What moves you to move, to do what you do?

Attend to Little Occurrences (Little Os)

For those of you following me here, you might have noticed, I am not on a fixed writing regimen. This is not a weekly gig nor a monthly gig. It is a ‘following the flow’ gig. So sometimes, you might get an occasional snowflake; and sometimes a snow storm. Sometimes you might be invited to meet me, seemingly through your intellect alone. Mostly not. I shall call upon you to engage with all of your Being. The breath and blood and bones of you; the yelps and howls, shrieks and shouts, guffaws and moans, delights and frights of you. Come with all you have to receive and give. Engagement is key to our mutual – reciprocal – exchange. Learning is changing and I expect to be changed by what I encounter when you and I ‘meet’ in the ways that are possible and discoverable between us.

I follow what beckons from the edges of my awareness. Think of blinking stars in the darkness of the vast heavens in which all my many possible/potential ‘TO-DOs’ drift. Suddenly a spark in my peripheral vision catches my attention. This is one of those moments.

You might ask me “why did you do/write/post ‘this’ today?” More often than not, when asked that question, I will probably say: I don’t know. In truth I really do not know ‘the’ answer to all the moving interdependencies that moved me to move to ‘do/say/write’ this thing in this moment. I simply knew I must without knowing ‘why’. Without even knowing where this emerging writing might carry me.

To me, it is somewhat disingenuous to assert that I know, for sure, some direct causal attribution to many of my ‘animations’/actions; let alone that I am clear about some pre-determined destination. To assert such assumed knowledge, would have me sitting in denial of the countless, unknown and unknowable effects of all that is roiling around in the world today – let alone in my wee life. What I might be able to indicate, is the ‘factor’ I noticed which, I believe, tipped me into motion. Let’s call this factor a ‘Little O’.

OK! So this is where we are flowing! Hmmm. I am pointing us towards the theory of self-organised criticality, as it relates to complex adaptive (living) systems. Put simply, in this theory, there is an accumulation of lots of ‘Little Os’ (tiny, seemingly inconsequential occurrences). At some point, something in the system reaches a threshold of tension/energy/conditions and one more ‘Little O’ appears to activate a shift – think of it as a bigger-than-tiny avalanche/occurrence. Let’s call it a ‘Mid-size O’. When the Mid-size Os, themselves, accumulate to an unknowable ‘mid-number’, they will spill over some indeterminable threshold, becoming a Mid-size O ‘avalanche’ which in turn activates the tipping into a ‘Big Occurrence (Big O)’. This phenomenon is what folk sometimes call a ‘Tipping Point’.

More often, folk look outside themselves for such phenomena – snow avalanches; riots breaking out; eruption into civil war; sudden surge of mass migration; landslide elections that go against the previous patterns in a country; et al. Yet we experience our own versions of this kind of phenomenon when we suddenly burst into tears or explode into laughter or hit out in sudden rage. Whatever scale we focus on, we face the same challenge – we cannot, with any certainty, predict or control the exact when, where, or how of such occurrences. We are dealing with what is called ‘nonlinear causality’, i.e. multiple factors (most unknown and unknowable) are in play and we have no idea when something will ‘tip’, nor in what ways it will ‘go’ until it shows itself.

In my early adult life, I felt both horrified and fascinated by some destructive behaviours I found myself repeating. I did not want to keep doing what I was doing yet could not stop myself simply by demanding that I stop! If it were that easy, none of us would have any persistent problems in our lives!

My earnest wish to experience life differently – fuelled by my intense fascination – turned into a life-long quest to tune in to, and understand, what was going on within me that tipped me into reacting in these self-harming ways. I wanted to ‘catch’ whatever was going on within me, BEORE I tipped into reactivity. Presence in Action (PIA) – as it came to be known in 2017 – evolved and became my way of noticing – and in the process of noticing – changing my ways of being and engaging with myself, others and the world.

Along the way of my (thus far) 41 year living-learning-research I came to know about and the nature of this nonlinear dynamic and to recognise it at play within me. This helped me comprehend and articulate what it is about Presence in Action, that renders it so transformative. More of this will likely show up in future articles.

This brings me back to this moment and my move to write today. I have been experiencing another accumulation of Little O tension within me about the runaway train that is AI. So, I found myself tipping into this space with an urge to share something I wrote in 2024.

If you want to read more about what this has to do with us as human beings, do please follow this link. It will take you to a long read pdf I wrote about about high-tech AI and human-tech PIA.

I would love to know what you make of all this!

[As a mischievous aside: if you want to explore another Big O theory, you might enjoy researching what Kristina Olsen had to say about it, in her song ‘Big O’ dating back to the mid 1990s! You might have to search more deeply to excavate it].