It is no longer a distant or abstract claim that an inherited coherence has failed us. Almost daily, the world we thought we knew is visibly fracturing. Assumptions once taken for granted no longer hold. Tectonic plates are shifting in plain sight — erupting as conflict, outrage, defensive posturing, and sudden breaks in what once felt stable.

The stories that once carried shared meaning — progress, authority, enlightenment, salvation — no longer hold in the way they once did. Institutions fracture, expertise is distrusted, and even our spiritual languages feel thin or overworked.

This collapse is often named as a crisis.
And it is.

But it is also an opening.

When shared meaning breaks down, something else becomes possible — or even demanded: a more relational way of knowing, one that does not rely on doctrine, ideology, or certainty, but on our capacity to meet one another directly, in the immediacy of lived encounter. What matters here is not the convergence of views, but the quality of presence we are willing to bring to what is unfolding between us, moment by moment, and how that presence shapes the way we relate.

This places a quiet but immense responsibility on those working with relational intelligence.

And at the same time, it demands an even greater restraint.

The demand of this moment may not be to interpret what is happening, nor to assign it meaning, direction, or outcome, but to hold as much of it in view as possible — the danger and the creativity, the breakdown and the stirrings of something unnamed — without stepping into the frame ourselves. Without turning the moment into a story about our role, our insight, or what we imagine it must become.

Here the tension sharpens.

Faced with instability, the human impulse is to orient by projecting forward — to name the future, to locate ourselves within it, to translate uncertainty into purpose. Yet the moment we do, we subtly interrupt what is still in the process of coming into form. We replace attention with intention. We substitute emergence with design.

Perhaps what is being asked now is something rarer and more exacting.

To stay with the pressure of not-knowing without converting it into possibility.
To rely not on vision or projection, but on the generative openness of this moment before it resolves into meaning.
To allow the world to be made, without instructing it in advance what it must become.

This is not withdrawal.
It is not passivity.
It is not a refusal of responsibility.

It is a discipline of care — the restraint not to impose coherence where coherence has not yet earned its form.

Walking this way is less like finding balance and more like sustaining focus.
Not holding a position.
Not advancing a future.
But remaining present at the point where creation is still undecided.

Remembering the wider context may help us orient.
But then we must set it down again — deliberately, repeatedly — if we are to meet this moment at the depth it requires.