All organisms have a great preference for action over passivity. After all, we are biological beings. We only learn passivity through training. We can easily grow to feel that fate controls us or that it is better for events to befall us than if we act and make a mistake. Classrooms and work environments condition us to fear mistakes. Lack of action though, is a far more grievous error than a mistake.
Our nature prefers action. This is as it should be. For we live in a world of complexity where we shall learn only through trial and error. Causality is non-linear, macro variables are impossible to foresee, and inter-relationships are multi-dimensional.
Participation is central to living. Relationships define the essential building blocks of life. Emergence is systemic and co-authored.[i]
We are not merely intellect. Interests, constraints, and needs of the physical world assemble our lives and consciousness. We are therefore both an intelligent human and extroverted animal. “As a man cannot divest himself of his animalist nature, so he cannot put off the Eros of his mind.”[ii] Our understanding is constrained, even incoherent, if one prevails over the other.
It is the same with meaning. We gain nothing by living passively. We gain everything by reaching out. The most intricate thoughts in the world remain untested theories, useless to others, until proved in the world. Puppy love is to real love what thoughts incubated in the classroom are to actions proven on the landscape of life.
Our meaning must always ground itself and result in action and conduct, not meditation or thought. It is important to establish this important connection with meaning, and notice how action bears with it a responsibility that thought does not. We learn, focus, and dedicate ourselves by acting in the world in our continual search for meaning.
Acting means we will fail. It also means we will succeed. We will do neither if we do not act. Large organizations have again instituted creative ‘labs’ in order to nurture innovation and more consciously encourage product development; it is appropriate to separate existent and new annuities. We hope an acceptable failure rate gifts all of them.
[i] Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, 2nd ed. (Sage Publications Ltd, 2007), 6.
[ii] Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 5th ed. (University of Toronto Press, 1992), 410.
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