Convex, conversation of exploration, can occur anywhere, anytime, with anyone. Its conviction is that we and all others are free originators; that the world is multifarious and multidimensional, and that the future is open-ended. Its style is playful. Its method is discovering and sharing gifts of livingness. Its route is unprescribed and spontaneous; its landmarks are surprises. Its success is the readiness for more of the same. Its takeaway, a renewed interest in one’s existence.
Join me in convex. Let there be more convex. Let’s make convex everywhere.
How does convex happen? In any conversation if we take time, with a measure of ingenuousness and vulnerability, to report and reflect with each other on news from our livingness: what we’ve been reading, listening to, watching, pondering, making, doing, saying, meeting…
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All convex are encounters, but not all encounters are conventionally conversational. I’ll use convex when I’m referring to encounters where the encountermates are people talking to each other; otherwise I’ll use the terms interchangeably. Convex is both a category and a collective noun.
One’s encountermate is not an audience but, like ourselves, free originator of thoughts, words and deeds, and co-determiners of the course of the conversation, co-creators of its surprises, and co-discoverers and recipients of the gifts of livingness.
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Convex are indifferent to respectabilities, orthodoxies, hierarchies, legal regimes, work systems; to the enabling agendas of power, profit and perpetuation; to contests and commercial deals; to the conclusions of the past. These, of course, loom large in all our lives, but in encounters, these are contexts, not compulsions.
What then draws us to convex? Freshness.
When I invite you to join me in conversation of exploration, we’re after what is unfreighted, unforced, unforeseen, and yet impressively, intriguingly, touchingly intimate in each of us, that not-to-be accounted-for origin of what we think, say and do.
We want spontaneity; we want surprises; we want gifts of livingness, in short, we want freshness. We want our interest, our inspirations, our impulses to be renewed and revitalized as if by fresh breezes or fresh springs–and how we welcome that: freshness not just coming to us from the world, but in us as we face the world.
Our livingness, our appetite for transformative interaction with all that is, can be and may come, longs to be roused, not tranquilized; stimulated, not inhibited; whetted, not dulled; quickened, not thickened; kindled, not dwindled; piqued, not plastered, incited, not recited; stirred, not stolid;or at least a dynamic balance between the two.
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Surprises: The surprise spectrum runs from simple notice, as when we are shaken out of our ‘take for granted’ trance or our torpor of presumption by some glitch, anomaly, or salience, to, at the other end, astoundedness that paralyzes our actions and minds. In between there are occasions of wonder, delight, interest, being lost, and ‘Well, fancy that.’ In convex, as we report together on the same or separate things, and reflect together on them, we make ourselves ready to be surprised, and to change in consequence. In games, surprise is a strategy for winning but in convex, it rewards and extends a discovery process that has no clock, no out-of-bounds, no victory conditions.
Gifts of livingness. Our livingness is our appetite for transformative engagement with others in encounters. Gifts of livingness are discoveries, experiences, connections that open up new horizons for us, new influences, new explanations, new sensitivities, and new potentialities in the world, and are also intimations of even more to be encountered beyond, between, behind what we already glimpse. Thus is our appetite whetted for further exploration.
That zest, that excitement, that passion for encounter is why we need and long for convex. When our other conversations make no room for our livingness, for what it is that motivates us, catches our attention, interests us, inspires us, perplexes us, pleases us, not as role players but as persons, when too often we are alone with our livingness, then convex can be the fresh air we need: inhale, exhale, breathe.