Freshness. A quality we recognize most clearly in, say, the air of early spring, and the taste of fruit plucked from the tree, the sight of puppies gamboling, the feeling of having just showered, and excitment of unburdened beginnings, the coolness of not-yet-breathed air, the energy of morning plans, and the expectancy of unanticipated arrivals.
When we’re stale and ‘it’s so stuffy in here’, and projects seem pointless, then we feel the need for freshness most acutely. When our basic mundane motives as individuals and communities–survival, comfort, dignity–and the agendas arising from them–power, profit, perpetuation–don’t satisfy the question ‘so what?’, then we need freshness badly because only freshness provides the self-evident why-ever of whatever we do.
We find freshness for our lives and indirectly our worlds in encounters, those occasions when we make common cause with the livingness of another. Or rather freshness comes when we call, that is, when we are ready for encounters. That readiness is our livingness.
A simple encounter begins with the address of some other as you, and in a compound encounter, being similarly and reciprocally spoken to. Then in the course of making common cause, we manifest who we are, our powers, energies, and potentialities, and also, beyond the perimeter that represents our livingness, who or what we consider our personal others and othernesses, outer and inner. This is the encounter space, full of the particulars of who we are and what we care about.
Freshness comes into and flows around this encounter space expanding it while suffusing it with the glamour of open-ended beyondness, of, say, unexplored plenitudes, unrealized potentialities, unresolved mysteries, of more, ever more, and it calling us.
And highlighting particular and personally compelling things we find impressive or intriguing or intimate, new and, or newly, interesting things to care about, to engage with and be inspired by. This is freshness as we actually relish and savor it in our day-to-days.
Whence freshness? Clearly from outside the mundane, from the transcendent. When we call, it comes (and when its summons, we answer). When ignored, it knocks. Freshness is passionate about encountering. It is not timeless but it is not pulled back by the past, nor pressed forward by the future. It encompasses the freshness of all encounters and serves as the medium of non-local connections between all encounters that are or ever were. In this way our encounters not only persist but participate in our subsequent encounters.
Freshness seems not just a quality but a kind of agency. And why not? When we’ve put our strategic or optimax or systemic thinking prowess to work figuring out just how but we’ve have lost conviction about just why, then freshness like the friend we need takes us to where we can discover what is really important. And we can begin afresh.