignment with the way we live, work, relate, and express ourselves?

What if the systems around us call forth certain patterns when those patterns are needed?

And what if our task is not to become the hero who saves the day, or the sacrificial lamb who makes the system possible, but to become a clearer expression of the pattern we actually are?

• Not through force.

• Not through performance.

• Not through proving our usefulness.

But through coherence.

Through the lens of light and camera:

The aperture is the degree to which one’s pattern of living permits one’s pattern of being to participate in the evolution of the system.

The aperture does not invent the light. It becomes clear enough for the light to pass through in its particular shape.

An aperture is not merely openness. It is aligned expression.

When the pattern of living does not match the pattern of being, the aperture is distorted. The signal bends, fragments, leaks, or becomes over-managed. That’s when we feel the strain of having to “make ourselves useful,” because our usefulness is being routed through effort rather than coherence.

But when the pattern of living begins to match the pattern of being, something different happens.

We become available. Maybe not famous, rewarded, understood by everyone, or even necessarily seen. But yes, available.

And I wonder if availability may be the deeper word beneath purpose.

Not:

“What is my purpose?”

But:

“What pattern am I, and how do I become available to the system without distorting myself?”

When we think of a “neighbourhood,” many of us immediately picture something quite different: rows of suburban houses, small lawns, short hedges, and neighbours leaning over fences to exchange news about what is happening in the world. Yet my earliest experiences of neighbourhood looked very different from this image.

My mother grew up in a farming community of roughly 350 people, surrounded by wheat fields and located fifteen minutes from the nearest small city. When we visited my grandparents, no one used the front door. In fact, if someone knocked on it, the entire house would momentarily fall silent as everyone wondered who on earth it could be.

People simply walked up the driveway, slid open the glass door off the kitchen, and came in. By the time they reached the table, coffee was already being poured.

There was rarely ceremony. A casual “How’s it goin’?” was often enough. Unless, of course, the visitor had been away for a long time. Then hugs, laughter, and a warm sense of you belong here would ripple through the room.

What is striking to me is that these homes were often separated by a quarter mile or more. There was no cul-de-sac. No shared green space. No density. And yet, community was strong.

Later, I lived on Commercial Drive in Vancouver. The neighbourhood could not have been more different. It was dense, vibrant, and wonderfully eclectic: artists, families, professionals, breweries, activists, immigrants, and people living every imaginable version of life.

Community there was practiced differently. You called ahead. You arranged to meet for coffee. You scheduled playdates. You did not simply arrive unannounced. Home became sanctuary - a retreat from the constant sensory richness of “The Drive” itself. The street provided the shared experience while individual homes provided refuge.

Even there, however, I encountered another form of neighbourhood. A friend lived in a small condominium building where residents routinely left their doors open. Neighbours wandered in and out. Pets visited one another’s suites. When the building needed painting, residents collectively picked up brushes and completed the work together over a weekend. Somewhere between the paint, the shared meals, and perhaps a little beer, a genuine sense of family emerged.

And now I live in Lower Lonsdale, where people strike up conversations in grocery store lines. They chat in elevators. They greet one another on the street. The city itself has intentionally created gathering places: outdoor skating rinks that become splash parks in summer, public plazas, markets, stages, and spaces that invite people outside and into one another’s lives.

Which makes me wonder: What actually makes a neighbourhood?

Is it a particular housing form? Is it single-family homes and front yards? Or is neighbourhood something deeper? Perhaps a way people choose to show up for one another within the constraints and opportunities of the places they inhabit? This question feels increasingly important.

Over the past twenty years, my community has changed dramatically. Like many places around the world, population growth and housing pressure have transformed what was once a relatively small community into a much denser one.

Imagine living somewhere for fifty years and watching, in what feels like an instant, thousands of new people arrive. Suddenly, the patterns of relationship that shaped your life no longer work in the same way.

People and families living in 800-square-foot apartments often experience the city differently than those living in detached homes. For someone raising a family in a small apartment, public spaces matter enormously. Parks, splash pads, skating rinks, transit, and green spaces become extensions of home itself. They are not luxuries; they are necessities.

For someone who has lived for decades in a detached home, community may centre around a backyard, a long-established network of neighbours, and a car that enables independence. Many have aged in place. Transit may not be physically practical or geographically convenient. Their needs are no less real.

Neither perspective is wrong - both emerge from lived experience.

