Celebrate Life

Why 2025 is the year of the coherence game

AI art source: riverflows.life

Continuing the tradition of a personal ceremony and contemplating where I am on this Earthwalk, what emerged from my retreat in December 2024 follows.

A birthday party

This was an unusual birthday party. I was not really in the mood to celebrate my b.day. My loving friends and family came together on two occasions to celebrate my 80th, but I desired to celebrate something else. That was not because getting older is not necessarily fun. I thoroughly enjoy this stage of my life and the creativity of a polymath, which manifests in many ways, bringing ever-new challenges and satisfactions. But this stage also gives me a perspective on what’s more worthy of celebration.

Birthday motto lettering by Carmen Betz

I bow down in reverence to the river of Life, to the flow that connects us All.

For some, a statement like this can be virtue signaling or, worse, the colonization of indigenous spirituality, in which all of Life is sacred. For others, it expresses a yearning to find our way back to the primordial oneness before our individualist culture tore us out of it.

Some don’t fit either of those categories and ask me, “What does this mean in practical terms?” What should I do to celebrate life? If you’re one of them, I have three verbs for you that are easy to remember, although they may be less easy to act on: Cohere, Curiosify, and Connect.

COHERE

Yes, we are grateful to you, Professor Prigogine, for your oft-quoted, fascinating insight: “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”

But where will coherence come from in the life of human groups and social systems? Let’s start with the qualities and origin of our inner experience of coherence.

When my values and thoughts are supported by my emotions and guiding my actions, the famous “head-heart-hands” alignment, I feel joyous and energized by a state of flow. Just as our children originated in us but don’t belong to us, neither does that flow. It comes to enliven us so that it can enliven others through us.

That’s when I may come into coherence with other cohering beings, too. Two people in their cohering moments can come into resonance, but that is not automatic, as nothing is human affairs. For interpersonal and group coherence, we also need values alignment and something else: curiosity.

CURIOSIFY

I’m not sure whether there’s such a word, but I’m using “curiosifying” in his context as imbuing oneself with a genuine interest in what is the next stage in one’s becoming, what one can learn from other people and, by extension, what are their strengths, their “superpowers.”

I asked the attendees of my b.day party to bring a question that matters to you, which we could explore together because meaningful conversations are one of the joys of his life. Some did, and the ensuing collaborative inquiry brightened my day. Questions that I don’t have an answer to toss me into a beginner’s mind and nourish my curiosity about the unknown.

Curiosifying fuels a learning mindset. It allows us to discover new dimensions of reality continually. This ongoing discovery process and updating our understanding helps us connect more authentically and grow our relationships into coherence.

If you’re genuinely curious about me, and I am about you and others in the group, that demonstrates interest and care, which fosters my trust. If you talk a lot with no interest in how your monologues land with me, let alone asking questions about me, that doesn’t help our interpersonal coherence grow because that would require honest dialogue and mutual listening and support.

CONNECT

For the enlivening state of the flow to expand from “head-heart-hands” and interpersonal coherence to coherent (but not conflict-free) social systems, it has to deepen and widen paths of connecting. “Enlivenment is not a project with a beginning and an end. It is the basic pattern that characterizes the unfolding fractal of life at any scale” — Towards an Enlivenment Theory of Change. Celebrating life is consciously joining in the dance of that unfolding.

In nature, seemingly isolated islands connect in the ground of their being on the ocean floor. Islands of human and social coherence connect in the ground of their becoming, their alignment with the evolutionary imperative that drives seemingly separate spirals into coherence with each other:

Source: Future HOW

The touching of the separately originated spirals creates the connection, but depending on circumstances, it can be unstable and evanescent. Those circumstances can include insufficient feedback loops, inadequate coordination mechanisms, and the strengthening of isolationist trends in the larger social and geopolitical contexts. The wise use of artificial intelligence can come to the rescue in the first two cases, and I will address the latter in the final section of this story.

If Life led to the creation of AI, we must not overlook it in the range of means for nourishing coherence as a way to celebrate Life.

A fundamental challenge in complex social systems is the delay between actions and their consequences. Well-designed AI agents could help shorten these feedback loops by analyzing system behavior in real-time and modeling potential outcomes of different interventions. Agentic AI could also help involve the stakeholders of a social system in coordinating and aligning the system’s parts into a coherent whole, be it urban planning, citizen budgeting, or other cases of participatory democracy.

2025 — the year of the coherence game

In 2024, the seismic waves of popular discontent with the neoliberal order, whipped up by power-hungry, authoritarian politicians, started shaking the foundations of the status quo. But not exactly in the way the Leftist critics of “late capitalism” hoped for.

In an increasingly interdependent world, the “me first” nations drive the trends of illiberal “democracy”, the erosion of liberty at home, and isolationism globally. Maybe the rising, conservative-populist wave will bury much of the social organization of the dying world order, and maybe it is necessary before a new healthy one can be born.

Even so, what can islands of sanity do during a possibly long, dark night of the planetary soul? I trust that people on those islands, people who cohere, curiosify, and. connect, will find meaningful answers. I aim to be one of them. Whatever those answers will be, the process of discovering them will most likely go through inter-island cohering. I nominate “the year of the coherence game” for the motto of 2025 😊 .

My year-end personal ceremony coincided with the end of a cycle in human history. My friends know that for the last twenty-plus years, I have remapped my Circle of LifeWork in each of those ceremonies. This past December, I didn’t find that possible anymore and broke that tradition.

No more mapping, no more lifework, only lifeplay,

where my struggles for the subsequent causes on the journey

morph into responding to the juiciest opportunities

for creative celebrations that Mother Life presents to me, to us.

LET’S CELEBRATE LIFE
and its gifts of 4 billion years,
starting with you and me together!
What are we a possibility for?