Hospicing Modernity

• What is modernity? How do you know it is dying? What are the implications for humanity?
• How does modernity colonize our conscious and our unconscious? How does modernity keep us in a self- infantilizing state?
• How does modernity condition our internal infrastructure? How does it limit possibilities for wellbeing?
• How does it impose impairments in our neurobiology and adaptability?
• How can we confront our resistance to facing inevitable imperfection?
• How can we challenge and parent the most difficult, immature, broken, trauamatized, and insecure parts of ourselves?

Questions from the Towards relational accountability deck: What does your ego feel entitled and justified to do? to what extent do these entitlements and justifications limit the scope of your relationships and your capacity to face and address the challenges at hand? What emotional states are you actively avoiding and at what cost?

• What is the accumulated shit we need to collectively learn to compost and why is this so hard to get started?
• What kinds of escapist mechanisms do we use to avoid composting shit?
• How is this different for different generations? How do incoming generations feel bout inheriting uncomposted shit?
• To what extent is it possible to find joy in shit composting? What are the first steps in learning to compost shit?

Questions from the Towards relational accountability deck: What are you assuming as universally true, real, normal, right and desirable and how does that reflect your own background? How is your privilege a loss? What does your privilege prevent you from seeing and experiencing? How can your assumptions become harmful? Who could refuse to work with you on legitimate grounds? Who/what are you accountable to and how come? What accountablities are you denying, rejecting or neglecting? To what extent are you being driven by desires for innocence, benevolence and hopefulness?

• How do we move through the fog at the edge of precipices together without throwing ourselves or each oher off the edge?
• Which kinds of hope can get us stuck?
• Which kinds of hope can help us show up differently?
• What is the role of the imagination in all of this?
• What if our imagination has also been colonized?
• How can we interrupt conditioned patterns of behavior and desire that are unconscious?
• How do we learn to see ourselves as both cute and pathetic?

Questions from the Towards relational accountability deck: How is our approach to the problem part of the problem? What other ways of seeing, doing and being are already viable, but unintelligible to you and those around you? What are you missing out on? In which ways are your idealizations, expectations, perceived entitlements and fragilities preventing you from facing the parts of the problem that challenge your self-image and your story of reality? In which ways are you reproducing patterns that center around your conditioned desires for recognition, validation and prestige? How can these desires limit your capacity to relate and collaborate differently?

The story of the Catalyst Program of UBC: report “Moving with storms” (hospicing and repurposing institutions)

Western culture “growing up” and the role of ancestral cultures in offering direction rather than detailed instruction

Exercise: Seven steps back and seven steps forward/aside

A pledge of generations

Learning to be and to breathe water

Invitations for release from the Towards Relational Accountability deck:

Let go of “the script,” the familiar linear single story that simplifies complexity, gives us a false sense of security and severely restricts our imagination

Let go of “the ruler,” the desire for feeling right and righteous that gives us a false sense of certainty and self-importance and prevents us from decentering ourselves and being present

Let go of “the bubble wrap,” the desire to please those you want validation from and the tendency to go along to get along to achieve harmony and placate conflict

Let go of “the steering wheel,” the fantasy that you can control the uncontrollable, placate uncertainty, plan flawlessly and achieve predictability

Let go of “the filtered selfie” (ego), the attachment to the carefully curated profile you crafted for yourself, which turns you away from what is difficult and uncomfortable

Let go of “the dictionary,” the expectation that meanings will be fixed, universal and stable, open up to the ambivalence, ambiguity, movement, and fluidity of language

Let go of “the flattened identity card,” the fantasy that you are self-transparent, objective and coherent, that you are in complete control of who you are and who you will become. embrace the mystery of our existence.