About Easeness
Easeness is to business as easiness is to busyness.
I hope this clears up any confusion about this silly name, what it means, or its pronunciation.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let's ground in the here and now. We find ourselves at an inflection point, point break, perched on the cusp of a waveform about to collapse. And there is one hell of a Rapturous riptide in these waters. The supposed apocalypse pending at the end of these days may reveal the wreckage of the last cataclysm that lies silent in the deep beneath. Or we may find, with more painfully honest eyes, that we are simply members of a civilization in steep decline, one in which the average human consumes nearly twice as much as the planet can support.
But seeing as we may already have paddled out beyond the point of no return, there's no better time to remember how to swim. Swimming is, of course, easy, since we're bags of water already, more than 99% by molecular count. What remains to be seen is whether we can stop thrashing about long enough not to drown each other.
The Great Exhale of 2020
I'm guessing that by 2021, we may still be guessing, still arguing, about everything. We'll still be too close to it, too attached to and defensive of our stances and opinions about this utterly bewildering phase of arrested development. But by 2022 we might have the space and distance we need to see what really went on during this tragic pandemic.
By then we may be able to admit just how many damaging habits we had to shed, how many hurtful attachments we had to let go of, and how many open wounds we had to heal. This comes as no surprise. For today nearly all humans left alive were born wounded, thrust kicking and screaming into a civilization infused with the heartless fallout of two world wars: a hierarchical culture where power as domination motivates our collective behavior through fear induced by systemic threats of violence.
By now so many generations have been born into and perpetuated the once-habitual, now-institutionalized regimes of violence, oppression, and profoundly deepening ignorance, we can hardly imagine another way. We can barely remember the ancient ease of being at peace with nature. Nowadays, it's all we can do to stay busy, just to distract ourselves from the horrendous origins, widespread injustice, and imminent collapse of our civilization.
And busy we stay, as though it's the only way.
Taking care of business. Business as usual. Everything must go: we're going out of business. But don't take it personally—the ecological, economic, and political collapse—this is just business. Strictly business. And I know it's really none of my business, but watch where you go pointing the business end of that thing.
It ain't easy being B Corps
When this dawns on us—that the drive behind our otherwise inexplicable hurry, the origin of our thirst for progress, the root of our hunger for productivity, were all the same desperate flight from the immanent evil half within us—we remember what we forgot. And that is, in a word, Easeness. In other contexts, we call it Abundance, Providence, Bounty, Grace, Mercy. These are words that we rarely hear in a place of busyness.
As we plummet into a COMPACT maelstrom disguised as neoliberal world democracy, where the rulers sit in their towers converting nature into numbers of dollars, where the politicians dutifully bellow "MOAR JOBS!", and where the working people hide their faces in fear and goad each other to work harder and stay busy, we all silently espouse a fundamental assumption:
We are not okay.
The popular, subliminal narrative develops from there.
There is evil in the world. No one knows why. Some people are just evil. Some people aren't people at all, but monsters. Nature is full of monsters red of tooth and claw, killing and scraping to get by. Because there isn't enough to go around. And someone or something is always out to get to us. Our enemies will take what we need, or our very lives if we are not careful.
We've heard this story in myriad forms all our lives. Depending on our cultural and geopolitical context the villains' names and faces change, but they remain the same. Was any of it true?
To pursue business in its modern manifestations in good conscience and with good reason, this nest of unfortunate premises must be true. Restated more discretely, they are:
Humans are exceptional.
There is not enough.
Nature is our enemy.
Evil is, but we are not.
We are not okay.
Take any business model, and you will find one, some, or all of these at the root. You will notice upon close inspection that each of these premises describes a separation or an exclusion. The systems, processes, and groups that grow from roots such as these will contain a fundamental split or obstacle. Sometimes, even often, intentionally or not, the split is buried, the obstacle is obfuscated. Here, mixed in with the Easeness features, we will periodically spelunk into seemingly innocuous, eco-friendly, humanitarian, or philanthropic busyness models, excavating splits from well-being, unmasking obstacles to integration, and exposing the kinks in the roots.
What's ease got to do with business?
This framing of any business model as rooted in separation or exclusion may seem rather hopeless and damning. If every business is rotten, what do we do? The answer lies in the premises we are bringing into question.
Trailing the Great Exhale of 2020, we spurtle toward the Great Reset of 2021, both astrologically and sociologically. Many waves will collapse into and emanate from each other. Many minds will become full, empty, change. As the dominoes fall in the days to follow, many creatures may perish—whole species, whole ecosystems. Many bits will flip all at once. But bits don't flip themselves.
That's where we come in, we, points of conscious awareness inhabiting these bodies that either stop at the skin or extend infinitely out into the universe, we manifesters of intention yoked to being by the breath, we wiggly woven vessels of vibration setting sail on the winds of Love from the Source into the Void. We flip the bits.
And once we are aware of the ugly premises underlying business itself (and once we acknowledge and accept them), we can flip each bit one by one until the taint is cleansed and we can proceed with open arms and wild hearts. Here's how those premises look after the Reset:
Humans are acceptable.
There is plenty for everyone.
We and nature are within each other.
Evil and good create each other anywhere they emerge.
We are okay.
These premises can function as tenets ("it holds" from the Latin) for creating a profitable, sustainable, exponentially growing Easeness. These tenets yield the five core values of Easeness: Acceptance, Abundance, Evolution, Un-ity, and Harmony.
But enough about this concept. We're here to celebrate you who are co-evolving healthy compassionate relationships, systems, flows, and groups, who are striding toward Easeness rather than running your business.
