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of thought and tradition, to revisit texts and ideas that have in many cases been reduced to soundbites or dismissed as outdated, and to see whether something essential may have been left behind in the process.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.

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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.

If this resonates, I write about clarity, systems, and the quiet work of getting things into coherence - subscribe for free below!

“Army reserves, Postal service employee, Booster club member, Small-town fixture, Father, Grandfather, Community pillar…”

The list was long and, if I am honest, a little lifeless. It told me what my grandfather did, but it did not tell me who he was. So I scratched it out. Because what he was, at his core, was actually a rascal. Not reckless or destructive mind you, just absolutely delighted with the edge of everything.

If the rule was not to walk on the lawn, he would not walk on the lawn. He would walk on the retaining wall in the lawn: technically compliant, spiritually mischievous, and balancing just far enough into forbidden territory to feel the thrill. When the peacekeepers came to restore order, he would run away laughing, already composing the story he would later tell over coffee or beer, doubling everyone over with laughter.

He didn’t just live on the edge, he narrated it. He brought others along through his epic yarns. All this with a glint in his eye and the unmistakable spark of someone who experienced life as something to be tasted and not merely endured.

And then, at sixty-four, he suffered a massive stroke.

He lost his speech, the control of half his body and, most tragically, the public expression of the very thing that had defined him.. his stories.

Where was the justice in that?

For years, I wrestled with that question. How could someone so animated by story and mischief be stripped of his voice and ability to share his life with others?

But something strange and steady remained. The glint didn’t leave. Even without speech or mobility, the impishness was there through the humour that still lived in his eyes. The edge didn’t disappear, it just moved.

That realization has followed me in unexpected ways. For much of my life, I believed my grandfather and I were opposites. He laughed at the edge while I study it. Where he bent rules playfully, I tend to respect structure.

And yet, as I wrote about him, I began to see a lineage I had missed:

• He walked the edge of social rules while I walk the edge of ideas.

• He tested boundaries with mischief while I test them with analysis.

Different expression, same fascination.

It has led me to wonder whether what defines us is not our roles or even our talents, but the persistent lens through which we meet the world.

• Some people see injustice everywhere.

• Some see beauty.

• Some see risk.

• Some see order.

• Some, perhaps, see thresholds.

And we do not explore that lens only through expansion and the joyful, expressive seasons of life. We also explore it through contraction, tragedy, and the parts that feel unfair.

My grandfather explored the edge through motion and story, and then he explored it through limitation. The terrain changed but the orientation did not. There is something strangely comforting in that.

Roles fall away, abilities shift, and public identities collapse, but something more fundamental persists. Perhaps we are not here to perfect a life résumé. Perhaps we are here to explore, from as many angles as life allows, the particular way our being leans into the world.

My grandfather leaned toward the edge with laughter. When life narrowed his world, the terrain changed but his lens did not.

Journal Prompt: What lens seems to persist across the different chapters of your life, in both your expansion and your loss?

So instead, I open a meal kit.

Everything I need is there, pre-measured, thoughtfully prepared, accompanied by a simple recipe card. In thirty minutes, I’ll have a healthy, genuinely good meal on the table. I put on music and start chopping, relieved that I don’t have to think too hard.

Then I open the first plastic bag, green onions sealed inside, and my heart sinks a little. As the ingredients emerge, a small pile of discarded plastic accumulates on the counter, quietly accusing. See what you’ve created in your search for balance?

I soothe myself with familiar justifications. My city recycles soft plastics, and I carefully wash and save every bag to take to the depot each month, where they’re actually turned into pellets locally and reused. But another voice quickly answers back: What about the plastic that was created in the first place? Those bags were almost certainly made from virgin oil.

The pleasure of feeding myself well fades, replaced by guilt.

When good / bad stops working

I’m left bargaining between two poles: the good of reduced food waste and personal sustainability, and the bad of plastic and extractive materials.

On the “good” side: I waste far less food. I eat better. My weekends are more restful. At scale, the company I purchase from reduces food waste dramatically by using every usable scrap. And downstream, at least where I live, the plastic loop is partially closed.

On the “bad” side: the upstream loop remains open. Virgin plastics. Heavy recipe cards printed once and recycled. Externalities I can’t see but know are also there.

Labeling this good or bad doesn’t help me live with it.

Following the incentives

This feels like a solvable problem. In fact, the company already has an alternative: reusable hard-plastic containers divided into compartments that you wash and return each week. About a third of my meals arrive this way. It’s clearly possible, just not universal.

When I imagine the company’s position, the reasons are obvious. The containers cost money. They have a lifespan. They introduce logistical complexity. Filling flexible plastic bags is cheaper, faster, and easier to scale. For a business producing thousands of meals a week, the reusable option likely threatens margins and efficiency.