What a challenge it must be to plan communities that must simultaneously house young families, maintain affordability, support economic vitality, and honour the needs of an aging population whose experience of place is rapidly changing.

Perhaps this is symbolic of many of the tensions we see today.

It is remarkably easy to cast those with different needs as the problem. Social media amplifies this tendency, magnifying feelings of being unseen, unheard, or left behind until frustration hardens into camps and camps harden into conflict. We speak louder and louder, hoping the other side will finally hear us.

But what if we reversed the sequence?

What if we entered these conversations with open ears first? What if we sought to truly understand another person’s lived experience before offering our own?

How might our communities change if understanding became our starting point rather than our destination?

Over the past four months on Substack (it feels like much longer!), I’ve been slowly clarifying what I want this paid space to become. My hope is that this area becomes less of a traditional subscription and more of a studio: a place where emerging models, frameworks, and ideas can be explored together while they are still alive and evolving.

At the moment there are only a handful of us gathered here, and as far as I know, each of you works in some aspect of human development through executive coaching, organizational development, leadership, learning, or systems change. That makes this a particularly rich environment in which to share work that is still in formation.

So, in the spirit of opening the studio doors, I’d like to share something that is very much still under development: a model I’ve been working on that explores how human development unfolds across expanding fields of Self, Other, and World.

As these ideas mature, I intend to publish more polished versions under The Aperture Field brand, and if you find them useful in your own practice, you are welcome to use them freely. My only request is attribution and, where appropriate, an invitation for others to join the conversation.

I’ll admit that sharing work this early in its development feels a little vulnerable. But I suspect that the most interesting conversations happen before ideas are fully formed, when they can still surprise us.

So I’m hoping to post here relatively frequently, sharing models, experiments, visualizations, and questions as they emerge. More than anything, I’m interested in whether these ideas resonate with your lived experience and the work you do. Where do they fit? Where do they fall short? What feels missing?

What follows is one of those early explorations…

Read more

But then one year, my sister’s birthday came, and suddenly I wanted to be part of it and give her something from me. Only I realized that fact as family members were already arriving for her birthday party. And so, I quickly looked around my room, and thought of everything I had that looked like something she would also like. But my sister and I were very different people. I was consumed by fantasy books, music, and horses. She was very experiential, with dolls that talked, a large Barbie and My Little Pony collection, and other interactive toys. As I looked around my room, nothing was right.

I began madly opening drawers and stumbled across my nightstand drawer, which was filled with cheap charm necklaces and a bunch of fake money.. she collected charm bracelet stuff and loved money and gosh, I didn’t even ever wear these anyway, so I wouldn’t even miss them… we had a WINNER!

I quickly took the entire contents of my drawer dumped it unceremoniously into a wrapping paper nest, and with my heart brimming with excitement and the joy of sharing, I quietly added my gift to the pile. Upon seeing my gift, my sister looked at me in surprise and excitement (I was delighted! I couldn’t wait for her to love my gift), and she ripped open the hastily wrapped and tape covered mess of paper.

And as she opened it, her expression went from excited to confused, and the tenor of the room changed dramatically.. “you gave me your worn out charm necklace?” In that instant, I remembered she probably already had the same charms I had, and not only that, maybe the necklace itself had seen better days. Her expression changed to wondering if it was a cruel older sister joke, and my mom delivered the 1-2 punch.. “what did you do Kari, empty your bedside table drawer and just give it to your sister?”

I can’t remember if I tried to downplay it.. I kind of remember it as sort of trying to share why I thought it would be good, but quickly putting together how not-good it actually was, and feeling absolutely devastated by my own lack of preparation for her birthday and thoughtless gift.

We laugh about this now as a family - it was perhaps slightly typical of my somewhat clueless nature growing up. But it got me thinking.. the reality was that I had independently realized on my own accord, that I wanted to celebrate my sister’s birthday with her by doing something nice. I had zero practice at it, and was clueless as to what the creature who lived in the room next door to me actually liked, as all I really knew was that she made no sense to me whatsoever (sisterly love didn’t really arise for us until I left the house for college and the remaining family members experienced peace for perhaps the first time).

And over the years, I very slowly learned how to celebrate first my relationships with each family member by carefully thinking about them at their birthdays and Christmases, and hopefully giving them something special that either came from my heart and time, or was something meaningful they might enjoy. And those were baby steps towards learning a greater empathy towards others, and through many other painful missteps, I learned how to empathize in a way that brought them joy instead of confusion.

