What I took from the Life Itself Values Jam

Written as a collaborative reflection by those in attendance at the Values Jam held on Thursday 19th October.

I have been holding an inquiry around values for a little while now, particularly along the subject lines of whether there might be, and if so what might be the character/central themes of a truly global “basic human values set.”

My interest is in looking for low level leverage points that might facilitate increased coherence in the activities, attention, and efforts of the combined human species enterprise in a global context where our survival is becoming increasingly dependent on some function of unified capacity and trajectory.

The invitation to the Values Jam seemed apropos of this, and though I have not participated in the meeting of these community calls yet, I thought I would be wise to pay some attention to this serendipitous invitation.

I came on the call a few minutes early, with a passive interest in discovering how the subject would be broached in this particular context. I had a busy morning waiting on my desk, but figured I could get through some clerical work while listening on in the background. The truth of what awaited was not quite what I had expected.

Entering the video conference room I was met, not with the expected accumulated handful of community familiar participants beginning to gather, but instead found myself face-to-face and solo with Lauren, our host for the exploration.

I very quickly realized that to truly be of service, I would have to provide a much deeper level of presence to the occasion than I had originally imagined. It strikes me that this very experience is apropos to our lives today in this struggling global commons.

Lauren and I would be joined shortly by a small handful of other co-conspirators, on this occasion – each of us new participants to this community. Obviously the theme had struck a nerve.

True to the heart of intention precipitating the initial invitation, our time together proved to be, to paraphrase some gestalt of our little collective, a lovely collaboration characterized by intellectual insight and personal vulnerability, leaving us each with a sense of wonder and gratitude. Characteristic of so many of the Life Itself calls (or so I’m told ;-)), all involved I think would characterize this engagement as truly nourishing for the soul.

Indeed, at the end of our call, one of our participants urged us to the possibility of taking some collective action, and thus was born this blog post which we now share with you.

May this exercise of bringing together diverse points of view to synergize some greater value, prove to nurture you, dear reader, as well.

In our conversation, we found both common themes, as well as a spectrum of experience and intent.

More than one of us were living with the simple and acute question of how best to manage care for the rubbish bins or laundry rooms in our modern cohabitated environments of multi-unit dwellings.

In the same conversation there arose questions of the metacrisis and how we might start to think intelligently along lines of action across the spectrum from personal and immediate, to civic, and global beyond.

Not surprisingly, care, community, and embodiment bubbled quickly to the surface. In the words of the initial invitation:

“Values shape everything we do, and having awareness of our values and our communities values plays an important role in consciously and successfully navigating life and relationships. When we don’t know or understand our own values, how these show up for us, and how they might interweave with others, we can often create unintended disharmony.”

It stands out for me, reflecting on this conversation, Everything is Relationship. That is the very medium in which these subtle objects of “values and virtues” meet the earth of our lived experience.

Embodiment indeed. And the friction of material experience as well. We shared about contexts where our best efforts thus far have failed to gain the traction of collaborative values-based actions. We recognized the grace of contexts where these things flow smoothly. We began to ask questions about how we can allow these experiences to shape us more consciously by coming together, to give our time, energy, and listening as we share our experience with one another and iterate again when insight comes to the fore.

We wondered if there might be insights around emerging forms of leadership in this domain and regard? Can we find breadcrumbs in the fields of developmental theory? Where is our agency, and how does action fit into all of this?

The conversation was of course, not all high-minded and intellectual — I did mention vulnerability. We shared our sense of daily challenge, when our offerings are not received; when new and even familiar frustrations surface; when we feel rejected and deflated and confronted with an apparent sense of blindness and ignorance so forceful in the world today.

We had to ask, why do we show up? Why should we? And do we even want to?

As the conversation unfolded, we found our shared way to reflect on values of gratitude, acceptance, intentionality. Conversations like this that both nurture existing seeds and sprouts within us, as well as planting new ones, enrich us all. The implicate value of coming together to find alignment in community.

Our time on the call left us feeling each, in various ways, more vulnerable, more empowered, more connected, and more committed to continuing this path of care forward in our own lives, and together.

Wise words were peppered throughout our exploration, but little can surpass the simple elegance voiced by one participant, “it involves self-care in the first instance, but then reaching out to others to form positive and collaborative relationships.”

The simple act of helping a neighbor to wrangle a runaway pet builds community in honest ways, bringing us more together and counters those courses, so algorithmic in the world today, that divide us.

Already one of our co-conspirators has reported feeling further buoyed by our connection such that they have committed to joining a local community advisory group to improve the circumstances of regional transit in their area. I am grateful to feel I have contributed in some very small, but not at all inconsequential way to the health and well-being of a local community far remote from my person. And just from saying yes to a small spontaneous moment where I could turn away from or towards novel community connection.

As it turns out, saying yes in the little moments of time can have far-reaching consequences entirely invisible from those moments of invitation.

In the words of another of our collaborators, “I want to underline how much I enjoyed our call, and however this [collaborative blog writing] post goes, I hope we can meet again on another call sometime.”

This was a gathering of voices from literally around the world, perhaps World Values Day happens always and is never farther than our nearest gesture of care.