A Categorical Defense of Our Future

By Esteban Montero and Brandon Baylor

Pragmatic yet ambitious, A Categorical Defense of Our Future offers a cutting-edge mental framework based on the union of categorical mathematics and art that can help engineers, business leaders, and other ambitious individuals better understand and manipulate the complex systems prevailing in today's increasingly connected world.

Systems design and engineering are breaking in the face of modern complexity. Our world is now too complex and interconnected to successfully navigate using our current tools and intuition. Using outdated mental frameworks in our decision-making has unintended consequences, and these consequences are increasingly severe. We need to start thinking about systems in a completely different way, and we need to start doing so now.

After graduating from MIT and working in systems engineering for years, we became increasingly frustrated by traditional engineering and design approaches. We have seen millions of dollars spent on solutions that aren't working, and in the process, we began to wonder if there was a better way to view and alter modern systems. Our proposed paradigm is based on the idea that we can understand anything, no matter how complex, by understanding its relationships to other things. The concept isn't based on labels. It's all about relationships, interactions, and transformations. It's the math and science of connections, and it is the way of thinking behind art.

After considering the directions that art, categorical mathematics, and new analogies take us, we coined the word compcreation (composition and creation) for a proposed method of systems design that, through composition, acknowledges and incorporates the chaotic consequences that arise from what we create. Marked by clarity rather than simplicity, this method incorporates interactions between entities, network effects, compounded effects, and chaos itself. This new paradigm for building systems is the way forward.

Perfect for readers who enjoyed Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and Max Tegmark's Life 3.0, A Categorical Defense of Our Future is an essential book for those seeking a better way to understand and navigate modern systems. Set yourself up for success in the future, and click "Add to cart!" today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Collective Cognition LLC
• Release date: Oct 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986789323

Book preview

Chapter 1

Our Confrontation with Complexity

The modern world has become complex in ways that make human intuition and existing tools no longer sufficient to navigate it. We’re surrounded by systems: groups of people, activities, processes, and objects that interact with one another and influence each other within a whole. Think of the energy grid, the public education system, the criminal justice system, or the ecosystem—all of these things are systems.

As these systems evolve and connect in new, unforeseen ways in our rapidly changing world, they impact other systems around them in ways we’ve never experienced before. The consequences of these impacts are becoming more severe, and they’re spreading faster and farther because we’re all more interconnected. Even worse, there’s no continuity between society’s current approaches to addressing these issues and the approaches needed to succeed in the future. We’re not equipped to improve our understanding of our complex systems and how they behave.

As I will be using the term complex throughout this book, it’s important to briefly differentiate between complex and complicated.

An airplane engine, this laptop, and a traditional (dumb) car are all examples of incredibly complicated systems that are actually not complex. We can predict with impressive accuracy how complicated systems behave, simulate scenarios that would make them fail, and explain each component in detail. The system has a clear boundary that defines where it ends. There’s a known designer, operator, and governing control system. Their behavior is repeatable and reproducible, meaning that if we build many identical instances of it, they will all behave the same way and if we run the same operation multiple times, each of them will produce the same results.

A complex system, on the other hand, behaves in ways that (a) are hard to predict, with high uncertainty and many unknown potential scenarios, (b) are sensitive to context, (c) have multiple conflicting design objectives, and (d) are prone to errors. Common examples of systems considered to be complex are socio-technical systems, cyber-physical systems, biological systems, political systems, human interactions, the climate, etc.

A frequent misconception is that the number of parts is relevant in determining complexity. Anyone with experience in a romantic relationship knows that just two components can create the most complex behaviors.

This book talks a great deal about complexity, but the conclusion isn’t that complexity is a source of undesirable outcomes. The problem isn’t complexity or its conditions—it’s how we relate to it. The best metaphor I can think of for this is the story of the Buddha and the Four Sights that forever changed his life.

The legend says that when Siddhartha Gautama ventured out of his palace for the first time after a life of luxurious confinement, he encountered three things he had never seen before: an old man, a sick man, and a dead man. He questioned his carriage driver about what he was seeing, and the driver explained that we all eventually suffer in these ways. They’re part of the human condition.

But then the Buddha saw a fourth man, a monk, and he felt hope that he could be happy despite old age, sickness, and death. He realized that this could be achieved not by eliminating these conditions, because that was impossible, but by learning how to live with them.