As a teenager, I wasn’t kind to my little sister, as the natural competition of siblings ensued, and an adult friend of the family took me to task for it. It was a steep learning curve for me, and the adult friend was ruthless in showing me how selfish I was in my behaviour and how hurtful I was to my sister. I’d love to be able to say that I knew that I was and this was just correction that I needed, but I really didn’t understand the perspective of someone else’s needs at that stage of my own journey.

Over time, I became fascinated with inhabiting the interior worlds of my partner, my friends, family members and others.. by building my own little model of their worlds, I could understand and predict their behaviours and as a result life got much easier. I could pick the right gifts, say the right things, feel their own pain or joy and relate to it. And the other side of the pendulum swing began.. I became so good at understanding other people that I started forgetting how to understand myself.

And this is where Carl Jung entered the story for me. Because eventually I became interested in understanding not just other people, but also why certain people affected me so strongly.

Why did one person’s behaviour roll off my back while another person’s behaviour could occupy my thoughts for days?

Why was I compassionate toward some people and reactive toward others?

Jung’s answer, at least as I first encountered it, was projection. The idea that what evokes a disproportionately charged reaction in us often points towards a similar unconscious trait within us that we carry.

At first, this felt like another expansion in empathy. Instead of asking only “What is happening for them?” I began asking, “What is happening in me?” And that question turned out to be incredibly useful.

Sometimes my reaction indeed pointed toward a trait I hadn’t recognized in myself.. something I had disowned. But over time, I started to notice something else: projection explained part of the picture, but not all of it.

I wonder if Jung’s perspective was a little lost in translation from the original German text, and if his perspective was actually more like ‘What evokes a disproportionately charged reaction in us often points toward something unconscious in us.’

The unconscious part in us may be anything from our own trait reflected back, a value we hold that is being broken, an unmet need, a disowned capacity, the opposite trait.. and on and on. But I think that’s one of two levels that ‘shadow work’ is actually about. I think we need to answer both questions in order to truly integrate the feeling so it no longer ‘triggers’ us:

1. why am I reacting (shadow work)

2. what is actually happening for the other person

So yes, we clean up our own house first (i.e. remove the plank from our own eye before addressing the speck in the other’s). But then, if we have found our own stability, the ‘stretch goal’ perhaps becomes about the fact that two systems have now collided in relationship, i.e.:

1. My reaction contains information about me.

2. Their behavior contains information about them.

3. The interaction between us contains information about the relationship.

And all three can be true at once.

So an example would be let’s say someone is controlling.

1. Level One would be the simplistic projection: “you dislike controlling-people because you yourself are controlling”.

2. Level Two would be “This person learned control because unpredictability was dangerous for them.”

And the second question changes something important. We still might not want them in our lives and/or refuse the behaviour and set a boundary, but the emotional field itself shifts from condemnation to understanding. It’s the difference between ‘you’re bad’ and ‘I understand how you got there’.

I think our own trauma is the work of Question 1 in unpacking the pain and suffering of our own life to see why we experience pain in colliding with this other person’s way of being. Trauma compresses pain into the perception of threat / enemy / avoid / danger.

But healing that trauma restores dimensionality, and we begin to be able to see their wound, the adaptation, the fear, the longing, and the humanity of the other person. And once we can see more clearly, our options expand. Sometimes that means repairing a relationship, sometimes it means extending compassion, sometimes it means realizing our assumptions were wrong, and sometimes it means setting a boundary. The point isn’t that every relationship should be preserved; it’s that we can finally respond to reality instead of reacting to our wounds.

And the tricky balance is that there is a trap here too - if you then only see the humanity in everyone but yourself, then you can become endlessly compassionate toward others while continually tolerating behaviors that don’t belong in your own life.

I think the true opportunity for integration is in holding both: the compassion and honouring of your own shadow and trauma while also holding compassion and honour for the trauma of the other. Boundary with compassion.

Looking back, I don’t think the lesson of the necklace was that I was selfish. I think the lesson was that I didn’t yet know my sister was a world unto herself. Growing up taught me to see other people’s worlds. Jung taught me to see my own. And relationship, I think, asks something harder still: the capacity to hold both at once.

My reaction contains information about me. Their behaviour contains information about them. And the space between us contains information about the relationship. Once we can see both ourselves and the other person clearly, we are finally free to choose our response.

“I understand why you are behaving this way. I don’t hate you for it. And I am also not available for it.”