Why not raise prices to support better practices? Because competition is fierce, and many customers will choose the cheaper option. People vote with their dollars, even when those votes conflict with their stated values.

And upstream of the company are investors: people who put their savings into a venture they hope will succeed. The company isn’t breaking rules; if anything, it’s already behaving more ethically than many competitors, at a cost to itself.

The company isn’t evil, it’s surviving in the system it inhabits.

The return of responsibility

But systems don’t arise in isolation. They’re shaped by what we demand, tolerate, and reward, and by what we refuse to pay for.

• We say “down with pesticides,” then seek blemish-free produce.

• We say we must protect the most vulnerable, then resist the taxes required to house, feed, and heal them.

• We say “love thy neighbor,” while keeping our doors firmly closed.

This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s disconnection between how we live individually and the societies that form from those choices.

When we fail to connect those dots, we externalize morality upward: to corporations, governments, and “bad actors.” We look for villains, rather than staying present to how our own fears, especially the fear of being taken advantage of, shape the systems we collectively build.

The choice that isn’t clean

So what do we do?

• Pressure governments to regulate? Yes, and that work is slow, often lagging behind reality.

• Pressure suppliers? Yes, but they must still survive in competitive markets.

• Absorb the cost ourselves? Perhaps, by paying more, spending more time, carrying more personal burden.

None of these options are pure. All of them cost something. In fact, manufacturing anything costs something. Scaling anything costs something. Even choosing to do everything yourself costs something; including time, energy, and capacity that not everyone has to spare.

From moral outsourcing to moral presence

I don’t know yet whether I’ll stop using this service. I do know I’m willing to name my discomfort to the company, to ask for more closed-loop options, and to accept that doing so may cost me convenience if nothing changes. That doesn’t make me pure, it makes me present.

Integrity isn’t the absence of externalities, it’s the willingness to stay in contact with them and to choose, consciously, how we participate.

Journal Prompt: What system do you participate in that produces outcomes you don’t fully agree with, and where are you willing to let the cost land?

Photo by Kumiko SHIMIZU on Unsplash

There is a familiar fact in the field of optics that still manages to surprise people when they hear it clearly:

Chlorophyll absorbs red and blue wavelengths efficiently. Those wavelengths do the real metabolic work. Green light is excess to requirement, so it is reflected back to the eye. What we perceive as ‘the plant’s colour’ is in a literal sense, the absence of integration. This inversion turns out to be a useful lens well beyond botany..

A vocal coaching disagreement

Many years ago when I worked as a vocal coach, I taught primarily through somatic imagery. I would say things like:

• “walk your tone around the corners of the room.”

• “Fog an imaginary mirror in the back of your throat/nose”

• “Imagine the vowel shape elongating without effort”

From a physics / anatomy lens, these instructions were nonsensical. Sound doesn’t walk, tone doesn’t float, and rooms don’t receive vowels.

And yet, they worked.

The imagery helped singers bypass over-control and let deeply trained musculature coordinate itself. The body already knew how to sing, the imagination simply removed the interference.

But a colleague of mine who I’ll call ‘Fred’, strongly disagreed with this approach. He was a brilliant ‘mechanist’ in the vocal arts. To him, the voice was an elegant machine. He taught:

• how formants shift with tongue height and placement

• how vowel modification affects harmonic alignment

• how breath pressure and resonance interact physically to constrain or ‘free’ a tone

From his perspective, somatic teaching risked imprecision and without explanation, could feel irresponsible. If you don’t explain why something works, you leave students dependent on intuition and metaphor rather than mastery.

Fred and I both facilitated excellence in singers. And yet, we stood in quiet opposition.

The false binary forms

Here’s the important detail: I was not only a somatic teacher. I had formal training in speech pathology and understood the mechanics deeply. I did explain formants, breath, and anatomy, often before introducing imagery.

But once Fred framed the landscape as mechanism vs somatic, something subtle happened: the somatic approach became threatened. And when a valid way of knowing is threatened, it tends to harden into identity.

I leaned more visibly into somatic teaching, not because it was all I was, but because it was the part at risk of being dismissed. The defense sharpened the contrast. The contrast reinforced the polarity. The polarity obscured the original integration.

This is not a personal failure, it’s a structural one.

What gets defended gets reflected

This is where our friendly plant analogy gets useful.

But when something can’t be absorbed (when a system lacks the capacity to integrate a valid signal) that signal is reflected outward.

It becomes:

• louder

• more visible

• more identity-shaped

In plant optics, that reflection is green. In human systems, that reflection is polarity. The defended position becomes what everyone sees, even though it may not be where the real work is happening.

