The Art of Becoming
Living in the Space Between Plans
Three months ago, I began writing a newsletter without a plan. No editorial calendar, no content strategy, no carefully curated brand voice—just the simple act of putting words to page each week, letting whatever felt most alive in the moment guide the direction. I called it Emergence, and only now do I understand why. (You can read about how it all began in the first essay here.)
The Architecture of Control
Walk into any corporate boardroom, any university lecture hall, any municipal planning office, and you'll encounter what I see as the architecture of control. Gantt charts sprawl across whiteboards like military formations. Strategic plans unfurl in neat quarterly increments. Everything has its place, its timeline, its measurable outcome. This is the world we've built: one where emergence—the spontaneous arising of new patterns and possibilities—has been systematically engineered out in favor of predictability.
There's an undeniable elegance to this approach. The quarterly business review, the five-year strategic plan, the carefully orchestrated product launch—these structures provide the scaffolding upon which modern organizations build their ambitions. They transform the terrifying vastness of possibility into manageable, actionable steps. In a world of infinite variables, they offer the comfort of constraint.
But what happens in the spaces between the planned moments? What lives in the pause between the inhale and the exhale of organizational life?
It's in these gaps—these carefully avoided intervals—that we encounter what might be called the uncomfortable void.
The Uncomfortable Void
To live from a place of emergence requires a fundamental reorientation toward uncertainty. It means sitting with what the Zen tradition calls "don't-know mind"—that uncomfortable space where answers haven't yet crystallized and the path forward remains unclear. Most of us find this space deeply unsettling, including myself until quite recently. We reach for our phones, check our calendars, manufacture urgency to avoid the awkward silence of not knowing what comes next.
Yet this void—this fertile darkness—is where emergence begins. It's the creative potential that exists before the idea, the relationship that forms before the introduction, the solution that appears before the problem is fully understood. The composer John Cage understood this when he wrote 4’33”, his famous piece of "silence" that forces audiences to confront the sounds that exist in the absence of planned music. What emerges isn't silence at all, but a symphony of unintended moments: shifting bodies, distant traffic, the hum of air conditioning—the aliveness that exists in the spaces we typically ignore.
In our personal and professional lives, we've grown so skilled at filling these spaces that we've forgotten how to listen to what might emerge from them. The executive who schedules back-to-back meetings, the parent who fills every moment of their child's weekend with activities, the student who drowns out introspection with constant stimulation—we've created a culture that mistakes busyness for purpose, motion for progress.
The Ecology of Noticing
Emergence, I've come to understand, is fundamentally an act of attention. It requires what the poet John Keats called "negative capability"—the ability to remain in uncertainty and doubt without irritably reaching after fact and reason. It's the scientist who notices that a contaminated petri dish has revealed something unexpected about bacterial behavior. It's the urban planner who observes how people actually move through a space, rather than how they were supposed to move through it. It's the parent who hears not just what their teenager is saying, but what they're not saying.
This kind of attention is both a practice and a rebellion. In a world that profits from our distraction, the simple act of noticing what's actually happening—in our bodies, our relationships, our communities—becomes a radical act. It requires us to slow down enough to perceive the subtle patterns that emerge when we're not trying to force outcomes.
I think of the mycorrhizal networks that connect forest ecosystems—the fungal threads that allow trees to share resources and information in ways that no forestry manual could have predicted. These networks weren't planned; they emerged from the simple fact that different organisms began paying attention to each other's needs. The result is a collaborative intelligence that far exceeds what any individual tree could accomplish alone.
The Practice of Becoming
What would it mean to organize our lives—our businesses, our communities, our daily routines—around this kind of collaborative emergence? Not the chaos of having no structure, but the dynamic balance of holding lightly to our plans while remaining alert to what wants to emerge?
The answer, I suspect, lies not in abandoning planning entirely, but in developing what we might call "emergence literacy"—the ability to sense when to hold and when to let go, when to push forward with intention and when to step back and allow something unexpected to unfold. It's the difference between conducting an orchestra with rigid precision and creating space for the musicians to find their way into a shared improvisation.
This requires a different kind of courage than we're used to. Not the courage to execute a predetermined plan, but the courage to begin without knowing how things will end. The courage to start conversations we're not sure how to finish. The courage to ask questions we don't yet know how to answer.
The Faithful Return
What strikes me most about emergence is its reliability. Not in the sense of predictable outcomes, but in the sense that something always arises when we create genuine space for it. The creative insight that surfaces during an aimless evening walk through familiar streets, when the mind finally stops churning through to-do lists. The solution that appears in conversation with an unexpected person, the barista, who mentions something that unlocks a problem you've been wrestling with for weeks. The sense of direction that clarifies when we stop trying so hard to figure everything out.
Even writing this week's post came from multiple conversations and unplanned interactions with folks on emergence—moments I allowed to unfold rather than steering toward any agenda—the noticing that came from seeds lying in the collective field, looking to be watered. What struck me wasn't any single insight, but the pattern itself: how the same questions kept surfacing across different conversations, as if something in the collective consciousness was ready to be articulated.
This is what I've come to think of as the "old faithful" of consciousness—not the geyser that erupts on schedule, but the deeper wellspring that flows when we stop trying to control its timing. It's the part of us that knows how to heal a cut without our conscious intervention, that dreams solutions to problems we forgot we were working on, that reaches toward connection even when we feel most isolated.
In this publication, in my work, in my relationships, I've learned to trust this faithful return. To create space for the pause between intention and action. To notice what wants to emerge in the gaps between my carefully laid plans. It's not always comfortable, and it's rarely efficient. But it's undeniably alive.
Perhaps that's what we're really hungry for in our over-scheduled, over-optimized world. Not another system to help us get things done faster, but permission to remember what it feels like to be genuinely surprised by what we discover when we slow down enough to pay attention.
The emergence isn't just what happens between our plans. It's what happens when we remember that we ourselves are always in the process of becoming something we can't yet fully imagine—and that this becoming, this perpetual unfolding, might be the most reliable thing about us after all.
With gratitude,
Rachel
Emergence with Rachel Weissman is a weekly exploration of the interconnections between consciousness, technology, and planetary flourishing.
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