Asymptote of Sustainability
We’re living to see changes. Sometimes we’re on the journey of those changes . Sometimes we’re just become point of those changes that came to us.
The living beyond “business as usual” sometimes takes time to understand. Time is sometimes used for transforming ourselves, individually, sometimes beyond. Sometimes we need to transform our bigger body, our social body. Consciously, and subconsciously.
The Question
There’s one sentence that I leaked as my intention in writing this post. The phrase is, “Everything has its limit, if we capture it in a single frame”. So with that, I can break it down into maybe 8–10 paragraphs of this post.
The question comes, when we see changes, what process actually happens with the limits? What interaction will actually happen, beyond capturing? Is there any embodiment of process, that beyond process framing and understanding?
The Journey to The Answer
That question was just answered by the shape of my colleague’s office while I met my colleague in my neighboring country. I found their offices were very sustainable. From the energy source, from the systems, the attitude, even the gestures of all stakeholders in that place. It started from how these collective groups respond to the situation by making collective gestures through logistics.
Go Beyond
With a consistent and disciplinary path, logistics gestures evolved into becoming the container leader maker and community stakeholder, in education and humbleness mentality through educational path. Going beyond is not the same with feeling higher than others. One of the founders had the privilege to learn at one of the “world changer” universities. And I can see what I cannot see in my previous learning space in a shifting mental model. Especially how they gather capital and intention, from the tangible oriented, into ecosystem oriented. That intangible also could become a prime asset for corporations and collaboration.
They also challenge themselves to run containing the revolution of data. Something that looks odd and needs deepening and wider knowledge, just to feel, embody, and raise the intention. But they all make it. They’re all success in converting all effort into values.
I could say that because I’m also a witness. I’ve been part of a team who see how hard transformation occurs in one of biggest media corporations in Indonesia, who started to shift the core from information to data and capitalize it in a sustainable capacity, but still struggle and the intention leaked into another branch of the core business. It’s really hard to convert capital into value. Some people just want in safe mode, to a safe and serve the capital, as capital.
The deepening process may take years, but the impact is significant and shapes the wholeness of circumstances. It’s actually not about capitalizing on the intangible, the data, the past process that could be measured and be counted. It’s also about the opening. The process of creating a moment to see self in wider perspective. When the process is tied into a cycle of awareness of who we are in the past, in the present, and in the future, we start to think about how to sustain ourselves from the deepest of our consciousness. To the source. To the core. Even, sometimes unfold the blindspot, the unconsciousness, that is connected with our awareness.
Finding the asymptote
Starting a sustainable path is not only about transforming self into more “less waste”. It’s not about “life”-style. It’s about how to shift self to a more connected and widening perspective of interdependence. We’re independent, but we are also connected with the past, present and future. It needs more grounding. More foundation is part of the changes.
Sustainability is also about sustainability in the journey of change. At every point of change that has oriented into one intention — the mother earth — there will be an asymptote to become the line for standing. To set up gestures for another point of change. Asymptoth is always a tool for deepening understanding a cycle. A cycle of gestures to being part of mother nature will. Asymptote is a state of awareness to count and measure what we are doing at present that tends to bend into a curve.
Bending The Shape
Every journey — with sustainability as part of the intention in it — will have the process of adapting the impact of self on circumstances. “It’s always a journey for bending yourself into circular directions,” said my colleague who loves to collect fresh water from a water spring. The process of “stressing out” or bending self we can call transformation. Yes. Sustainability is a set of continuous transformation. We need muscles to bend ourselves, and to create an asymptote to keep the bend in perfect cycles. “Sustainability is interesting, because it’s so mathematical,” said my colleague, offering one of the pure water bottles to me.