Improve Something Today

Monthly notes

Going wrong, going great: notes for December 2025

A somewhat cloudy, very cool day. Clouds are reflected in a body of water. In the distance: mountains. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

2½ readings on seeing failures & responding to them. Celebrating my accomplished & wonderful pals.

‘Failure gaps’—online reading

The experiences of folks who find themselves fighting on a technical battleground—privacy, security, infrastructure, or even developer experience—have a lot of common themes. There's a psychological fortitude that goes into becoming a Champion, a clarity of seeing the consequences that other people don't like to see. Most people systematically underestimate the problems, failures, fragility, and errors around them … Researchers tested people’s estimation of failure rates across more than thirty domains and found a consistent “failure gap.” Champions may just be the people who have learned to overcome the typical failure gap in a particular domain. They’re like our sociocognitive field scouts, with sharper prediction skills for the disasters most of us can't tolerate imagining for long.

The paper Hicks mentioned is this (freely available to read online or download): Eskreis-Winkler, Lauren and Woolley, Kaitlin and Kim, Minhee and Polimeni, Eliana, The Failure Gap (August 04, 2025). Across seven studies, this team looked into responses to failure:

People closest to a failure—those with the clearest access to information about a failure that occurred—will tend to be those with the strongest motive not to share it. This could seriously impede the accessibility of information. For example, a reporter looking to write a story about an individual, a company, or an organization, may find that the most knowledgeable and powerful sources more freely share information on what is going right, versus what is going wrong.

If you’d rather not read the entire, dense paper, read Fred Hebert’s summary and discussion instead.

I’ve been thinking about how and why bad news related to likely failures or recent failures does not get communicated inside organizations, or is deliberately hidden from view; hence my recent posts on shifting baselines and undiscussables. As various initiatives don’t pan out—in the typical case of mandated ‘AI’ usage, because they won’t, and can’t—people are left the unenviable task of ‘easing in’ the bad news (to use Argyris’ phrasing).

Some good things from 2025

This is the part where we bask in the accomplishments of my friends, pals, and comrades. An incomplete, roughly chronological list:

Chris and pals at Fenwick published Rewild Magazine (issues 0 and 1 available) as part of a larger community project.
Jenny created Show Up Toronto, my favorite newsletter for local events in a city I haven’t been to in 20 years. Wherever you are, read the manifesto.
Tonianne and Jim started their Humane Work newsletter. Recommended: Tonianne’s Sundays with Saarinen.
Greg published Eject Disk, a set of 4 zines for people who are stuck in work or otherwise. Read online, or pay Greg to mail them to you. The first zine told me what I need to do in 2026, for which I’m grateful.
Shannon (singer) and Jamie (producer) released the album that is now part 1 of their 80s Kids project, toured all year, and have raised funds and released the first single from 80s Kids 2, for which a 2026 tour is already scheduled. When I imagine I am busy, I think about these two and sit back down.
Isabel launched flux studio. If you loathe ‘personal branding’ or ‘content marketing’ but gotta do it anyways, hire Isabel to help.

Beyond this, various friends left jobs (by choice or otherwise), started new work or adventures, and have done the right things for themselves. My family is healthy and mostly doing stuff they like. Walk into our home and beware sewing scraps, LEGO bricks, and books piled underfoot. Meanwhile: a steady, year-length drumbeat of protest. I love all of this, and this is what I celebrate.

Continuous improvement

Vanishing fish, boiling frogs & the dry bed of the sea

Another sunset behind the mountains, obscured by some patchy clouds, and reflected in a cool blue body of water. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Making sense of ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ in the world & in the workplace.

The original tagline for this site and newsletter was ‘continuous improvement in a world that’s one damn thing after another.’ Today let’s revisit that last bit. What does it mean for a world to be one damn thing after another? And what does this have to do with the potential for continuous improvement, or the possibility of provision?

Something fishy

In 1995 fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly (by this time 20 years into his career and already a prolific author) wrote a one-pager published on the back page of an obscure biology journal.

This was the location of one of the biggest, gloomiest ideas going. Pauly described a ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ affecting his profession:

This syndrome has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species, and inappropriate reference points for evaluating economic losses resulting from overfishing, or for identifying targets for rehabilitation measures.

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Read this article for yourself. It’s very short: Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries.

