🦊 Surreptitious obliquity

Here’s a word apt for any complexity practitioner, trickster and rogue: obliquity. I came across it after reading another one of those posts by Dave Snowden that had me highlighting more words than not. This particular note resonated muchly—

Working obliquely also means less public commitment to solving a particular problem and more time to watch for unintended consequences. It also gives more space for solutions to emerge rather than be manufactured or imposed. [...] Working obliquely also means less public commitment to solving a particular problem and more time to watch for unintended consequences. It also gives more space for solutions to emerge rather than be manufactured or imposed.

I’ve been intending to revitalise The “Choose One Word” Ritual of Becoming*—specifically to de-emphasise the One Word bit. Having a Word to serve as a fuzzy contextual-beacon is wondrous—but only because of the ritual that conjures it.

* This is an attempt to bring about a sense of intentionality to our own self-development as adults, and currently takes the shape of a self-paced online program. But it may well become a book, soon.

The Ritual of Becoming engenders deep reflection and introspection, allowing you to veritably perambulate your way to epiphany. Requisite obliquity is baked into the process. You can’t skip the ritual and just ‘pick a word’ that sounds good (after all of a minute’s consideration).

Approaching your own developmental unfurling directly will, at best, result in incrementalism. At worst: ossification and entrenchment.

And—as the various algorithms continue to groom you to perform for attention (and to optimise your performance to maximise attention)—the risk of audience capture is ever more apparent. You could become a parody of yourself, drifting further and further away from your intuitive sensibilities; rationalising and justifying it to yourself all the while. You might already be.

The Ritual of Becoming is a chance to return home to yourself; to reckon with who you are and may yet become and be. As Byung-Chul Han writes in The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present:

“Rituals are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.”

When I shared The Ritual of Becoming five years ago, I had thought that your Word, once found, ought be declared! Heralded! Trumpeted to the world, as means to better actualise it.

Now, my sense has shifted to your Word being shared—but not declared. This is not an exercise in “personal branding”. Rather: it’s quite the opposite.

And, much like your daemon or your muse, you must idle up to (and alongside) your Word—surreptitiously. That is: obliquely, indirectly, and without fanfare. There’s courtship involved with these fleeting glimmers; this can’t be rushed.

This is antithetical to a world that craves and manufactures easy answers, I know. And that’s the point.