We often talk about sustainability as though the world should exist in perfect equilibrium at all times; but living systems don’t work that way. They move through cycles of growth, consolidation, release, and renewal.

We need to look no farther than the seasons themselves: spring plants its seeds, summer is a season of growth and expansion, fall brings the harvest and evaluation as well as the pruning and cutting back of what no longer serves , and winter becomes a time of integration and preparation for what comes next.. and around and around we go.

Throughout history, we have seen this same cyclical rhythm appear again and again. We push forward and discover things that fundamentally reshape society - metallurgy, steam power, computing, AI.. In each transition, we surge toward new frontiers, summiting the edge of what we know and suddenly beholding an entirely new landscape of possibility.

But discovery is only the beginning.

What follows is always a period of incorporation, a long phase of weaving those discoveries into the fabric of society itself, fundamentally reshaping how we live, work, govern, relate and understand the world around us.

This is the natural rhythm of evolution. We push outward and find new edges. In doing so, we sense the exhilaration and fragility of standing at the boundary of the unknown and how new discoveries can either fracture systems or usher in entirely new eras of flourishing. Over time, those discoveries become integrated into the structures of everyday life. Institutions mature, systems stabilize, and society reorganizes itself around the new reality.

And eventually that very stability itself begins to harden, and what was once adaptive and life-giving slowly becomes rigid. Mature systems become stale instead of simply stable, and eventually the growth cycle begins again, nudging society forward into another period of transformation.

But the end of each of these cycles rarely feels graceful from the inside. The end of the era of growth feels more like teetering on collapse: too much unintegrated change accumulating too quickly, systems straining under the weight of their own complexity, institutions falling increasingly out of sync with what it now possible, and perhaps even necessary, for society to become.

We begin to sense that the underlying infrastructure of how we live must change, while simultaneously discovering that the very structures built to create stability are naturally resistant to fundamental transformation.

And so the cultural rhythm begins to shift and the drumbeat of relentless growth gives way to another rhythm entirely:

Integrate. Consolidate. Digest. Reorganize.

Growth gives way to application and expansion gives way to restructuring and renewal. Like a farmer harvesting fruit at its peak and storing it for the winter, we begin preserving and integrating what has been learned so that it does not simply die on the vine in an endless pursuit of more.

And perhaps this is where we now find ourselves: not at the end of progress, but at the end of a particular phase of progress. A civilization-wide pause to metabolize what we have created.

No athlete becomes stronger during exertion itself. Strength emerges during recovery and integration. Yet culturally, we increasingly treat recovery as failure.

There is no need to vilify the extraordinary growth era that brought us here, simply because it has reached its natural limits. Better that we honour what has been built, recognize the immense beauty and possibility that it created, and allow ourselves to enter the next phase consciously: one of integration, restructuring, maturation, and renewal.

In my curiosity, I’ve been returning to the works of thinkers from the past, reading their original texts (there is no shortage of material here), from The Theory of Moral Sentiments to more modern works like Integrity, and of course Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, which helped bring the language of ‘EQ’ into the mainstream

As I followed the thread, I kept discovering something interesting: not only are these thinkers describing similar underlying dynamics through different lenses, but we have in fact, been circling these ideas for thousands of years. Empathy isn’t a new concept, it’s something continually rediscovered, reinterpreted, and renamed.

And yet, despite this long lineage of thought, it feels as though we have lost something.. perhaps our shared internal picture of what these ideas actually mean in practice. Each work I return to offers another fragment of that image that feels both familiar and strangely absent in how we engage with one another today.

So I’ve decided to follow that thread more deliberately.

This series is an attempt to piece together connections across centuries of thought and tradition, to revisit texts and ideas that have in many cases been reduced to soundbites or dismissed as outdated, and to see whether something essential may have been left behind in the process.

Some of the authors I’ll be exploring may be surprising, as often what they are remembered for today captures only a fraction of what they were actually trying to articulate.

I'm very interested in hearing your own reflections as this unfolds, whether they align, challenge, or take the conversation somewhere unexpected. So, with that, consider this an open exploration into the deeper question of how we perceive, relate to, and make sense of one another individually, collectively, and within an increasingly complex world.

What I can’t yet reconcile is why something so persistent keeps getting lost.. I suspect that’s where this needs to go next…

Optimization leadership emerged in a “sprint era,” under conditions where speed, execution, and clarity of outcome were paramount. It creates effectiveness through reduction:

• Narrowing focus quickly

• Driving toward known outcomes

• Maximizing efficiency and short-term value capture

• Rewarding decisiveness and control

This mode works well in stable or clearly defined environments. But it begins to break down under conditions of complexity.