In exactly this way, we must face complexity and recognize it as universal and unavoidable. We must aim to make good decisions despite the ubiquity of complexity. Each of us has to make a decision to renounce our figurative palaces by honestly and courageously taking in what we see so that we can learn how to live in harmony with it.

Complexity isn’t the problem. The problem is how we’re facing and embracing it—or, rather, how we’re not facing or embracing it.

This brings about a sense of vulnerability. Fear and discomfort quickly bubble to the surface when thinking about modern complexity and how poorly equipped we are to face it. But when these feelings arise, it’s important to stay present and resist the urge to fall back into comfortable ways of thinking.

The solution begins with new representations of the ever-changing nature of the world. We need new means to model reality and reason about the complexity that surrounds us.

Our current way of understanding the world is through reasoning about things by classifying them into sets or groups based on what they are. This is one reason why we struggle to confront complexity, and an entire section is devoted to this topic in chapter 2. For now, a brief introduction will suffice.

The fundamental premise is that we primarily define things by describing what they are and their membership in a set or group: I’m part of a family, an employee of a company, a citizen of a country, a professional of a certain field, a male, a father, and so on. A spoon goes inside the utensils drawer. The plates go into the plate cabinet. A dog is a mammal. Earth is part of our solar system.

These are labels we use in every waking moment to explain the world we inhabit. We’re always interacting with the objects around us, and these sets are a significant part of the language we use to describe them. This way of thinking is buried deep in the recesses of our minds. From what to buy for lunch to how to solve complex societal problems, sets are used everywhere.

Our dependency on this way of thinking is just one reason we struggle to live in harmony with complexity. We’re also missing methodologies, tools, and ways of thinking about complexity in a tactical way. Reasoning about what things are is effective in many cases, but it comes with immense limitations as complexity increases, as we’ll see in later chapters.

The first three Sights of the Buddha forced him to realize that he could not escape suffering. It’s part of being human. Our first three Sights show us that we cannot escape complexity and being part of a collective entity. We are all part of a complex system.

The fourth Sight that the Buddha encountered was a wise man showing him a viable path toward living in harmony with suffering. Our fourth Sight is a community of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and leaders embarking on a journey of exploration and discovery of something new. These people are re-thinking the problem in a revolutionary way.

This new paradigm is based on the idea that we can understand anything, no matter how complex, by understanding its relationships to other things. The concept isn’t based on labels or boxes. It’s all about relationships, interactions, and transformation. It’s the math and science of connections. It’s composition. (I discuss my unconventional usage of this word in the Introduction.)

We’re missing the foundation that would allow us to put together the pieces of our individual lives while respecting our differences. The challenge we face with complexity is preserving our individuality while also dissolving labels so that we can get to an abstract place where our similarities become recognizable and comparable. What we need is the missing piece—the composition of our heterogeneity.

Composition is the key to unlocking a brighter future. We need a means to more fully understand our complex world so we can engineer it in a way that allows us to work with our systems instead of against them. From the individual human system to the global ecosystem, we’re all interconnected and in need of a new foundation.

Decisions have to be made even when a complete understanding of the implications is unreachable. When complexity is between us and understanding, reaching toward a diversity of models and perspectives can allow us to converge to a better solution. If only we could compose those different views together.

This requires a new language and new ways of reasoning about complex systems. The secret lies in the world of abstraction and the subject of category theory. This relatively unknown theory, combined with systems theory and concepts borrowed from other fields, reveals an entirely new realm of possibilities that we have only begun to explore.

The intent of this book is to shine a light on those possibilities. Society must be exposed to the fourth Sight—the ideas presented by thought leaders who are defining the future of working together as a whole.

To begin, let us confront complexity together by examining the ways in which we’re all connected, from global supply chains to our own families.

Everything Is Connected

What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?

—My grandfather

Composing more effectively necessitates that we broaden our view of interactions and relationships. It’s an invitation to think about connection in entirely new contexts.

Global Connections

Let’s first discuss the obvious ways in which the world is connected, the ways people may already recognize. This is important to acknowledge and make visible, even if it comes across as a bit unnecessary given the twenty-four-by-seven news cycle. Once these much-discussed topics are covered, I can describe how we’re connected in more subtle ways.

