The Future is Relational

What the mycelium is showing us

I sense a profound softening inside of me as spring blossoms around me. Yellow gulmohars surround the house from all sides of the street. Sometimes, it rains and the tender flowers drop to the ground, covering the entire road in yellow softness. In basking in the beauty of this gorgeous south Indian spring, I forget sometimes what it took to get here, what it took for cycles of autumn and winter to turn to spring. I forget that it took letting go - the painful process of decay and composting of what had served its purpose. That it took being open to be transformed yet again and to allow the most tender parts to come forth and be beautiful. I forget, more often than not, that it wasn’t one tree that did it. It was the tree and all its kin, its siblings in bloom, its pollinators, its nesters, its composters. It is easy to forget about its deep inner nervous system that thrives much beneath the ground in the form of the mycelium which consumes the dead and creates conditions for life, which communicates endlessly to balance resources, help the struggling ones, and keep the system going.

“What do you think leadership will look like in the new AI-enabled world?”, a friend asked recently. “A lot of the traditional expectations from leaders of being able to make balanced decisions with data are now easily possible with AI”

“I believe very deeply that the future is relational”, I found myself saying.

I believe that there is a core reason that the system around us has reached a point that is making us question our fundamental relevance as living beings. I believe that it is to help us distil the core nature of being alive on this planet. It is our ability to relate to each other, to belong together. It is our ability to be like the mycelium that has survived many mass extinctions - it has a core memory of what it means to relate, to hold together.

Because everything wants to live, the system we have created has devised clever ways to survive - it rewards those who keep it going by keeping silent, by continuing cycles of disconnection, by repressing their true essence. And, it suppresses with a great force those who want to express their core beauty and essence. It is why our education system kills creativity and individuality, why our corporate and public systems demand blind compliance, why family dynamics are often built around patriarchy and other hierarchies. A relentless focus on survival in the system will always foster survival of the system.

That is why, the bubbling up of our collective disenchantment today holds a special yearning - it is a yearning for relating - with ourselves and with each other. The central question that is informing my life and work today is, ‘How can we transform the ways we relate to each other?’ - it’s a simple question but it requires deep unlearning because the current system lives in all of us. The voices of the system ask us to be roles, to demand others to be the roles they never really chose. These voices need us to keep the system alive, to keep playing gatekeepers of its narrow boundaries. But, I also believe that deep down, our connection to our kin, the fungi, is encoded deep in our ancient memory. May be we already know how to be together in life-giving ways that are conducive to bringing forth all of our unique essences, our inner springs. May be all we need to do is remove the layers of illusion we have formed on top of this knowing.