by Mordon
Our story begins with a group of passionate caring folk who get together and create an organisation to work on something they care about in their community. They navigate challenges, overcome hardship, and quickly become a success story. They have steady funding, a ready pool of volunteers and a lot of community good-will and they do good. However, the years pass, and the founders get older and older, and so do the volunteers. The finances are still somewhat healthy, though decreasing, but what is really diminishing fast is will; not necessarily from the founders, but from the community. In meeting after meeting, they wonder why “young people these days don’t care”, and plan futile initiatives to attract young people. Eventually, the organisation shuts up shop, another organisation not passed down to a new generation – in other words, who lacked the capacity to re-generate itself.
I have seen countless organisations somewhere along this path, in many different forms: those in their heyday but who are actually eating away at their foundations; those who took on hidden liabilities they can’t meet; those who would need to close if they didn’t get their next round of funding; those crying out for donations or volunteers; those who are desperate to attract young people; and those who have given up and resigned to their fate. Finally, I’ve seen countless great organisations, from gardens to justice to community halls, die too young and leave their places and the people who depended on them suddenly in the lurch.
Is any of this sounding familiar?
Short-term successes are great, and they help people, but they are also totally insufficient. The issues that these organisations are called to play a role in are not solved in a single generation, but require sustained work with accumulating wisdom over many years to begin to make a dent. If we are to have a hope of acheiving what we need to achieve, we need cathedrals, not disused chapels.
Intermezzo: bring to mind an organisation that achieved initial success, but closed because it was unable to sustain itself beyond its initial success, perhaps after a few years or a single generation. What could the organisation have potentially acheived if it could have worked on this issue for two, three, four generations?
Why is it that good people who have overcome many challenges in their time still cannot overcome the final challenge: passing their organisation down to the next generation?
Well, firstly, it’s not just the 3rd Sector where this phenomenon rears its head, it’s showing up everywhere in the western world: around the world, languages are going extinct because they’re not being passed onto younger people; institutions like the NHS and schools are both at risk of losing the will in the community that keeps them alive; both major UK political parties have been unable to create a new generation of ‘success’ after Thatcher and Blair; businesses, councils and governments are going bankrupt; the cultural gap between older and younger generations points to the failure at what is called “cultural memeisis”, the transmission of culture itself from one generation to another; in fact, we are in the midst of democracy and the liberal world order itself struggling to reproduce itself. Birth rates are falling in many western countries, and even bigger, human society itself may fail to physically reproduce itself more than another couple of generations due to the damage we’re doing to the ecosystems we rely on.
Everywhere you look, things that initially had so much success are now falling apart, from charities to businesses, from councils to the NHS, from an innovative industrial western culture to nations themselves. The problem is clearly not that we Westerners lack the ability to achieve anything – just look around, no matter how you judge it, there is a lot of stuff created – it’s that we can’t sustain the process of achieving. Every time we build momentum, we lose it.
How did we get here? A wise man named Gurdjieff might just have something that can help us understand what is going on. He once compared a journey of getting from A to B as more like the progression of an octave than a straight line:
If you study the above familiar keyboard layout as a journey from left to right, what I hope you’ll notice is that two intervals are different from the others by not having a half-tone (black note) between them. In the solfège scale (Do-Re-Mi), these are the intervals between ‘Mi’ and ‘Fa’, and ‘Si’ and ‘Do’ (the beginning of the next octave). It is at these points that progression through the notes becomes non-linear, and difficulties can occur. He used this Law of Octaves as a metaphor for two types of challenges we experience in our journeys from A to B.
The Mi/Fa interval punctuates the easy progression through the first notes (Do-Re-Mi) sometimes called, “beginners’ luck”, or the novelty, initial excitement and flash of will that accompanies setting out on any journey. The Mi/Fa interval is the dangerous situation the heroes of our stories have to navigate. It is the end of the honeymoon phase and the transition to a long-term relationship. It is the overwhelm felt a few miles in at the long road still left to go. It’s the moment we adjust our goals from “doing X well” to “doing X okay enough”. It is the building resentments of the “storming” phase of team building. Near the beginning of every journey, we can find a challenge of a Mi/Fa character.
Intermezzo: what Mi/Fa intervals have you faced in your life? in your work? in your projects? What qualities did they share behind the superficial content?
Successful organisations have overcome Mi/Fa intervals to get where they are, so we can do it. Progression after this point gets easier* as we continue to approach the culmination of the octave (Fa-So-La-Si). It is at this point that the Si/Do interval strikes. This is the collapse in motivation as we see the finish line of the race, the final distance being the hardest to push through. This is the urge to pee getting stronger the closer we get to the toilet. It’s also the trap of making it, of completing the journey by arriving at “Si”: the person who rests on their laurels; the one-hit-wonders who fall out of relevance; the lottery winners who lose their fortune; the fall of empires and dynasties. It is also the tempting of Jesus by Satan in the desert, and of Buddha by Mara before enlightenment. It’s human society at the pinnacle of technological ‘success’, but having forgotten the basics, and watching it collapsing around our ears.
The metaphor of the octave stretches beyond the single octave in recognising that the end of one octave is the beginning of the next – and if we must keep the journey going, as we always must do, we must navigate the Si/Do interval. The problem is that they are two different problems, and they need solving in two different ways. Trying to navigate the Si/Do like a Mi/Fa only deepens the crisis further. One reason we struggle with this interval so much is so many of our cultural myths and stories focus on the Mi/Fa interval and end when they ‘make it’. How does Simba go round the Circle of Life a second time in The Lion King? This is not well explored.
If we are to build a cathedral together, or even just keep our little chapels in use for centuries to come, we must learn how to navigate the Si/Do interval, and to do this, it calls on us to grow our capacity to regenerate: re – generation, in other words, the ability of an organism who cannot live forever to reproduce itself as a new generation of itself. As an apprentice and practitioner in regeneration, I believe this is one of the sacred roles of our work – in a world already filled with people helping to overcome Mi/Fa intervals, take up the challenge of the Si/Do.
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*the reality is that we regularly meet Mi/Fa intervals, because there are multiple journeys, and therefore, multiple octaves at play at any one time – for example, in any organisation there’s each person’s individual journey, the journey of the team and of the organisation and the journey of the place they’re working in and so on, where each ‘line of work’ has its own octave which will throw up a Mi/Fa at the right moment of its progression. If we’re not conscious of the different lines of work, we collapse into experiencing “just one problem after another”.
It’s important to me that this is read as just one man’s testimony, in the spirit of both the Regenerative and the Quaker traditions. However, reading things like this does tend to generate thinking and counter-thinking – which instead of incorporating or resisting, I’d instead love to capture and collate. So, instead of feedback or reflections (though that’s cool too), I invite your own testimony, while holding in mind potential for a book about our Work based on collated testimonies from lineage practitioners rather than the doctrine of an “expert” in the field (see Quaker Faith & Practice for what this could look like). If reading this post stimulates thinking and you’d like to send me your testimony, you can use this form