Integration leadership is what those conditions demand. It creates clarity not through reduction, but through relationship:

• Holding multiple perspectives without premature collapse

• Extending time horizons (second- and third-order effects)

• Navigating ambiguity without forcing false clarity

• Balancing seemingly opposing needs (speed vs. reflection, action vs. listening)

Where optimization asks, “What is the fastest path forward?” Integration asks, “What is actually true here, and how do these pieces fit together over time?”

This is not a rejection of optimization, but an evolution beyond it.

The shift is from:

• clarity through simplification → clarity through coherence

• execution as primary → judgment as primary

• single-mode excellence → multi-modal fluency

In earlier eras, we could rely on leaders who wielded one tool exceptionally well, but this moment requires leaders who can move between modes with precision without losing coherence in themselves or the system.

We’ve spent decades optimizing for speed. What we need now is leadership that can hold complexity long enough to find real direction.

Not so much to study history, but to sit inside the thinking of those who were trying to make sense of the same underlying patterns we’re still living in.

Today, I began The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith, and within the first few pages, I hit something that feels strangely alive:

> “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel… it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations…”

> “…It is from this very illusion of the imagination… that the dread of death… while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society.”

There’s a paradox here that I can’t quite let go of:

That our empathy is, at its core, an imperfect simulation: we imagine ourselves into another’s experience, often inaccurately…

And yet, it’s precisely this distortion that seems to restrain us, to shape behavior, to hold something like “society” together.

Which raises questions I don’t yet have answers to:

- If our moral instincts are built on imagined (and potentially exaggerated) experience… what does that mean for how we judge, protect, or intervene?

- Where does this mechanism create coherence… and where might it create blind spots?

- And what happens when these human-scale distortions begin to operate at system scale?

I’m starting to suspect that many of the systems we live inside are built on these kinds of human distortions.. functional, but not necessarily accurate.

I’m going to keep reading Smith in full, alongside others, and follow the thread wherever it leads.

If this kind of exploration is alive for you too, I’d be curious to hear how you see it. Not conclusions necessarily, just where your thinking goes when you sit with something like this.

There were many important observations made in that session - representation of women on boards appears to be holding around 30% globally, but new placements have slowed significantly. At the same time, some women seem to be opting out of systems that don’t recognize or integrate their perspective.

After the meeting, Katrina C. Foster published a piece that stayed with me. She is naming something subtle and significant - that this doesn’t look like a loud reversal, but is more like a quiet withdrawal. The language of DEI, the measurement, and the scaffolding that once made inequality visible is being slowly removed.

And I found myself sitting with a different question - the signal she is pointing to feels real, but why is this happening now, in a time where we might assume we ‘know better’?

I’ve spent decades, in different ways, pushing against systems as a woman in leadership and as someone trying to introduce new ideas into rigid structures. For a long time, I understood that experience as kind of a battle. There was always a ceiling, and my instinct was to locate the source of it - who was blocking it, who needed to be challenged and where the resistance lived. And let me tell you, I can play that role well - give me a sword and I will go to battle without hesitation.

But over time as I ran into deeper and deeper ceilings, something began to shift. Each time I reached what I felt was the ‘final boss,’ I found an unexpected twist. The person I thought I was fighting was usually operating within constraints of their own- an incentive structure, a rule set, or pressures I hadn’t fully seen.

And when I followed that thread further, the shape of the problem itself changed. It became harder to find a singular ‘bad actor,’ and easier to see something more diffuse: systems of incentives, and structures that produce outcomes, regardless of the individuals inside of them.

That realization didn’t make the experience any easier. If anything, it made it more disorienting, because while I was trying to understand the system more deeply by listening, integrating perspectives, and questioning my own assumptions, I was still inside it. Still being shaped by it and at times, still getting hit by it.

It felt like holding a sword and shield while also extending an olive branch.

Eventually though, a different lens began to emerge. Years ago, Jeremy Rifkin, in The Empathic Civilization, wrote about how societies evolve through expanding circles of identification, and how what we consider ‘us’ grows over time: from family, to tribe, to village, to nation. At each stage, something new emerges that stretches the boundaries of the existing system and that creates friction, because integrating something new often requires changing something that already works (at least for some).

And beneath that friction is something deeper than ideology:

fear.