Organizational behaviour: the same pattern at scale

Organizations repeat this pattern constantly. A few common examples:

• “We’re too emotional” vs “We’re too rigid”

• “We need structure” vs “We need freedom”

• “This place is all process/rules” vs “This place is all chaos”

Often, the loudest tension in a company isn’t where energy is being metabolized, it’s where energy cannot yet be taken in. Someone defends the underrepresented pole (with good intent). Others push back (also with good intent). Positions harden. Nuance collapses. The organization organizes itself around what it cannot digest.

Like leaves reflecting green light, the system broadcasts its absences.

The uncomfortable implication

Here’s the part that’s hardest to sit with:

Protection can turn possibility into identity, identity invites opposition, opposition stabilizes polarity itself. No villains are actually required - we do it all on our own.

This is especially tricky for people who are sensitive to ‘coherence’ loss - people who instinctively step in when something valid is being flattened or erased. And that instinct is honourable, but the timing is everything.

Moving toward a different kind of intervention

The alternative may feel like silence, withdrawal or neutrality, but it’s actually something more subtle:

• sensing whether a system has the metabolic capacity to absorb what’s being offered

• distinguishing between holding space and holding position

• Knowing when not to add more light to a surface that can only reflect it

Sometimes the most effective move is to wait for the chlorophyll to develop. This isn’t resignation, it’s respect for readiness.

In Closing and Predicted Continuation

There is more to say here about leadership, facilitation and timing; about why some truths land softly while others ricochet, and about how bridge-builders can accidentally become polarization engines, but for now it’s enough to name the pattern:

Green leaves
Defended positions
Organizational stalemates

Same structure, different scale..

Journal Prompt: Before defending a position, what would it look like to ask: Does this system have the capacity to integrate what I’m about to add?

Wherever we turn, the structures and cultures we once trusted are revealing fractures we didn’t expect. Institutions that felt timeless are failing, families are being pulled apart.. The sense that life is relatively predictable and that there is stable ground beneath us has quietly evaporated.

And yet, the many ways of walking in the world are more alike than different. If we look deeply enough into any culture, we tend to find the same underlying principles: each are different expressions of the same human questions. On the surface, those differences can make others appear alien or threatening. But when we sit quietly with another person’s lived experience, that sense of otherness often dissolves into something that has a familiar root.

But listening today is harder than it has been in a long time. The air is thick with anger, fear, and the impulse to strike first, to hurt before we are hurt. Exhaustion makes slowness and patience feel unbearable. And when despair shows up in the people we love, many of us no longer know how to be with it.

And our culture is one deeply attached to solutions. Phrases like “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” have seeped into how we measure qualities like worth, action, and care. When faced with another person’s sorrow, we often feel compelled to fix it, to build them a structure, ladder, or plan that will pull them out of the well they’ve fallen into.

But sometimes what is needed is not rescue. Sometimes what is actually needed is for someone to bring a small light down into the well, to sit with them quietly, and to listen until listening itself is enough. And when it is time to leave, to understand that the other person may not be ready to climb out yet.

We leave the light behind not because we carried them out, but because we trusted them to find their own way when they are ready.

And in the end, what is becoming ever clearer is that:

Journal Prompt: What would it mean, in one relationship right now, to listen until listening itself is enough?

To be fair, there is something understandable and compassionate about this trend. People are simply exhausted in these brittle systems that are breaking around us and to be honest, joy sounds a lot like relief right now. But I find myself really struggling to adopt this singular focus on joy. It’s not that it’s wrong, I just don’t think it’s the full picture.

When joy becomes the goal of ‘success’ or even ‘awakening’ to purpose, the experience of life itself subtly narrows. Moments become assessed for quality and amount of joy rather than being met for the feelings they naturally contain, which end up ranked on a joy-scale - 100 being joy and all other feelings falling in ‘less-than’ levels.

And we all know that joy is only experienceable when we have other feelings to contrast it with. By only focusing exclusively on the emotion of joy, we lose the very texture that allows joy to be, and more importantly, we fail to see the beauty in other moments that aren’t as bold: the quiet middle states of equilibrium, the coziness and calm of hygge, the bittersweet moments of smiling and crying at once, undramatic stillness, and that subtle beauty we experience that doesn’t announce itself as joy at all - all the pastels of the emotional colour spectrum.

A wider lens: non-attachment, not emotional suppression

I’ve noticed a funny trend that comes up particularly when Eastern philosophies are translated into modern leadership language. It’s almost like the perceived goal of transcendence is to flatten your ‘ugly’ emotions and achieve a state of constant bliss. But as I see it, this is neither the tradition nor the experience.

Joy still arises fully, but so does grief, tenderness, awe, disappointment and care. But its not about the amplitude of feeling, it’s the non-holding of them. Emotions (‘good’ or ‘bad’) are still experienced in real time, it’s just that they aren’t being extended by narrative, identity or expectation. They complete themselves almost in that moment, which from the outside can look neutral, but from the inside feels unobstructive.