In the world of viral news and social media, it’s nearly impossible to miss disruptive worldwide events. Thomas Friedman, who popularized the idea of globalization in The World is Flat, says the recent Covid-19 pandemic was but one of many pandemics to impact our society. Since the turn of the millennium, humanity has been fraught with large-scale disruptions: geopolitical (9/11), financial (2008), atmospheric (climate), and biological (Covid-19). These events are happening more frequently because we share an interconnection through communication, commerce, transportation, and more.

Think about the geopolitical system and how threats of nuclear war have evolved over the last several decades. Countries can no longer isolate themselves and think only of their own interests. It’s a connected world now. It’s so connected, in fact, that we must strive to manage interactions with countries that might have diverse, different, or distasteful government regimes. We have no choice but to think more holistically about our land and our collective actions.

When we hear leaders talk about designing systems—and especially systems made up of systems—it’s an admission of how connected things are. This includes the ecosystem, the public safety system, the healthcare system, the financial system, the political system, and the supply chain system, among many others.

I keep hearing journalists talk about how supply chain disruptions are yet another reminder that everything is connected. But I only hear a superficial interpretation of the interdependencies involved. What if global disruption isn’t a cause that impacts society? What if instead we viewed disruption as a consequence of the system’s structure?

Reasoning about disruptions as a consequence rather than a cause requires a completely different way of thinking. There’s a name for this: systems thinking. This approach doesn’t mean thinking systematically about things; it means thinking of things as systems—individual pieces interacting to form a whole. (In this book I will sometimes use the term systems thinker, which may be unfamiliar, in this sense.)

Consider the global economy and supply chains. What happens in a warehouse in a small town in China does, in fact, impact a small store in the middle of the US. There are dynamic behaviors between these systems, and we currently have inadequate thought processes about how actions and decisions result in consequences.

Calling these consequences disruptions misses another interdependency. The term implies that these consequences should come as a surprise, but they can actually be viewed as an inevitable part of the system design. Human behavior is driven by the context surrounding decision makers, and there are incentives within the system influencing people to behave in certain ways. Behavior and incentives are two sides of the same coin.

Our systems, therefore, are simply responding to an accumulation of individual choices. There’s no such thing as a side effect when consequences are viewed through the lens of systems thinking. Whether results are intended or unintended, they’re all effects of the system structure.

This means that small decisions matter. Individuals matter. What each person does is small at a global scale, but it ripples throughout and is amplified within other systems. Everyone struggles with this conceptually. Our mental models simply aren’t equipped to comprehend the structures, physics, and information flows of dynamic behavior.

Take, for example, the house I remodeled during the height of the supply chain disruption in 2021. This undertaking exposed me to prices that were almost double or triple the amount just a few months before. In the face of surging prices, there’s an individual and local incentive to pause construction until prices return to a more reasonable place. This reaction, while intuitive, has a negative effect on the global pricing system, because it’s an individual decision that’s immersed in a bigger system that’s moving with inertia all around us. It’s like deciding, during rush hour on the highway, to stop our car, turn off the engine, and wait until traffic decreases before we keep driving. It would only make traffic worse for everyone else. Our individual choices could turn out to hurt the collective even though they benefit us in the moment.

In the same way that a small warehouse pausing its work can disrupt a global supply chain, I believe that my counterintuitive decision to keep working on the house did the same in a positive way. Yes, it was painful to accept that I was paying an exorbitant amount of money compared to even the previous week, but I felt confident that if I did my part, it would help bring prices to a more stable level for everyone. The dynamic behavior of the demand for construction is always oscillating, as I will describe when talking about network effects. Buying less when demand is low only amplifies the waves of the oscillation, worsening the crisis for the network as a whole. This is what MIT professor Jay Forrester, inventor of the field of systems dynamics, calls the bullwhip effect.

There are more forms of global interconnection than the economic and political items that make the news.

Our mental health depends on how we compose our experiences with our personal beliefs and response mechanisms. Trauma that we experienced in childhood can be a key determinant of how we respond to events as adults. The behaviors that got us rewarded early in life can have a lasting influence on our interests and what incentivizes us.

Our personal health depends on many environmental factors that are shared, like the water we drink, the air we breathe, the stress we endure, the food we eat, the sounds we hear, and the levels of radiation that we’re exposed to. Our physical and chemical context is shared. We experience the same levels of gravity, the same ranges of temperatures, and the same oxygen levels. Our world connects us in a way that seems obvious but is not.

