Recently I was talking with my friend Mara Zepeda about investors and the “next economy.” My friend is on the leading edge of new thinking and feeling about how individuals, communities and businesses thrive and grow. (See Mara’s venture Zebras Unite.) She is working not with the current yang (I would call it false yang) model of immediate, measurable results, linear growth, maximized production and profit, competition and top-down structures.
She’s working with a yin model: a horizontal governing structure, with sovereign components, overseeing projects that she described alternately as “like an octopus” (one of my favorite yin metaphors!) and “a lasagne” (eat this one, not the other, please).
What she has found is that the current (i.e. soon-to-be-obsolete) model of funding and investment doesn’t know how to interact with this yin model. They can’t tick off their boxes, because no octopus stays in a box for long.
Investing is, of course, not just about money and the financial world. We are constantly investing ourselves, our energy, our resources, our time, our hearts. And we are doing so for a return. Some of those returns show up in our bank accounts. Most of them don’t. Some of these have immediate payoffs. Some won’t be known for generations. The returns are immeasurable. You might even say they are inexhaustible.
As I considered the yang approach to investing versus the yin, I had some pretty startling thoughts.
Under the false yang model of investment, here are two examples of ventures that would be considered an absolute failure:
Planting a tree. I planted this apple tree last year and if I’m lucky this year it grew another foot and maybe produced an apple or two. I’m going belly up! What a waste of time and money! I might as well cut that tree down and try another crop that will produce more immediate profits.
The Grand Canyon. If you were an investor 70 million years ago, well, you lost everything.
But if you were playing the Long Game, the game of the Yin, the game that Nature plays, you would see the subtle immediate returns and the richness of the multi-generational potential that you may never live to see, but nevertheless helped to create.
You would be contributing to the inexhaustible resource and return of life itself.
The wisdom of the Yin is emerging in our world, now more than ever. This is the resource and return that does not fit on a spread sheet, bar graph or in the stock market. We need new metrics that measure many timelines, more multiplicious than the arms of an octopus or layers of lasagne. Along the way, there are instant gratification moments and pleasures, sudden shifts and changes, surprising windfalls. But this is an investment that deepens and broadens with the richness of time, and becomes so interwoven with the many arms of other octopuses soon the original octopuses become indistinguishable from the whole. (I love this metaphor!)
I want to invite you to play the Long Game with yourself:
Take the time go inward and explore the hidden country of your soul
Cultivate your energy as your most precious resource
“. . . let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”
Allow the unfolding of your sexual pleasure in your own time
Awaken to your sensitivity, nuanced experience and the deep well of your knowing
Just slow down
Witness yourself with compassion and love in your continual becoming
Give yourself the time and space to heal, while enjoying life along the way
Suspend judgement while evolving your discernment
Recognize your seasons and cycles—the fallow, the productive, the emergent, the harvest
Act when the time is ripe
Invest deeply and give yourself time to feel, heal, open, soften and grow.
Play the Long Game with those you love. And play it in our world, with new systems, models and paradigms for relationship, earth stewardship and the grand potential of Life itself.
Quote: Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”
Photo: Masaaki Komori from Unsplash