Re-reading the Zen Farmer

One of my favourite parables is of the Zen Farmer, and it often is told in a way that sounds like emotional detachment:

A farmer’s horse runs away. When neighbours come to console him in his bad luck, he responds with: “Good luck, bad luck - who knows?”

And then the horse comes back with several mares. The neighours congratulate him on his fortune, to which he responds: “Good luck, bad luck - who knows?”

His son is then to be found training the new mares, has an accident and breaks his leg. The neighbours extend their sorrow at his poor fortune, and again he responds with: “Good luck, bad luck - who knows?”

The story ends with the military coming that week to conscript soldiers, and the son’s broken leg keeps him from war..

This is often read through a lens of indifference - you could easily add in “who cares?” after every ‘who knows’.. But that interpretation misses the human middle. A more evolved reading might be:

When the horse returns, the farmer notices the beauty, vitality and new life entering the field.

When the son is injured, the farmer meets him with care, empathy and presence.

What he does not do is cling to the pleasure or prolong the pain.

Feeling is not absent. Attachment is.

This form of appreciation doesn’t seek to preserve the moment indefinitely. Instead, joy can be appreciated without being hoarded, sorrow can be honored without being rehearsed, and meaning can arise without being extracted. The goal isn’t to detach from life, it’s to experience intimacy in the moment without caging it, and in leadership, this matters deeply.

Many leaders today are navigating complex situations that don’t have clear resolution, responsibility without control of the means, and systems that can’t be ‘fixed’ by positivity. In these challenging contexts, joy-as-metric feels hollow because the frame is too simple. What is needed is not brighter emotion, but greater coherence.

Coherence doesn’t demand joy, it allows it, along with grief, neutrality, uncertainty, and care, to move through the system without distortion.

This is not an argument against joy - joy is welcome! But so is everything else. The work is not to feel better, it’s to see clearly, meet what is here in the moment, and allow life to move through us without unnecessary friction. In that clarity, joy often appears quietly, briefly, and exquisitely.

And then it goes.

As it should.

Journal Prompt: Where in your life have you been measuring experience against joy rather than meeting it as it is?

You can listen to the audio version here:

The Aperture Field Notes

The Aperture Field Note: Veiled Communication

Many of us learned to read what was not being said as carefully as what was…

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a month ago · The Aperture Field Notes

I grew up in a family where big feelings were rarely said directly. Meaning lived in the pauses, tones, hesitations, and slight detours in a sentence. What was spoken aloud was often not what was actually meant, so the only way to understand anything was to learn to read underneath the words.

That shaped me, not entirely in a negative way mind you. It trained me to become exquisitely attuned to the emotional subtext in any room.

It also made me work far too hard to decipher people who weren’t actually hiding anything.

As an adult, and as someone who now works with leaders, founders, and complex systems, I’ve noticed how much this pattern still runs in the background. When someone speaks with care, I often scan for subtext. When someone adds context, I wonder what they are trying not to say. When someone reassures, part of me listens for the warning beneath it.

And it’s not because I’m anxious (although it certainly sounds that way), but because I was trained to ‘survive’ by reading the invisible layers. But here’s an insight that landed for me recently, one that now feels like a cornerstone of my own leadership practice:

Sometimes people are simply telling you what they mean.

And the more I let myself receive communication at face value, spoken cleanly without decoding, the more coherent my own system became. There is less friction, more trust, more presence, and more space.

This is the leadership lesson:

And when we allow ourselves to be spoken to that way, without bracing for the unsaid, something shifts internally. The body stops preparing for threat. The field opens and communication becomes a direct, present exchange, rather than a puzzle to solve.

In a world saturated with ambiguity and half-signals, the simple act of saying the thing kindly, clearly and without veils is a profound form of integrity and care.

Journal Prompt: In your relationships right now, where are you bracing for subtext and where might you be speaking in it?

The Aperture Field Notes

The Aperture Field Notes (Welcome)

At its essence, an aperture is an opening or gateway that allows light to enter a system. In a camera, this shows up as a lens that can be narrowed or opened depending on whether we need to focus on fine details, or the big picture…

Listen now

a month ago · The Aperture Field Notes

At its essence, an aperture is an opening or gateway that allows light to enter a system. In a camera, this shows up as a lens that can be narrowed or opened depending on whether we need to focus on fine details, or the big picture.

We are in a time that is best categorized as a season of change. Not only is it necessary for us to find new ways of existing in harmony with the world around us, but what becomes evident is that even beneficial change isn’t something you can turn on like a light switch. The change our century is tasked with is not just adding technology to existing systems - it’s also changing organizations and systems themselves so they are able to adopt these new solutions.

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!