In 1951 John E. Arnold, professor of product design at MIT, envisioned what it would be like to discover intelligent life on a planet called Arcturus IV. He went so far as to outline a fictional alien race he called the Methanians. Thinking about a race with different contextual needs inspired the students to create a set of innovative designs that would never have been conceived while thinking within the invisible frame of our usual context.

We also share stories, fables, experiences, and analogies that heavily skew the way we think. Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. She experienced firsthand the Bolshevik Revolution’s traumatic effects on her father and their family business. This experience was a key factor in her writing novels that promoted individualism and laissez-faire capitalism. Her books ended up being influential among conservatives and libertarians and became popular among generations of young people in the United States during the mid-twentieth century.

Rand took the stories of a certain group of people in a certain location at a certain point in time and composed them through a narrative, generalizing them into a universal doctrine of how society should work. This is attractive because it’s easy to understand, but I question its usefulness and moral implications.

There are also entirely natural forms of global connection. Ecological systems are composed in a temporal way through the cycle of life. We humans play a role in this system, serving as hosts to colonies of bacteria and viruses that use species like ours as their living ground. Trees apparently communicate through an underground network of fungi.

But fungi do more than just connect trees. Scientists who study fungi, called mycologists, recently discovered fascinating ways in which fungi create networks with more functions than we’d previously understood. Discoveries like this are motivating complexity scientists to study how fungi networks work, a concept called mycological strategies. Many are even fostering enough curiosity in the computer science community to consider developing mycological computers.

As we learn more about fungi, the labels we assign to them become less useful. In fact, scientists have learned that humans share a common ancestor with fungi. Our response, unsurprisingly, was to use our traditional ways of understanding things, so we assigned a new label to this bigger group shared by fungi and humans. It’s called Opisthokonta. Instead, we could explore and expand the relationships we share.

To advance, we must consider how we’re interconnected. A neighbor building a fence to protect himself also changes the appearance of the neighborhood. When we drive fast because we’re late for a meeting, we increase the danger to everyone else driving at the same time. When we decide to save money because we think an economic crisis is looming, we accelerate the very crisis we fear.

*

The way we think about problems and solutions today is just one of the obstacles to composing better systems. The path forward is full of discontinuities. Strategies that worked in the beginning won’t help us as we progress. There’s no incremental step in between. There’s only an abyss, requiring a huge leap to leave everything behind and transform our core assumptions. There’s nothing between before and after. We’re called to question everything we know and start again.

Take an everyday example of this kind of discontinuity: improving athletic performance. If a trainer works with a person who has no awareness of the food they eat, someone with a high percentage of body fat and a sedentary lifestyle, the trainer would find that their client most likely needs to eat less and move more. Take now an athlete who is already strenuously active and at the limits of their performance. They might need to eat more in order to gain muscle mass, and they might need to move less, taking more rest days to recover. The strategies that worked in the early stages of training would be damaging in the more advanced stages. At each stage a person improving their athletic performance must redesign almost everything they do.

Consider another example: the design of a car. The method used to assemble a car with a hundred components isn’t the same as the one required to assemble a car with a thousand components. Likewise, writing a novel isn’t the same as writing a short story; a novel isn’t merely longer. These different scales are related, but they are different. New scales and levels of performance require new levels of complexity, forcing us to start from scratch.

This discontinuity affects us not only as we look forward but also as we look backward. A person with advanced degrees in mathematics would struggle to explain math to an elementary school child more than to a person who recently finished college. The system that a person at a graduate level uses to understand and put ideas together isn’t incrementally different from the one used by elementary school students. It’s completely different.

Much like startups struggle to scale, global corporations struggle to be entrepreneurial. This isn’t a deficiency of culture or a case of individuals not trying hard enough. It’s two different worlds. There’s a discontinuity that can only be bridged through new ways of thinking, new methodologies, and new tools.

In Andrew Chen’s book, The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects, he argues that the problem of scaling growth is about understanding networks. How the initial customers or observers of any initiative are connected to each other matters. It’s not just a problem of quantity but a problem of who, where, and when.

Everything is related in complex ways. We’re connected, composed across time and space. But somehow we’re different despite our interconnection. This reveals an intriguing premise: things can be connected and composed yet retain their differences. The journey of respecting and working with this premise is the journey of understanding.