Pauly viewed this as a generational ‘shift’ to be countered with careful data collection and analysis. These countermeasures would occupy much of his time and publication schedule for the rest of his career.

The blissfully boiling frog

When I first read this article some years ago, it really stuck with me. It seemed to explain a lot. But I wondered:

Might it explain more, and more broadly? Doesn’t everybody do this?
And at a faster pace than the gradual, generational cycles under discussion? I believed then, and believe now, that people can get used to just about anything. The evidence is all around us.
I also worried that expanding the idea of ‘shifting baselines’ beyond Pauly’s original scope would lead to nostalgia. There are many important ways in which the present is better than the past, even as we rush to forget what has passed away.

Eventually I poked around the archive. No surprise that Pauly continued to think and write about this big, gloomy idea.

In 2011—sixteen years after ‘shifting baselines’—he wrote:

Without firm rooting in scientific, quantified knowledge of what we now have, or had, we will inevitably experience the ‘shifting baseline syndrome.’ As I have described, successive generations of naturalists, ecologists, or even Nature lovers use the state of the environment at the beginning of their conscious interactions with it as the reference point, which then shifts as successive generations degrade that same environment. The story of the frog kept in water that is heated very slowly comes to mind here, and if we are not careful, we are going to get boiled as the frog does: a runaway greenhouse effect would do the job nicely.

I found here in the 2011 writing the broadened scope, the boiling frog, and the slow-but-fast progression of human-caused climate change that is the defining feature of our century.

The decade-scale example is excess deaths caused by COVID-19. We never did a great job tracking mortality due to COVID. Instead, we mostly stopped counting 3 years ago, and mostly stopped estimating one year ago, as the body count neared 30 million. There is a huge impulse to forget and to move along, although insurance companies remember. (Thanks to Susannah for these links.) Is this another aspect of shifting baselines? Despite, alongside, and during this unsurpassed tragedy, we continue to care for the people in our lives and provide and labor in community. What the hell else would we do? Emerson wrote that “we learn geology the morning after the earthquake.” This is true; also true is that only a few days or years pass before the “cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea” become as unremarkable as any other feature of our surroundings. A disaster as invisible as any other.

Pauly made an additional point—also revealed to me by my friend Summer:

For baselines to shift is not always bad. There are many stupid things that must be forgotten even if they have been the rule for thousands of years. Getting rid of these notions will free our minds and enable us to concentrate on things that matter, including some important things that we should remember.

Forgetting, remembering—and in Pauly’s discussion, forgetting some things in order to remember others. All baselines can shift. It seems that most will. But a few must not, lest we lose our footing during the ongoing scramble toward liberation. This is the idea. It is big, and it is gloomy.

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These 2011 quotes are from a book chapter called “On baselines that need shifting.” It is reprinted in Pauly’s 2019 book Vanishing Fish.

Shifting baselines in the workplace

This is not mere theory. I see it in my daily efforts as a consultant supporting people in their work and in their workplaces.

The conditions of shifting baseline syndrome—of vast, continual retrenchment of natural and built and social environments—are those under which people work. Even if undiscussable, it’s ever-present.
As someone who lives and works in the US, this has only accelerated in our current bad times. The Christian fascists in power have an agenda that depends on baselines shifting quickly and broadly. Whether people resist and ignore this—or, as a minority do, accept it—the effort keeps everyone distracted and uncomfortable.
Finally, certain ultra-Amazonified workplaces intentionally leverage the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ to get staff to accept bad policy, missing strategy, poorly leveled workloads, and so forth.
1. If employees are to perform inside these settings, they must develop a context-free, history-less pragmatism.
2. Some people will shift to accommodate.
3. Other people will wash out.
4. Either way, the corporation gets what it wants.

I don’t have answers to any of this. But I find it helpful to remember that these are the conditions people are in.

Pauly’s closing advice

Let’s give Pauly the last word. He ended his 2019 book Vanishing Fish with an offer of advice, which—after all of the above—I was eager to accept. His advice is honest and true. I suppose time will tell whether it is sufficient. Pauly wrote:

If I have any advice to give, it is that one should have friends and work hard.

Monthly notes

A choice to counter culture: notes for November 2025

Rain falling into a pretty gloomy looking body of water. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Ways to practice: refusal, invitation, risk. The new Ram Dass book. Revisiting ‘whole-heartedness.’

