When will we accept we are like quarks ? Part 3: Individuals need not be singular
As I said in my two previous installments, 21st century individuals are like quarks… and we owe it to ourselves to make a jump in collective intelligence and benefit from what we know of quantum physics, integrating their principles into our way of living.
In the first installment, I made the case for virtualizing space so that individuals can live their lives more fully while also improving performance in their work. In the second installment, I argued in favor of enabling spherical time development so that individuals can get back in touch with natural life-progressing rhythms without being overly taxed socially or professionally… in a way which can actually improve society and productivity. Now we’ll look at a new take on “matter”: our individuality.
3. Individuals need not be singular.
Quarks are simultaneously matter and antimatter, both particles and waves, until observed.
We humans base our relationships a lot on behavioral and visual codes. The easiest place to witness it is at a high school where many budding individuals help to categorize themselves by being part of a clear-cut tribe, with which they identify themselves by adopting the correlate codes (think Gothics vs. hip hop, etc.). They are actively still-life-ing themselves when observed so as to be identifiable and gain belonging to a well-defined social group.
In our digitalized media age, we adults are also constantly observed and observing. If before we were observed at precise moments of socialization (present at religious gatherings, professional gatherings, blood-related gatherings), nowadays these moments never really end or begin; with facebook, linked-in, SMS, and mobile phones, we are more or less constantly linked... and observed (even in abstentia!).
Yes, observed and observing… With less and less time for simple growth or learning, for living or experimenting. Instead, we are performing.
But there are a lot of down-sides to performing.
Performing entails type-casting ourselves in order to be more intelligible for our audience (employers, friends, etc.), forcing certain traits, casting in shadow other aspects that don’t sell your performance so well (at least, in today’s age, hopefully for you!). In this sense, performing is a rather redundant logic as it requires ostensible visual or oral cues that can place more fixedly the person within the social system, meaning it builds on established patterns instead of leaving full latitude to creative or innovative behavior.
Performing also requires keeping up the performance, keeping up appearances, which is hardly sustainable considering how many roles each of us must perform. This is a real issue to be considered for as long as we’re in a performance society, we have to be performant in each and every of our dimensions and tasks we undertake instead of enabling a balanced, more holistic approach.
That’s why I plead for a quarkish “Integrated I”: integrating our different facets, for a “mosaic me” instead of a “tribal we”. This doesn’t mean we should be everything to all people at all times. What it means is moving away from crystalized perfrection for each of our “tribes”. This is particularly a challenge for modern women who are constantly spinning plates and playing every female archetype for her many roles (more manly than a man in business, more seductive and ‘wild’ than a sex-worker in bed, more motherly than June Beaver, as good of a friend as the Sex in the City crew, and as good of a hobbyist as the role Meg Ryan plays in The Women, etc.)
Let us 21st century women move away from multiple and simultaneous perfect performances towards an “Integrated I”. Instead of one thing and another, we should embrace a kind of multiplicity, a mosaic in which the glimpse of one facet of an individual is colored and contoured with that same individual’s other simultaneous facets… with which our different facets serve to multiply our energy and added-value in each role (instead of the commonly perceived quagmire of superwoman or exhausted woman who’s spread too thin to do anything as well as she thinks she should).
On the contrary, living our “Integrated I”, we actually synergize our diverse experiences. In this way, motherhood and the experiences and learning it entails becomes an asset for sharpshooting professional problems. Womanhood and the experiences and learning it involves (consider Ginger Rogers’ quote, “I did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in heels”) becomes a boon in the business world (consider “Lehman Sisters”), professional growth becomes a positive force in raising a family and running a household, hobbies become a real oxygenator of our minds helping us to be better friends, mothers, and professionals. And so on and so forth.
This “Integrated I” is also a-temporal, or spherical-time, as discussed in a previous blog. It allows us to pull on all dimensions of our own resources at all times. Imagine a kind of time warp that activates the strengths of our past and potential futures in order that we better live our present. Sounds obvious and yet so often people talk of their lives very linearly and generally present them as a positive slope, emphasizing causality and logical construction. Their focus is on the future and their ambitions. When this happens, in some ways, they seem to be always pushing forward, almost running away from their pasts in order to keep up the pace of success, to catch happiness.
Unfortunately, in the race, we risk leaving behind the riches of lessons learned, roots, preferences, tastes… we risk leaving behind some of the elements that make us unique. Specific. Authentic. Self-worthy and worthy of Self. As we perform, we tend to reproduce the current model instead of valorizing the personal traits and diversity we could contribute. And we know the importance of diversity in the survival of a species.
The point here is that many of us have lost touch with what are our personal gifts and with what is natural for us as women and as individuals. The unintended consequence of this is that we are no longer reaping the fruits of our individual labor… that in the absence of living deliberately (due to being caught up in the societal flow and expectations), we have given in to a kind of “absentee living” with which we may check off the list certain clichéd accomplishments, we haven’t actually benefitted from them or grown with them (cf. If it's Tuesday, this must be Brussels). Living according to our “Integrated I” reclaims the full dimension of our selves, nourishes us with what we have lived and experienced, coming full circle to our roots and our personal story which become a source of strength for our present selves and helps to shape our future selves. This was a part of Almodovar’s El Flor de mi secreto.
For, however politically incorrect it may sound, NO, we don’t all have the same talents. Many of us have a tendency to think that what’s easy for “me” is easy for others… whereas each of us have skills which come easily and others which do not. Each of us needs to regain focus on what comes naturally to us instead of fixating on a societal ideal of 360° perfection. After all, 360° perfection is a very fragmented way of looking at life. Fixating on one small fragment of a whole necessarily distorts the image and often expresses an entirely different message than that of a more holistic consideration. As said Germaine Greer, one needs to know onself to gain “self-determination”. The “Integrated I” helps each of us to find ourselves, our true selfhood… and thus allows our world to delect in true diversity.
I will stop here and come back in later blogs for the three other benefits of integrating the quantum into our current way of living:
1. Space need not be physical
2. Time need not be linear
3. Individuals need not be singular
4. Identity need not be definitive
5. Love need not be crystalized
Rendez-vous next Thursday for a new bite from the apple. In the meantime, share your comments based on your own knowledge and consciousness!
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