The name of my (very) occasional blog is “Life in Full-Spectrum Color.” I gave it that name because, well, there’s the obvious tie to the name of my consulting practice and the website where the blog is hosted. But more so, I gave it that name because I wanted the blog to be a place where I could record the ways that life reveals itself in all the fullness of color and light through ordinary, sometimes extraordinary moments. Over the years, I’ve shared a number of “full-spectrum” musings, be they reflections on my father’s life a year after his passing or revelations I had while riding 60+ miles through California wine country or the awe I felt watching a mass of butterflies at Esalen retreat center in Big Sur.

But in the past few weeks and months, I’ll admit, that a life of full-spectrum color has been harder to find, to lift up, and to celebrate. Or perhaps it has just become harder for me to put words to. Everything around me, around us, feels as though it’s falling apart. Do you get that sense too?

The world’s wars and conflicts seem only to be worsening, dissolving our planet into greater chaos. Liberal democracy is crumbling before our eyes. The climate continues to spin out of control and wreak havoc on communities. Some of the most basic realities of our daily existence — our freedoms, institutions, expected norms of society — can no longer be taken for granted.

The ground is shifting beneath our feet at an almost unfathomable pace. At times, all I can do is sit in silence, unable to summon the words to express my disbelief at it all. I fall short of my occupation as a communications consultant. Language evades me.

Amid this strange muteness, I have sought solace in the words and reflections of others to get me through. And what comforts me is that I hear familiar echoes of the same theme repeating, be it in stories people share, in podcast interviews, in poems I read, in the charting of the planets and stars, in the coming of spring — could this falling apart, while painful, be the catalyst for a new beginning, a new kind of coming together? The old systems we have been fighting to fix, some of them existing for centuries, may just have become too broken to heal in their current form. It may be that, rather than looking to fix what is so broken, we need to re-imagine something wholly and completely new.

Lessons from Physics

I have found many times in my life that in moments when my world seems to be spiraling into a crescendo of chaos or struggle —when I’m trying to do too many things at once, rushing to meet an outrageous deadline, or banking on ten different pieces of the puzzle to come together — I hit a wall, an obstacle that can’t be surpassed, and everything falls to pieces. Often, something in my physical environment literally comes crashing down on me. A shelf with my belongings falls off the wall and sends everything it held to the ground. I take a bad fall, or my car breaks down, and my motion is immediately halted. The spin of everything comes to a near screeching halt and I’m brought to my knees, left breathless and broken, observing the wreckage of it all in disbelief and exhaustion.

Physics tells us that when objects move in a circular direction, they obey centripetal force, an invisible pull towards the central axis of rotation. The gravitational force around the sun is centripetal; it’s what keeps the earth and other planets orbiting around it.

Centrifugal force, on the other hand, is the experience of an object moving in a circle spinning outward. And here’s the rub…centrifugal force isn’t actually real. It is perceived. If you are the object spinning around a circle, you will feel as if the centrifugal force is casting you outward. But in fact, the real force at play is the one drawing you into the center. It’s all in your frame of reference.

I have to wonder if this experience of things spinning out of control or falling apart in our world isn’t also actually pulling us together. Perhaps the centrifugal forces we perceive are, in fact, an opportunity for us to find our center or redirect our energies in completely new directions to build something wholly new. Could it be that when the top-down structures that we relied on for stability are dismantled before our eyes, when our government representatives utterly fail us, when whole systems of society that we’ve expected to function are breaking down that we are then forced to change our perception so radically as to find new ways of coming together, building new communities, caring for ourselves and each other? This may actually be how we change the world — not by trying to cobble band aid after band aid, fix after fix on the old system, but completely re-inventing the system.

I’m not advocating, by any stretch, for the dissolution of society or the breakdown of climate ecosystems or the crumbling of government institutions and justice — all things we are experiencing in real time, particularly here in the U.S. I’m not suggesting that it’s a good thing that crazy technocrats are “moving fast and breaking things” or that our political leaders should be breaking the rule of law or that all of this dissolution we see isn’t completely and utterly devastating, harmful, or just plain wrong. And I’m not suggesting we just throw up our hands and surrender to the chaos, check out from society, and go about our days oblivious to the real suffering and consequences of these forces as if something wonderful will arise out of it all.

What I’m suggesting is that we channel our energies in revolutionary, love-infused opposition to the centrifugal forces seemingly sending us outward in all different directions from each other and look for our center, lean into the forces that are in fact pulling us together. Let us reach out to each other more, find our community, build new systems of society that bring us together. Let’s reorganize ourselves not in top-down structures but in more organic, localized, human-to-human, being-to-being, relationships. It takes energy to counteract the forces of entropy and disorder in our universe (another teaching of physics!). And if there’s something that this time in society and our human evolution is teaching us, it may be that in the breaking apart, there is new music to be found.

‘Where Everything Is Music’

Don’t worry about saving these songs!

And if one of our instruments breaks,

it doesn’t matter.

We have fallen into the place

where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes

rise into the atmosphere,

and even if the whole world’s harp

should burn up, there will still be

hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out.

We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

This singing art is sea foam.

The graceful movements come from a pearl

somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge

of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

They derive

from a slow and powerful root

that we can’t see.

Stop the words now.

Open the window in the centre of your chest,

and let the spirits fly in and out.