Everything is connected. We already know that. What we’re struggling to do is to be more aware of this and to understand how we’re connected so that we can influence the whole as it comes together.

Personal Connections

Every day we make composed decisions. Even seemingly simple choices, like what to have for lunch, involve many aspects that impact our entire lives: our personal taste preferences, the preferences of those eating with us, ideas about nutrition and health, our finances, how each food was produced and how it will be disposed of, concepts about sustainability and the environment, the specific day’s agenda and how much time we have, what we’ve eaten recently, an impression of how each choice will impact our social status, the local weather, feelings about cooking versus buying something prepared, and opinions about the restaurant or manufacturer.

I once had a colleague who took the decision of what to eat to the extreme. He used to say with enigmatic flair, There are always three elements to consider when choosing what to eat: value, function, and taste. Every time he went to lunch, he would make tradeoffs in his mind and arrive at what he felt was an optimal choice across these three dimensions of the decision.

We used to joke about his scrutiny around such a seemingly simple choice, but a closer inspection reveals that this decision involves elements of our entire lives and ripples throughout the world—even if it’s just a pebble dropped in the ocean.

There are also factors involved in our meal choices that are usually invisible to us, like our cultural and family backgrounds. When we think about breakfast, we automatically associate that meal with certain types of food depending on our culture. These associations are contextual and specific to groups in ways that we don’t commonly recognize.

We understand each of these factors in a way we colloquially call mental models. Most people can describe quite sophisticated mental models for choosing foods. The way we consider small decisions, like what to have for lunch, in connection with global issues is one aspect of composition. It’s just like considering our own lives, or our personal connections, in tandem with a larger perspective about ourselves.

This is where we diverge from the traditional examination of the network of global systems. Applying systems thinking to a problem like supply chain disruption is only one piece of what it means to compose. In subtle and often overlooked ways, we’re missing the means to compose our own lives into the larger picture. How can we respect and accommodate each others’ various perspectives? How can we compose our personal lives with our professional lives? How can we live in harmony with the ever-changing environment around us?

This book offers a way of thinking that allows for this diversity of thought while being respectful of our differences.

*

Peter Senge, an MIT professor widely considered a thought leader in how organizations work, guides us to look no further than our families to think about systems and complex interactions. It’s a useful way to avoid jargon and ground us in something we can all relate to.

The reality is that we’ve all experienced the complex web of dependencies and interactions that arise among family members, and we’ve witnessed the unintended consequences of these interactions. But perhaps we’ve never fully understood why or how these consequences came to be.

I first felt compelled to examine my thinking because of the father figures who came in and out of my life over the years. They’re the people who most influenced the fragments that became my whole being. They signify my greatest joy, and they represent my deepest regret.

We’re all familiar with the construct of family trees. They’re an attempt to decompose, or break down into pieces, the connections in our families, by viewing them through the specific lens of lineage. We use them as an abstraction to more easily make sense of our family structures. We also assign labels to our relatives, and while useful at times, this can be problematic when trying to make decisions around how to approach relationships.

I have a complicated genealogy, and as a child I found it confusing. I was raised by a single mother and didn’t come to know my biological father until I was a teenager. As a result, I struggled throughout childhood to understand who filled the father label on my family tree. Also, I mostly lived with my grandparents and aunt, who is only three years older than me, and there was a time—as a young child—that I mistakenly thought my grandfather was my dad.

My aunt used to say in the snide tone that children sometimes take, "You’re not part of our immediate family." This used to upset me, because it was technically true based on standard family labels, yet I felt differently based on the relationships and dynamics in the household around me.

Sometimes I resisted the identities that came with my family tree. As I grew up, it didn’t matter who I was biologically connected with. It certainly mattered at the moment I was conceived, and genetics continue to play a role in my overall health. But what I needed while growing up was a father figure, someone to teach me about positive and healthy behaviors.

For a time, my mother and grandfather tried to fill that role to the best of their abilities, but, happily, my mother eventually remarried, and my new stepfather adopted me as his son. This was a great moment for me because I gained a potential father figure, someone with a presence who could fill that void in my life. Still, the labels of biological father versus adopted father continued to confuse me, and I was hungry for a better way to think about these complex family relationships.

