Retrospective 2019-52

This is a look back at last week’s reading, blogging, and painting.

Reading

I’ve continued reading F. David Peat. I finished reading From Certainty to Uncertainty, and re-read Peat’s books on Gentle Action and Synchronicity.

I started my inquiry into deeper generative organizing after having read David Bohm and F. David Peat’s book Science, Order, and Creativity. Bohm and Peat’s notion of “generative order” inspired me. Gentle Action, which Peat wrote twenty years later, goes beyond a mere restructuring of organizations. “Gentle action” is a way of connecting with a deeper “generative order” for organizing.

Books I’ve started to read are An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, and the Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation by Michael Perelman. Perelman’s book is about how a self-sufficient peasantry was whipped into industrial wage slaves (or human rentals).

Blogging

I wrote this post (in Swedish) during the week where I reflect on Jonna Bornemark’s article (also in Swedish and behind a paywall) on how our way of organizing society has become hostile to human beings. Jonna Bornemark is associate professor in philosophy at Södertörn University. I agree with Jonna Bornemark’s analysis.

Painting

Now, I’m going to get personal. Both my parents have passed away during less than a year. When cleaning up my parent’s appartment I found a photo of me as a one year old which moved me to tears.

Next time I’ll summarize my year in books and paintings. Going forward I feel a need to wrap-up seven years of reading, and to reconnect with parts of myself which I left behind a long time ago. Painting will help me.