I bring you a few practices of doing otherwise—doing anything other than the default, expected, thoughtless thing. Wiggle room where and how we find it.

As a person

First, a practice of refusal, from Winston Hearn:

When you practice refusal, you start conjuring up space for different futures. It’s a magic trick. When you refuse to do a thing that the majority of other people are doing, you create space for others to join you. When you refuse to enforce a dumb rule, you make the world malleable. When you refuse to believe a story without doing your own research, you build trust in yourself. When you refuse to take people at their word—when you understand that trust has to be earned it is not just given by default—you undermine power. The effects of the practice of refusal is to create a less predictable world, which makes planning harder.

Next, a practice of invitation, from Jack Kornfield:

You see a hungry child, a painful injustice, an act of violence to an innocent person and your heart goes out. You want to help. The profound reality of suffering is an invitation to step out of the fiction of separateness, grasping at what is called the “small sense of self” or the “body of fear,” where we are frightened or selfish or self-centered or cut off. This is not who we are. We know there is a reality beyond this. We feel it walking in the high mountains or making love or being there at the mystery of the birth of a child or the death of a human being. All of a sudden we step out of time-bound consciousness, the separateness, and feel ourselves part of the turning of the seasons of life. You can feel it on retreat. You’re doing walking meditation and all of a sudden you realize you’re not doing it. It’s all just doing it itself. It’s amazing. One of my teachers explained this as “No self, no problem.” More self, more clinging; more self-centered, more problem.

In the workplace

The busy lil’ consultant in me is preoccupied with how this plays out in the workplace. First, let’s acknowledge with Sumantra Ghoshal—in his classic paper from 2005—that labor markets are not efficient, and transfer risk to workers:

Shareholders can sell their stocks far more easily than most employees can find another job. In every substantive sense, employees of a company carry more risks than do the shareholders. Also, their contributions of knowledge, skills, and entrepreneurship are typically more important than the contributions of capital by shareholders, a pure commodity that is perhaps in excess supply.

(This paper is well worth reading if you haven’t. JSTOR and mysterious PDF links below.)

Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices on JSTOR

Sumantra Ghoshal, Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 75-91

Somewhat dodgy PDF link for those who need it

If you’re a worker storing your bosses’ risk in your head and heart and hands, what might you do? Mandy Brown writes:

Most employment in the US is what is known as “at will.” Legally, that means both you and your employer can end the job at any moment, for any reason or for no reason at all. But to “will” something is to choose it, to exercise the mind and body towards an act. Every choice you make in your work is an act of will, an act of your will, and the collective will of the people you make those choices with. And will is a powerful thing! The story of inevitability is a story that wants you to forget that you have the will to change things; but the future remains, as ever, unwritten.

And, finally, Jenny:

It’s possible to see this with despair or derision: who are we becoming that even the use of tools and technologies has become a matter of identity? But the fun thing about reading anthropology is learning how much humans have always been Like This™. There were tribes who refused to adopt agriculture not because they didn’t know about it, but because the tribe up the road does agriculture and they’re not like them. Groups that refused to domesticate cattle because it was important to their group identity to see bulls as wild and untamed. I refuse to use generative AI because I simply don’t want to be the kind of person who uses generative AI. The promise of AI is that it removes friction. It doesn’t matter whether it can actually fulfill that promise, it matters that the sovereign wealth funds with seemingly infinite pockets and patience for Sam Altman’s megalomania believe it can.

choosing friction

In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that: Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there. I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.

The Roof is on PhireThe Roof is on Phire

A book recommendation

I’ve been enjoying this new book of edited talks from Ram Dass, with supporting essays by various teachers:

Ram Dass—who you may know as the author of “Be Here Now” among may other books—was not the most accessible speaker or thinker to get into, but this collection provides a generous structure for doing so. For example, the ‘invitation to freedom’ by Jack Kornfield I mentioned above is one of the supporting essays from this book. I’d recommend this collection to anybody.

A year of whole-heartedness closes

A year ago, I wrote about whole-heartedness as we entered into what we all knew would be—politically, socially, culturally—a very bad time.

