Science and logic had reigned supreme in my mind for years. I saw systems as concepts – mechanistic abstractions that represented living, complex entities. These models offered me a grasp on complexity, and my pride came from my capacity to understand and describe these systems, believing it to be my intelligence. I was not alone in this form of thinking, since often we are implicitly taught this at school – that intelligence describes a particular type of mental function. My capacity for structured thinking not only brought me a sense of security, but it was repeatedly rewarded by a society that glorifies reason. Abstraction allowed me to believe I understood the way things work. It was a form of clarity I could claim, document, and exploit, and this granted me the power to maneuver myself in a world of systems and logic. It is, after all, a language – one that is spoken by those in charge, and one that allowed me to reach them.

As someone who predominantly inhabited my mind, I had turned myself into a project. I did the right things, the optimal things even – scheduled, planned, and systematized. Over time, however, and very slowly, I gained the suspicion that the efficiency I was displaying was coming at the cost of something vital. I watched the pendulum swing – from my optimal daily routine to freedom, aliveness, and liberation, and from that to chaos and disorder, and back to a strict regimen. It was becoming clear that my structure was missing something essential that was causing me to rebel against myself.

In operating off of a mental model of myself, I had erased my own vital components. Despite believing I was deeply considerate of my body – with the right food, exercise, and care – I was denying it of its largest ask: listening. I had removed my own capacity to communicate with myself through a regimen that overrode any of my body’s signals. I had flattened time by giving authority to the clock over the rhythms of the day. The seasons had no influence over me, and time was a number – it was not felt as a pulse through breath and heartbeat. In believing that the day demanded the same of me whether I was in New York City or in my ancestral lands of rural Galicia, Spain, I had stripped place of influence. I had denied myself the dance of self and environment and had forgotten the things that I could learn from the land. As a self in isolation, my surroundings did not affect me, and I did not affect my surroundings.

What slowly followed was a desire to truly inhabit my body – to feel sensations and emotions before they were interpreted by the mind. This was beyond ‘wellness’ and optimization. This was listening and responding, and I began to understand that mental models and systems were far from the only form of intelligence. I could know things from a sensation in my gut, a shortening of my breath, or a shiver down my spine. I began to recognize that I am configured differently in relation to every place and person. I grew in my desire to explore what it meant to inhabit the place I was in. This was a lesson in the power of limits – that creativity needs boundaries in order to flourish, and that our potential is marked in relationship with that which surrounds us. Slowness became attunement and friction became information. The elements I often ignored became central components to a cohesive, living, and true system of self. Inhabiting my limitations became proof of my humanity, something I was no longer trying to escape.

Rigid conclusions no longer seem satisfying. Rather, I am curious about exploring the seemingly infinite forms of listening and responding. I am in a constant process of unlearning much of what I had been taught about reason, intelligence, and efficiency. There is essential information contained within the body and the environment that has too often been ignored, which I believe has been much to our detriment. I am certainly not in opposition to the western paradigms that have brought about modern civilization. In fact, I consider abstract systems thinking to be essential as one form of communication and planning. I feel however, that we are in a new place of evolution, one that can accommodate scientific reasoning with an understanding that this is not the only form of knowledge, and that alternate forms of knowing are not at odds with each other. I am interested in participating in the development of more integrated forms of thinking – ones that allow abstraction and embodiment to inform one another rather than compete. I believe that progress, at one point, demanded we simplify our assumptions, but that we are now being tasked with expanding them. I hope, throughout my career as a systems thinker, that I can continue to investigate the way that body and place are essential contributors to a cohesive, functioning whole – not as a concept, but as a living necessity.