Dancing with the World Wound. Have you ever felt like you were born at the wrong time? I was only six years old when Woodstock happened, and humans first stepped on the moon. Amazing times, but I always felt like I had been born slightly out of tune with time. The cool stuff was happening when I was too young to fully appreciate it. The feeling of being out of time was very present for me.

And yet, I have also had a persistent feeling throughout my life that I'm here for a reason, that my incarnation at precisely this time makes sense on some cosmic scale.

The tension between these two orientations has been challenging to resolve or make peace with; it has been tempting to bypass, overextend, work at it or ignore it.

Recently I heard Pete Michaud say that if there is a concept or idea that he could magically erase from human awareness, it would be the notion of 'deservingness.'

At the moment he said it, I could feel simultaneously the immense weight that had been balanced on this fulcrum, and the expiration date passing on its centrality in my life.

In the week after, I could feel my emotional tectonic plates shifting, my inner continents of self forming new valleys and peaks, and a new fulcrum forming.

It was even stranger that, for me, the notion of 'deservingness' wasn't super loud. I am becoming increasingly aware of several aspects of privilege that I have, but I'm certain I remain blind to many more aspects of privilege. My orientation wasn't so much on what I deserve, because I have plenty, I mostly feel abundant in life. My focus was more on the obligation to return the favor for this privilege which I inherited, and my resistance to that obligation.

But if I'm to loosen my grip on deservingness, as I must and am doing, then it also becomes impossible to keep a firm grip on 'obligation.'

These two titans of motivation, deservingness and obligation, leave quite a void in their wake. I feel the lifting of an amazing burden that I didn't know I was carrying. And in the space left behind, I find an invitation to creativity.

Covid was also a powerful force in many of our lives. For me, it was a more subtle frame shift, but it functioned like a planetary zoom-out. In the early days of the pandemic, I found myself pulled beyond immediate survival concerns into a kind of global awareness and feeling of places remote from my home in Texas.

Amidst that rupture, I experienced the unexpected beauty of connecting with new friends across the world—through text, Zoom, spontaneous online communities. In those early months, I felt the contours of a new kind of relational coherence. One of these friends introduced me to the concept of The Commons.

At the time, it felt vague—slippery, like a fogged window you sense has a view behind it. But over the past few years, the outlines have sharpened. The more I sit with the idea, the more it seems not just conceptually true, but personally transformative.

The Commons began to feel not like a political framework or economic structure, but like a kind of social tissue—subtle, connective, alive.

In hindsight, I can see that "deservingness" was already in decay, but I hadn’t named it yet. What I had sensed more viscerally was a new space of belonging that wasn’t predicated on exchange, merit, or obligation. It was so distinct from the transactional frame that I felt had been force-fed to me from birth. It was something else entirely—something relational and participatory.

My friend who talked about the Commons contrasted it with notions that seem more apparent: the Market and the State. Interestingly, I think the Market is concerned with the deservingness aspect that I was blind to until Pete pointed it out. And I hypothesize that the State is concerned with the obligation half of the see-saw of relationality. These orientations orient to that transactional sense of belonging that has chafed in places I found difficult to sooth.

I sense that Commons involves a more being-orientation to belonging, and I sense that spiritually it is a more mature orientation. Mentally, Market and State orientations have been profound innovations in relating, but I think what we are seeing with the Weirding of the World is the toppling of a precarious tower of assumptions that have been poised atop this mighty load-bearing assumption of 'deservingness.'

Our sense of deservingness seems to arise from a sense of separation and comparison, which highlights features of life that we fight over like squabbling siblings ("It's my turn to sit in the front seat", and "but I called 'shotgun' first!").

So how did we come to have the notion of 'deservingness' be so central to our self (and collective self) concept that we can't even see it as a useful fiction?

This is where the dance with the world wound becomes interesting.

Our mythology around evolution is warped by this very wound. If I were to ask for a headline that captures Darwin's opus, The Origin of Species, that brought evolution into the minds of many people for the first time, we might holler out 'Survival of the fittest.' Interestingly, that phrase did not originate with Darwin, and he didn’t use it until the fifth edition (1869) of On the Origin of Species, as a shorthand alternative to 'natural selection,' crediting Herbert Spencer for coining it. Yet we’ve held onto the simplified, meritocratic echo ever since. It seems we believe we deserve our spot. "I called shotgun!" our species seems to claim. And now with AI, and trying to align AI with "Human" values, we look to apply the might of our technological prowess to secure our place in the shotgun seat for the foreseeable future (which if we don't look further to the horizon, may not be that long).

But I think this is just evidence of the waning years of teenager-phase of our species.

Given the prefrontal cortex explosion that allows all of this cogitation, but also, for mechanical and biological reasons, means that we have to be thrust into the world to complete our gestation outside of the womb. I believe that the necessity for a deep co-dependence between parent and child is essential for our species to survive.

But as this innovation has resulted in us pushing against our delicate eco-system with more force than the subtle levers of evolution are pushing back, we have perhaps crossed the threshold of escape velocity. And on the other side, 'deservingness' becomes more liability than asset.

What if we considered the Commons as our collective body? One which is even more precarious in some ways, and robust in others than we could imagine. Could we let the wound of separation dissolve? And it it's waie, see there is no deservingness nor obligation, only response to what is. This human dance is one of newborn's fingers wiggling with new capacity, and only coming into awareness of what we grasp responds to our grasp, and what we release responds to that release.

We humans are like fingers of love that Jordan named in one of his early Three Things Thursday offerings. May your dance bring joy.

#FutureYouLove