How has this year of whole-heartedness worked out? Great, I think, but not without a lot of heartache. I try to be less cynical, to bring care and kindness. It’s hard, sometimes (all the time), but also something I can do to run counter to the culture being produced while the “killers in high places say their prayers out loud.” In that same post I wrote that this song is what whole-heartedness means to me, and a year later, I have no better definition:

It’s Election Day in the United States. My ballot is dropped off and has been counted. On Friday, Mavis Staples’ new album is out. The tracklist indicates she’s covered this song. I look forward to it.

One more thing. If you’re in the US, consider a cash donation of any amount to your community food bank. This part of the social safety net is in crisis right now due to the government shutdown and the Republican party’s refusal to fund SNAP (aka food stamps). Here’s detailed information about how SNAP works, how the Trump administration broke it, and the day-by-day accumulating impact on families:

Take good care. See you a little further down the road.

Learning

‘Undiscussables’ 45 years later: still here, still bad & somehow even worse

A distant sunset in a dusty, cloudy sky above the mountains and beyond a body of water. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Revisiting Argyris’ ‘undiscussables’ as emergent, unwanted behaviors & as features of organizational control. Keeping courage, showing kindness.

In 1980, Chris Argyris published a short article called ‘Making the Undiscussable and its Undiscussability Discussable’. Argyris wrote broadly and for decades about organizational behavior and its consequences, but this is the article with the catchy title and the fun terminology so it’s the one people remember. Let’s start there.

(Access the article via JSTOR or archive.org.)

Undiscussables 1980

Argyris wrote that as individuals enter organizations they bring

a set of values, action strategies, and skills that lead them to respond automatically to threatening issues by ‘easing in,’ ‘appropriately covering,’ or by ‘being civilized.’

Any way you wish to describe the actions, they add up to making threatening issues undiscussable and then to making their undiscussability undiscussable. The organization may not be the culprit; it may be the victim of the individuals who work within it. However, once the victim, the organization may collude to maintain and reinforce the problem.

The article uses undiscussability to diagnose mismatches between various learning strategies available—what Argyris called single-loop vs. double-loop learning—and their (mis)application to various problems that arise. This is valuable and good, but it feels incomplete.

Undiscussables 2025

At 45 years’ remove from the paper, there has been a change:

Back in 1980, Argyris approached undiscussables as emergent, unwanted behaviors that a wise organization could route around in order to achieve shared understanding and clarity of purpose.
In 2025, individuals bring their own perspectives on undiscussability into an organization, per Argyris. But the typical organization has also established its own set(s) of undiscussables. To what end?—as a means of control.

This is not solely a result of the present political circumstance. Although authoritarianism trickles down in a way that most things do not, what we’ve seen in the last year in the workplace is a change in degree, not in kind.

The widening circle of undiscussability has consequences.

The further up someone is in the org chart, the more fabricated (as in: filtered, or ‘eased in’ to acceptability) the information they receive. This huge disconnect helps nobody, as Argyris discussed in the 1980 paper.
Conversely, lower on the org chart, a simply outrageously tremendous amount of labor goes into producing these limited, acceptable, discussable messages.
Things go worse than they otherwise might. Opportunities and ideas are constrained. Failures take longer and cost more. People are excluded.
And you aren’t meant to talk about any of it. It’s all undiscussable.

Courage & kindness

I bring all this up because I want you to have courage. I want you to know that if you’re feeling this pressure, you’re not alone. I don’t suggest you stand up and shout out the organization’s undiscussables. But maybe write them down somewhere, on a 100% offline piece of paper, and think about how their mere, invisible, undiscussed presence benefits the organization.

Returning at last to Argyris’ formulation of undiscussables as ‘threatening issues’: what are they afraid of?—what are they threatening you with?—and what kindness or stout-heartedness might you extend today, tomorrow, and again the day after, to others feeling the same sense of enclosure?

Monthly notes

The undefined moon: notes for October 2025

A dark evening sky, with some scattered stars visible, but no moon. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Readings on sneaker manufacturing, a dismal vision from the 1960s, & Wendell Berry on ‘provision.’ Plus two upcoming events.

Looking ahead

I’m adjusting the schedule of this newsletter. We’re looking ahead into the month as we begin, not back at the past month.

So: October. Let’s go, together.

