What something, concrete and specific, recently
filled you with wonder
piqued your curiosity
delighted you
awed you
touched your heart
opened up a new line of thought
aroused your respect
caused you to muse
made you dissatisfied with your level of understanding
laid out before you vistas of possibility
Whatever answer you give to any of these or similar questions, the larger point is that each was arrived at through some adventure of exploration you had, some excursion or incursion on a particular occasion with a particular other or otherness.
Any answer, as ingenuous or vulnerable as it makes you, as tentatively and tenderly as you share it, represents something discovered, or experienced, or connected with through some adventure of exploration. Each answer is a response that transcends concerns about our basic motives of survival, comfort or dignity, and their enabling agendas. Rather it is an unpremeditated and intrinsic response to the affordance represented by reality in its most inclusive sense, a response that whets our appetite for more such.
What is in us that has these responses, and that has appetite for further adventures of exploration to have more such responses? I call it livingness and want to make the focus of a new kind of conversation I want practice and champion from here on in: conversation of exploration, convex of livingness.
I’ve spent a year now thinking and writing at this site about things like encounters, others and othernesses, livingness, and freshness. It’s time to road test these concepts in a kind of conversation that any two (or more) people can have whenever, wherever, they want, a conversation focused on adventures of exploration and their implications.
‘Adventures’ suggests exciting endeavors with the prospect of rewards and risks. Often we associated adventures with travel to exotic places, but every encounter, that is every occasion of making common cause with the livingness of an other addressed as ‘you’, is, in fact, an adventure.
The risks? Possible discomfort, disorientation, disappointment, and disapproval, along with the inevitable dramas associated with the difficulties of determining what’s true, what’s trustworthy and what’s pertinent in any situation at any time.
The rewards? Each of the answers above is a gift of our livingness, both to ourselves and our partner, a unique gift, one of a kind, created on the spot by the interaction of livingness and freshness coming together, a gift delightful in its own right, but ripe with an implied open-endedness that warrants continued celebration expressed as further exploration.
The type of conversation I propose makes room for the contemplation of livingness, mine, yours, livingness as such. It doesn’t dismiss the topic as impractical, childish or beneath consideration, but as essential because our livingness, if overlooked, leads to languishing and loneliness, whereas livingness, if liberated, outlasts life itself.
One more thing about convex. It is a conversation and so, after all, unscripted and spontaneous. It can weave itself in and out of other kinds of conversation. In and of itself, convex is an adventure of exploration, each participant serving as other to the other(s).
There are no takeaways or deliverables of convex, unless perhaps a renewed appetite on the part of participants, of encountermates, to risk more adventures of exploration, including perhaps more convex.
I don’t know how this project of popularizing convex will play out. In my experience, people respond hungrily to chances to report on gifts of livingness, their own or others, but they don’t often realize what these gifts represent, and where reflection on them could go, so they don’t protect convex from lapsing inadvertently into simply discussions of practical matters or performances.
Indeed, only now has the way forward become clear to me. But with clarity comes opportunity (and responsibility) and so, one way or another, I’m going to pioneer convex, as I understand it today. Your good wishes are welcome.