Not ideological disagreement or even resistance to progress necessarily, but more of a fundamental uncertainty:

if we change this system, will we still be safe within it?

History gives us examples in every direction in the moments where integration created something more coherent, and also moments where it fractured what was already working.

If you look at systems over time, a pattern begins to emerge:

• An insight arises, often from lived experience, and often ahead of its time.

• A system forms around that insight, attempting to bring it into reality.

• That system becomes codified into policies, metrics, language and programs

And then slowly, it shifts.. the form is still there, but the spirit begins to thin. The incentives distort, and what began as clarity becomes compliance and what began as truth becomes language, and when that happens, legitimacy begins to erode.

It’s possible that some of what we now call DEI has followed this arc. The original signal was real, and it still is - the need to make inequality visible by naming and measuring it was necessary. But over time, many of the systems built around that signal didn’t produce the outcomes they were designed to create. In some cases, they became performative and in others, they created friction with the other parts of the system they were trying change. And when systems lose legitimacy, they are often not refined - they are abandoned.

We can see the symptoms of that now. In some places, it shows up as quiet institutional withdrawal where programs disappear, language softens and measurement declines. In other places it shows up very differently, as more heightened, even mythic interpretations of what is happening. These attempt to make sense of complexity by locating a central force, a clear antagonist (big boss), or a story that can hold the scale of the shift. When systems lose coherence, the signals don’t arrive cleanly.

There is a real risk in this moment. As Katrina points out, when we remove the scaffolding (the measurement and language), we lose the visibility. Without visibility, inequality doesn’t disappear, it just becomes harder to see and harder to act on.

But there is another risk as well. If we only focus on preserving the scaffolding without questioning whether it was sufficient to begin with, we may continue to measure a problem without meaningfully changing it. Measurement is a stage in system evolution, but it isn’t the destination.

Which brings us to a different kind of question. Not how do we we return to what we had, and not how we remove it entirely, but:

What kind of systems actually produce the outcomes we’ve been trying to measure?

Right now, we may be between systems, with the old one losing legitimacy and the new one not yet formed. That makes this a disorienting moment, but also a generative one.

When systems lose coherence, we tend to respond in two ways: we either try to preserve the structures that no longer work or we construct narratives that explain their failure. Both are understandable. Neither on their own is sufficient.

This is a space where ideas are explored in real time. You can subscribe to follow the threads as they begin to connect.

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This episode explores the “villainous hero”: the leader who steps in at the point of crisis, absorbs the pressure, and unintentionally teaches the system not to adapt.

A reflection on timing, responsibility, and what real leadership actually requires.

We all recognize the hero: the leader who storms in when things are falling apart, the maverick who takes on what no one else will or the founder, executive, or ‘fixer’ who shoulders the impossible load and somehow makes it work. In Western culture, we revere this archetype.

They are decisive. Tireless. Action-oriented. When others hesitate, they move; when systems wobble, they stabilize them, often at great personal cost. Organizations reward this behavior again and again, promoting these individuals precisely because they “get things done” when no one else can and often save the day. But that success hides a deeper and more dangerous pattern.

We tell ourselves “many hands make light work,” but often the work was never light at all, and was carried by one or two people whose capacity masked a systemic failure. The hero didn’t just act, they absorbed what the system could not hold and because the crisis passed, the structure never had to change.

The shadow side of this archetype is not subtle and is at this point a stereotype: burnout, chronic pain and illness, strained marriages, and children who grow up resenting parents who were “always saving something, somewhere.”

Entrepreneurs and leaders are statistically more prone to anxiety, depression, and exhaustion than the general population not because leadership is inherently destructive, but because heroic over-functioning becomes an identity. Saving broken systems becomes how worth is measured, and once that identity is in place, stepping back feels impossible.

Because if you stop rescuing, who are you?

The uncomfortable truth:

When someone repeatedly steps in at the point of crisis, the early warning signs are never dealt with and unclear roles remain unclear. The system learns unconsciously, but very effectively, that it does not need to adapt, because someone else will carry it.

Real leadership happens before the fire.

Leadership is not the dramatic moment when everything is about to collapse; it lives in the micro-decisions long before that moment in how work is structured, how responsibility is assigned, and what discomfort a leader is willing to allow.

• Who is allowed to carry how much?

• What friction is tolerated instead of absorbed?

• Where does responsibility actually sit?

• What happens when someone does not step in?

