Lately I’ve been thinking about change.
First, because of my own personal changes: my son leaving for college soon, a new iteration of this brand being (re)born, and slowly beginning to consider a more permanent home, without any of the objects that once made a home for me in my pre-fire life.
But also because of more global changes: new wars, the quality of our food, air, and water, rapidly evolving technologies, the way our attention is constantly being pulled, and the simple fact that the world feels wildly different from the one many of us remember just two or three decades ago.
Thinking about change is one of the things that draws me most to Complexity Theory. And here, complex doesn’t mean complicated. It refers to systems made of many interacting parts whose relationships generate something genuinely new.
That newness is called Emergence.
From the quantum and subatomic realm, to atoms, molecules, cells, organs, bodies, ecosystems, planets, and the universe itself, reality seems to build in nested wholes, wholes within wholes. One thing becomes part of something larger, and at the larger scale new properties appear. A molecule isn’t just atoms sitting next to each other. A cell isn’t just molecules. A body isn’t just cells. At each threshold, something new comes online.
We tend to think of ourselves as separate from nature, the planet, the universe, somehow standing outside it all and observing. But the truth is, we’re less like isolated beings moving across the planet, and more like parts of a living whole that help constitute it. We’re one of the ways life is organizing, perceiving, choosing, and changing.
Living systems don’t stay alive the way machines do, through stiffness or control. A living system is always receiving information about what’s happening and adjusting in response. Too hot, cool down. Too little fuel, find energy. Too much stress, compensate if possible. Feedback is information. It’s the system staying in conversation with itself.
That helps explain how living systems stay alive. But how do they evolve?
Through something most of us resist: Unpredictability.
Most of us want certainty, control, guarantees. We want the pattern to hold, preferably in a way that’s convenient and reassuring. But in a living system, a certain degree of unpredictability is part of what allows adaptation, discovery, and creativity. Too much randomness and nothing coherent can form. Too much rigidity and the system becomes brittle, unable to evolve. Somewhere in that alive middle, between chaos and control, new possibilities appear. Sometimes we’re just between patterns.
I keep thinking about how relevant that is to our lives right now, because many of us are being asked to let go of forms we thought defined us. And maybe the invitation isn’t to cling to the past, but to become more discerning.
I think this is one reason attention matters so much. If living systems respond to information, then what we feed ourselves matters. What we repeat matters. What we rehearse, create, scroll, avoid, numb, love, and return to—all of it shapes the pattern. The way we live becomes part of the larger whole we all inhabit.
Which means that change in our lives is never only personal.
It is participatory.
This is where the idea of living in emergence has meant so much to me, and where the name InEmergence came from in the first place. Not from branding language, but from the recognition that what each of us does with our lives and attention becomes part of the larger system.
So when we choose a truer conversation, a healthier rhythm, a more honest creation, or a direction that feels more alive, we’re not only changing our private experience. We’re feeding the whole with new possibilities, and new ways of being. One person affects a room. One courageous act can alter what others are able to imagine.
Sometimes closing our eyes isn’t a way of leaving reality. It’s a way of interrupting the noise long enough to sense what’s actually there, and to return with better information.
If living systems stay alive through feedback, adaptation, and new expression, then the moments when we make a different choice may be far more important than they seem. They may be the very moments when we bring new input into the living system, opening exciting new possibilities for what the whole can become. And maybe that’s one of the deepest meanings of change: not simply that life is moving, but that life is still creating.
Thank you for navigating changes with me as the website and other content undergo major updates in the next few weeks. The process will likely be less linear and more fractal.
Paula
Founder, INEMERGENCE
If you’d like to go deeper into Complexity Theory, I highly recommend Neil Theise’s Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being, which explores many of these ideas with remarkable depth and originality, along with the Santa Fe Institute, a pioneering center for the study of complexity.