Online reading

Sometimes you read something that clarifies the moment. What is going on right now, really? For me, it was this detailed reporting from a ‘materials sourcing’ conference for footwear companies:

When you make stuff to sell—mountains of stuff, so much stuff that the human mind cannot fathom the volume of it—you cannot pretend that your industry will just function as it has forever. Sneaker manufacturing isn’t like tech, where you can blabber on about how you actually need to devour cities’ worth of energy for years at a time in order to make Generative AI and keep your investors happy. These companies are in a more tactile business. Whatever Nike’s vision of itself might be, it sells shoes and facilitates the manufacturing of shoes. For a company in that business, thinking five years ahead means thinking about what the marketplace will be like five years deeper into multiple environmental catastrophes.

Books

Fall is a season for old science fiction. Let’s visit J.G. Ballard’s Studio 5, The Stars from 1961. Here, ‘VT’ is short for ‘Verse-Transcriber’—a machine that emits soulless poetry on demand, to spec.

Fifty years ago a few people wrote poetry, but no one read it. Now no one writes it either. The VT set merely simplifies the whole process.

Ballard’s vision of text extruders everywhere fits our moment, which is the moment of over & over encountering LLM-generated text, copy without end, argument-shaped things without arguments. Of “pushing a button, selecting metre, rhyme, assonance on a dial.” I’m so tired of all of it.

Fall is a season for Wendell Berry, who helps me remember that caring is not abstract, or theoretical. I love his definition of ‘provision’—what it means to provide—from the recent collection The Art of Loading Brush.

Provision, I think, is never more than caring properly for the good that you have, including your own life. As it relates to the future, provision does only what our oldest, longest experience tells us to do. We must continuously attend to our need for food, clothing, and shelter. We must care for the land, care for the forest, plant trees, plant gardens and crops, see that the brood animals are bred, keep the house and the household intact. We must teach the children. But provision does not foresee, predict, project, or theorize the future. Provision instructs us to renew the roof of our house, not to shelter us when we are old—we may die or the world may end before we are old—but so we may live under a sound roof now. Provision merely accepts the chances we must take with the weather, mortality, fallibility. Perhaps the wisest of the old sayings is ‘Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.’ Provision accepts, next, the importance of diversity. Perhaps the next-wisest old saying is ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’ When the bad, worse, or worst possibility presents itself, provision only continues to take best possible care of what we have, or of what we have left.

We’re here in the moment of bad, worse, or worst. What to do? As Berry puts it, ‘only continue.’ I can do that. So can you. It just might be enough.

On the site

I’m running a new publication schedule. If you’re reading this on the e-mail newsletter, you’ll get two mails a month:

newsletter for the month ahead (first Tuesday of each month), and
a regular old blog post (third Tuesday of each month).

Now, I update the site more frequently than this. One example of updates that aren’t sent out as e-mails (or even distributed in the RSS feed) are HOWTOs. These HOWTOs are more telegraphic and less explanatory than what I usually write here. Procedures for assembling a particular kind of diagram, checking in with a group—that kind of thing. I joked that I have reinvented the concept of putting up a plain old web page, for my own use. Take a walk through them here:

HOWTOs

How to do different things. More quick reference than deep explanation.

Improve Something TodayBrian Kerr

Upcoming events

This month, my friend & neighbor Andy is hosting Awktober—a monthlong celebration of being genuinely awkward, or maybe better put, awkwardly genuine. A thesis of Andy’s work is that when you embrace your awkwardness, you’ll find joy in the doing, and confidence thereafter.

And looking ahead to November, you can get your ticket today for Makesensemess on Nov. 7. This will be an incredible event, as always. It is:

The brain child of information architect and author, Abby Covert. It is an annual (virtual) celebration of sensemaking that started in 2021. Part virtual unconference, part virtual party, all virtual fun. It is celebrated every November, which also happens to be the publication anniversary for How to Make Sense of Any Mess.

The undefined moon

Pity the wayward Moon Phases Mastodon bot. It posted the following on October 1:

Today’s undefined moon is 0% of full brightness, and is currently NaN km from Earth and NaN km from the sun. It’s been NaN days since the last new moon.

I thank this misfiring script or disconnected data feed for nearly a week of happiness produced by that phrase. It is the season of the undefined moon, unnumbered in distance, duration, and brightness. Yet, as I write these words, the moon is up, and it is full, and still, and brilliant.

