![]() When I was in university I discovered the school of journalism where you could train and prepare to be a war correspondent. And being a jacked-up teenager, the idea of getting paid to go to exotic places where people were shooting at each other sounded like a dream job come true. Way back in the 1980's we had things called darkrooms where film was developed -- we did not have cell phones / the internet / etc -- so when you went off to cover a revolution you were really far out on the edge, out of reach. Yet the way you broke stories was well -- by going -- over there, somewhere and waiting around until a civil war started or whatever. So, the mindset we were advised was most useful was F-8 and be there. F-8 being a middle setting on an SLR lens and be there to mean paying attention to what was going on around you as an observer - not a participant. The habit of observing instead of participating can, I find, lead you to places you never could have imagined. Then as you got better at figuring our what was going on around you and you could observe yet not get squashed by the chaos going on around you. Artfully dodging chaos -- while paying attention to the big picture -- so you could learn what to focus on. One can either accept that chaos exists in the world and work with it -- or get repeatedly bashed over the head by it until the lesson to pay attention is learned and internalized. A habit as easy as crossing the street, once you learn how. Living on a small boat we deal with this everyday. Our opinions are irrelevant, the sea and weather are... Eos.earth artfully dodging chaos is where we chose to put our focus for the last five years. Why? And why should you care? The Western calendar identifies this year as 2023 and my wife and I are in our mid-fifties. We have been able to watch the global population double to over 8 billion of us earthlings now. And we became an urban species a few years ago too. So, the idea of the world we all grew up with stopped reflecting the real world we live in long ago. And that seems to make people crazy and think the world is going to end -- or some such nonsense. Perhaps it is just that we have the internet and we can all see each other now for the first time? Yet, I have made a career and life of academic study of how our societies have, for about 500 years now, grown closer together -- by common agreement in the form of treaties, agreements and understandings. And I believe that if you learn what the world looks like through our eyes -- you would be optimistic too. But, there is a problem. As as attorney, almost all of what I have learned about how the world works was part of being a consigliere and advising the super rich on what was going on in the world as it changed before all our eyes. However, I can share with you my resultant world view -- and if you look at it in just the right way -- like with a negative space drawing, you will probably be able to see what I wanted to show you all along. And I will not have broken any rules on confidentiality. Much of what we have been doing over the last five years is untangling that mess of secrecy so that we could crochet it back into something tangible and useful. And Eos Life Artfully Dodging Chaos is that process... M
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Michael Sylvester
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