One day—before I ever contemplated the notion of composition—a realization dawned on me. I decided that the labels on my family tree were no longer important. They were useful in the sense that they helped organize my thinking about people in my life, but they were details that I didn’t truly care about. So I decided to drop the labels and the intrinsic properties they represented from my thinking. I chose, instead, to consider the roles these people played in my life.

This was a liberating experience. I downgraded my contrived relationships with people who carried a specific label on my family tree, with whom I had been forcing interactions for years—all because of an invisible construct—and discovered I felt no regret. I decided to instead enrich the relationships in my life with people who reciprocated my affection, even if they had no label or binary identity.

Focusing on these people unlocked something in my heart and in my mind. It became easier to prioritize my limited time and energy. After all, we only have a finite amount of resources to devote to others—emotional availability, time, and money. We have to decide whom to buy gifts for, to spend time with, to travel to visit, and to call on the weekend.

Using my family tree as a way to annotate and classify the people in my life had made me believe I was reducing the complexity of these decisions—as trivial as they may seem. But I found that without the baggage of genealogical obligations, my relationships with friends and family became more holistic. The old labels, I discovered, had been holding me back.

*

This notion of identity extends beyond our families. We see it in every walk of life today. Simply look at the political arena: Democrat, Republican, Independent. We use labels to try to manage the complexity of what falls within these groups. What if, instead of caring about these labels, we dropped them and chose leaders based on the roles their policies played in the world?

Our families, our politics, our culture—they’re all becoming more fragmented when we most need them to get closer together. I would add, however, that I don’t mean getting closer together as a way to reduce our perspectives to a single perspective; our composed view of the world and its interactions must be sensitive to many perspectives.

My relationships with others, like my father figures and other family members, is only one part of the struggle of composing my personal life. An even more arduous one is to compose a relationship with myself. Even now, I struggle with the paradox that the different versions of me in different contexts and at different ages are totally different entities while simultaneously being one and the same. The experiences that I had in childhood remain an active influence in how I feel, think, and behave.

My willingness to be vulnerable—or not—is directly related to the love and support that I received from my family. My perfectionism and ambition are influenced by how much I felt the need to get approval from the people who were supposed to love me and protect me when I couldn’t do it for myself.

My perceived experience of being abandoned by my father who died, my fear of disappointing my mother without even knowing what she needed from me, and an accident in a cold river where I was convinced that I was about to die are all key influences on how I act right now. These experiences also influence how I project my own future.

My past, present, and future are composed, whether I consciously compose them or not. They’re all parts of who I am.

Awareness of the complexities within requires courage and hard work. It takes courage because I’m forced to question experiences and people that I love and fear. The most traumatic and treasured memories and relationships of my life have to be exposed to honest contemplation. It requires hard work because we must overcome the limitations of our language in order to deal with the complexity that limits and blinds us. It’s like wanting to see the radiation from the sun with just our eyes.

The limitations of our language when contemplating our own lives are multiple, but the greatest limitation is the way in which we tend to think about sets or groups. We love to put things in boxes: My mom is good or bad. My ex loved me or not. My daughter is disappointed or proud. Because these topics are so emotional, my life experience has been a constant struggle to classify these relationships without even knowing that there’s an alternative to classification.

We need to put things in boxes in order to survive in the wild. It’s important to quickly decide whether what moves in the grass is a snake that can kill us or a cute animal that will make us laugh. An expansive conversation with ourselves about how a snake can be both good and bad is a life-threatening approach to take when barefoot and about to step on a snake. Boxes are useful in certain frameworks.

However, when we put our parents or a traumatic experience in a box, we become prisoners of a narrow and rigid meaning. It’s in these moments that we need the courage to do the work to expand the meaning of the experience. Then we can find what’s essential, what connects all the parts of ourselves—what connects us all.

One implication of the idea that everything is connected is that we’re connected to everything that we despise. As the philosopher Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran puts it, crime doesn’t just involve the actions of criminals. When closely studied, the binary that separates good from bad, us from them, dissolves, and we inevitably arrive at the conclusion that we’re part of everything. Somehow, we’re all accomplices to what’s going on, even if we’re not aware of it.

Pema Chödrön says beautifully in her book The Places That Scare You that compassion requires that the healer see the wounded as an equal, recognizing the shared humanity between them.

If we’re able to deal with the tension and paradoxes that arise from