Monthly notes

Needing Earth & body: notes for July 2025

A ‘gnome plant’ or Hemitomes spotted by my son in the forest. Odd pink buds grow directly out of the forest floor. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Remembering Joanna Macy. Two book recommendations (on AI & on facilitation). Two ways of looking at a chair.

Remembering Joanna Macy

The environmental activist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy died this month, the end of a long and generative life. Here’s a little passage from her book World as Lover, World as Self:

The strength and wisdom we need is not to be concocted on our own, but to be found in interaction—for that is how they arise, interdependently. The same is true for our goals and the visions that guide us; they, too, interdependently co-arise. New visions do not come from blueprints inside our heads, concocted by past experience and old habits of thinking, so much as from our interactions with our world and fresh sensations and perceptions. And for that we need Earth and body, the stuff out of which we are made. For these remind us that we are not brains on the end of a stick, but an organic, integral part of the web of life.

One thing I appreciated about Macy is that she never seemed satisfied with theory. She needed to know: how should we act? What can we do in intractably difficult, hate-filled, inhumane times? So if you’d like to learn more about Macy’s work—and how to apply it directly to your own—I encourage you to take this free, online “Active Hope” training based on the book she coauthored with Chris Johnstone.

Books

Creative Intelligence

I’m deeply skeptical of LLMs and related “AI” technologies, and think people should not use them. However, a lot of folks I work with have been made to, like it or not. Bosses are looking for returns on their investments—returns that don’t exist, and won’t. So the pressure is on.

If you are being required to demonstrate use of LLMs at work but want to do this in as considered and thoughtful a way as humanly possible, give Greg Storey’s new book Creative Intelligence a shot. Greg will even get you started with a free chapter.

Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality

I found this new book from Dr. Tolu Noah helpful in filling in the middle spaces between (a) having a grab bag of facilitation methods on hand, and (b) knowing how to design and run professional learning workshops skillfully.

Newer facilitators will benefit from the practical advice about gluing together methods, approaches, etc., to get to the outcomes they have in mind. And more experienced folks will find something interesting and insightful in the mix. Personally, I appreciated the discussion of ten traits that facilitators can demonstrate to produce the right kind of tone in a workshop setting.

Order a copy today.

The burning, flowering chair

I leave you today with two passages from two books giving different—yet similar—ways of looking at a wooden chair and seeing what is ‘inside’.

First, from Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Other Shore:

The word interbeing was born while I was leading a retreat at Tassajara Zen Center in the mountains of California in the 1980s. I was teaching about emptiness and I did not have a sheet of paper with me to illustrate the point, so I used an empty wooden chair. I invited everyone to look carefully into the chair to see the presence of the forest, the sunshine, the rain, and the clouds. I explained that the chair was not subject to birth and death, nor could it be described in terms of being or nonbeing. I asked them whether there was a word in French or English that could describe how the chair existed along with all the other non-chair elements. I asked if the word ‘togetherness’ would do. Somebody said that it sounded strange, so I suggested the word ‘interbeing.’

And second, from Rob Burbea’s Seeing That Frees:

A thing is ‘empty’ of its seemingly real, independent existence. And all things are this way, are empty. This voidness is what is also sometimes termed the ultimate truth or reality of things. To illustrate this and begin to get a hint of what it means we could consider a wooden chair thrown onto a big fire. The chair begins to burn, then gradually deform and fall apart, slowly turning to ashes. At what point exactly is it no longer a chair? Is it not the mind perceiving and conceiving of it one way or another that determines whether it is ‘a chair’ at a certain moment in time after catching fire? Its chair-ness is given by the mind, and does not reside in it independently of the mind. The lack of an inherently existing ‘official’ time when it stops ‘being a chair’ points to a certain emptiness, its lack of inherent chair-ness.

Both of these visions of a chair bring me comfort, and their juxtaposition makes me smile. I hope you can keep at least one of them with you and remember it next time you notice a wooden chair.

Latest Posts

‘Failure gaps’—online reading

Some good things from 2025

Something fishy

The blissfully boiling frog

Shifting baselines in the workplace

Pauly’s closing advice

As a person

In the workplace

A book recommendation

A year of whole-heartedness closes

Undiscussables 1980

Undiscussables 2025

Courage & kindness

Looking ahead

Online reading

Books

On the site

Upcoming events

The undefined moon

Remembering Joanna Macy

Books

Creative Intelligence

Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality

The burning, flowering chair