Healthy systems distribute load early, not heroically late. They allow discomfort before catastrophe by letting small failures teach and requiring each person to hold a share of the weight, no more/no less, and to remain accountable for it. When this happens, there is no need for saviors because there is no blaze that requires one person to run into the flames.

The “villain” in the villainous hero archetype isn’t the individual, it’s the timing. When leaders repeatedly intervene too late (at the point of collapse), they unintentionally undermine the very resilience they believe they are protecting. What looks like strength is actually structural dependency, and because the hero often is capable, the damage remains hidden until the body, the family, or the system finally refuses to continue.

And, more personally:

• Where do I step in before I’m asked?

• Where do I absorb friction to keep things running smoothly?

• Where does my competence prevent others from developing theirs?

These questions are uncomfortable, but they are the questions that dismantle the hero trap.

Like a rowing shell lifted by many hands: when each person takes only their portion of the weight, the load feels almost light. When one person compensates for the whole, it becomes crushing. The goal is not to drop the shell. It’s to stop lifting weight that was never yours to bear.

If you recognize yourself in this archetype, this isn’t a call to abandon responsibility, it’s a call to change where in the timeline you intervene. Not at the blaze, but at the first spark.

If something you’ve read here has been meaningful to you, the most helpful way to support this work is simply to share it with someone who might find it useful. I don’t write for algorithms, I write for people who are trying to see clearly, think well, and build responsibly in complex environments. Those people often know each other.

If you invite friends or colleagues to subscribe using your referral link, Substack keeps track and unlocks small thank-you benefits along the way. But more than anything, referrals simply help these ideas reach the kinds of people they are written for.

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The Aperture Field grows slowly, through conversation and trust, one reader at a time.

This Field Note explores how indirect communication shapes our nervous systems, our leadership, and our relationships; and why clarity, spoken kindly and directly, is one of the most generous things we can offer another person.

As it has for time immemorial, societal change starts with the individual, and this substack invites you to join me in exploring how this might show up in your own world by opening and closing your own aperture to see the multiple points of view needed to actualize our next stage as a society.

What this space is:

• Field notes from my own lived experiences

• Patterns I’m noticing

• An invitation for discussion on your own perspectives on each topic

What this space is not:

• Not hot takes

• Not advice on productivity

• Not certainty

Most of what I write here will remain free.

For those who find this work useful and want to help sustain it, I’ve enabled an optional paid subscription. Paid readers may occasionally receive longer or more experimental reflections, but the core of the work will stay open.

If you’re working at the edge of something, be it a role, system or transition, you’re likely in the right place. Welcome to the Aperture Field!

This morning I found myself contemplating a variegated Pothos I picked up from a plant shop that had recently closed.

It needed some care. Several of its leaves were marked (burned at the edges) from what I later learned were environmental control issues in the mall where the shop had been located. Too much light, not enough consistency - the kind of subtle imbalance that doesn’t kill immediately, but leaves its trace.

As I looked into how to help it recover, I came across something I hadn’t known before. In variegated plants (the ones with both white and green in their leaves) only the green portions perform photosynthesis. The white parts lack chlorophyll. They don’t produce energy in the same way because they are, in a sense, supported by the green. You could say the green is doing the work while the white is along for the ride.

And yet… that’s not quite right either.

Because sometimes, if too much of the leaf turns white, the plant begins to starve as there simply isn’t enough energy production to sustain it. Other times, when the green dominates, the plant becomes more robust and efficient but also more ordinary. In cultivation, those leaves are often cut away not because they don’t work, but because they don’t carry the aesthetic the plant is known for.

And when conditions become unstable, as they had in that failing shop, it is the white portions that suffer first. They crisp and then fail, revealing the fragility of the system.

It’s a strange balance:

• Too much efficiency, and something is lost.

• Too much beauty, and the system can’t sustain itself.

And somewhere in between, there is a form that holds both.

—

It reminded me of something Robert Pirsig explored deeply in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: this idea of “quality” that sits somewhere between the classical (structure, logic, science) and the romantic (aesthetic, experience, meaning).

We’ve spent generations pulling these apart. Science on one side; spirituality, art, and meaning on the other. Each refined, each made more precise, and each, in its own way, beautiful.

And in doing so, we’ve created the familiar camps:

“I’m on this side.”

“I’m on that side.”

But in the plant, there are no camps, there is only the leaf.

—

Standing in the shop, I passed by the fully green pothos without much thought. I know they grow faster and are more resilient. They would fill a shelf quickly, cascade easily, and do exactly what they are built to do.

And yet I chose the variegated one: Slower, more delicate, less efficient, and ultimately more interesting. But I also wouldn’t choose a plant that had gone almost entirely white because I know what would happen: It wouldn’t last as there wouldn’t be enough “engine” to sustain the form.

So what I’m drawn to, it seems, is not one or the other; it’s the integration. A living system that holds:

• the part that works, and the part that reveals

• the part that sustains, and the part that makes it worth sustaining

—

Like a leaf that knows, somehow, how much green it needs… to support the white that makes it beautiful.

A few weeks ago, I caught myself trying to operate like someone I’m not yet. On paper, everything made sense. I had a week of ‘perfect’ meals planned with gourmet flourish, I had shopped perfectly and was set for an excellent and healthy week of home cooked meals (I have been using meal services for the past year which has been a lifesaver until now).

But something felt off and tight, like I was holding a shape I couldn’t quite sustain. It wasn’t dramatic and nothing was obviously wrong.. in fact from the outside, it looked like things were working really well (I’m sure you are guessing that the week did not go accordingly to plan, with only one meal actually made). When I go back to figure out where things went wrong, all I could sense was that internally, there was friction.

And that friction I think is something many of us experience, especially when we’re growing or trying to step into what’s next. We often live with two versions of ourselves active at the same time.

There’s the current self, shaped by habit, responsibility, and constraint. This version knows what it can reliably deliver. It’s been tested and it has learned (often the hard way) how not to fall apart under pressure.

And then there’s the potential self: the one that senses there’s more. More clarity, ease and alignment between what matters and how we actually live.

These two aren’t enemies, they’re part of the same organism. But when the distance between them grows too large, like when we try to act from the future self without having embodied it yet, something subtle happens.

We become internally dissonant.

And dissonance doesn’t look like chaos, instead it looks almost right. It shows up in the person who gets everything done, but whose spark is dimmed. In the leader who is respected and capable, but who feels constantly stretched like a rubber band that never quite relaxes. In the person who has “made it” but still feels a quiet dissatisfaction they can’t explain. There’s often a sense of carrying more than we should be, without knowing exactly how to set it down.

Coherence isn’t about having everything figured out. It’s about reducing that internal gap until the two versions of you are no longer pulling in different directions. You stop trying to perform your future and start inhabiting your present more honestly and, somewhat counterintuitively, that’s what allows real growth to happen.

As coherence increases, things begin to shift in very practical ways:

• capacity becomes clearer

• commitments become cleaner

• roles start to fit instead of chafe

• nervous systems settle in both you and the people around you

You don’t necessarily do more, but what you do, you do with less friction.

I think this is also why AI has become such an unexpectedly effective mirror for some people. When used well, it doesn’t just process information. It reflects back the structure of how we’re thinking, including the gap between who we are now and who we’re trying to be.

In a way, we present both versions of ourselves at once. For someone willing to see that gap and work with it, the experience can feel clarifying.

“Oh. That’s the mismatch. That’s what hasn’t landed yet.”

But for someone who isn’t ready to integrate what’s being revealed, the same interaction can feel frustrating or off.

• “This isn’t helpful.”

• “This doesn’t get me.”

• “Something about this feels wrong.”

The tool hasn’t changed. The relationship to what’s being reflected has.

Which points to something deeper: We can’t integrate what we refuse to see, which is why I keep coming back to colour. A leaf appears green not because green is in it, but because green is what it reflects - everything else is absorbed.

In the same way, the parts of ourselves we don’t want to see don’t disappear, they shape our behavior indirectly.

• If we ignore our limits, they show up as overcommitment.

• If we reject our need for rest, it becomes irritability or burnout.

• If we don’t recognize our value, we try to prove it everywhere and exhaust ourselves in the process.

The colour we won’t see is still in the field. But coherence begins when we’re willing to look at it directly.

And this doesn’t just matter at the individual level. A leader’s internal coherence sets the limit for the complexity their organization can hold. A parent’s coherence shapes the emotional tone of a household. A community’s coherence influences whether differences turn into dialogue or into division.

You might be waiting for the proverbial shortcut or hack here. I hate to disappoint, but there is no sudden upgrade on this one. Just a steady process of noticing where you’re overreaching, clarifying where you’re actually most coherent, letting go of roles that don’t fit anymore, and allowing your future self to arrive gradually instead of forcing it into place.

Life gets a little less loud. A little less brittle. And a lot more workable.

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