WAVES25: Learning to surf destabilisation.
An embodied rehearsal for staying with the shift. An evocative positional paper.
This is not the usual positional paper. It is not an explanation, it’s an evocation. It is an invitation to feel something that we’ll explore deeper at WAVES 25, September 11-13th at Hanaholmen, Helsinki. Here is more info and ticket.
We gather to sense into the shift. To recover our agency and remember that, if we move together, there is much that can be done.
Take a breath now. Ok. Off we go.
Your feet are in the water. It’s warm. The waves are gently caressing your legs. There is a sensation of something, as if you shouldn’t be here anymore. As if something is going on that you cannot quite grasp. But the weather is nice and the ocean is still calm. The water splashes your knees, gets your pants wet. Your breath deepens. You’ve been here before. Then you notice.
What used to be a lagoon, with reef and natural wave breakers is now open ocean. The seafloor drops away steeply where there used to be a gentle slope. You sense the exposure. As your vigilance awakens you hear the diesel generator humming away, the one they’re using to pump sand from the leeward part of the island to the one you're on. The sand is beautiful. And after a few days it’s gone. They keep pumping. It keeps eroding the natural protections of the place.
You become aware of the ocean again. The pull deepens. The water isn’t just caressing now - it's tugging. There is a knot in your stomach, it feels familiar. Clouds are flocking and the waves are picking up. This island is so low. So flat. The ground you're standing on, that last solidity between you and the relentless flow of water, is being washed away. Every wave is washing it away. And the waves are picking up.
Illusions crumbling
This is reality in the Maldives today. It’s an analogy but it’s a good analogy for what we’re facing. In this paper I will describe shifts that are currently happening as a frame for why the Waves Gathering is needed.
“We live in a time between worlds. The old world is dying and the new one has yet to be born.” - Zach Stein.
It seems to be a more relevant picture than ever. It’s just that the dying world has been dying for a long time. Some have been pointing to the signals for the last 50 years already. Others longer. Yet for most of us 2025 seems to have been the year when we realised that the shift is real. It’s no longer just ‘out there’, in the atmosphere in the mysterious and ungraspable ppm’s, nor is it in the pH that is dropping or the ocean currents that are slowing down. It’s not just in the deterioration of land nor the increasing rates of extinction of species. It’s not just on the battlefields nor in the political high-courts where tariffs are decided nor in the central banks where the cost of capital is set. Whatever is happening, whatever is dying is now getting very close. It’s not out there anymore. You’re starting to feel it everywhere. Your stock portfolio, the neighbourhood, the taxes, the inflation, the food prices… Somehow the shift has happened, many of us are feeling it, but it is only now that it’s starting to play out in full force.
From solid to liquid
Sigmun Bauman introduced the concept of solid and liquid modernity to illustrate the shift we are in. For some, modernity still feels solid. The progress narrative feels intact, the material wealth is still increasing. Ok your kids are not going to have it better than you but they will still have it as good. Or perhaps just marginally worse. If we just work hard and keep our heads down. Make sure to grasp the opportunities we’re given and make the most out of them. Make sure we have a little bit of a buffer. Maybe then we’ll be ok.
For some this illusion is already gone. The waves are already crashing. They’re not standing with their ankles in water, they are kneedeep. For others, the flood has already come. The promises of modernity have vanished—if they were ever real to begin with.
Shift happens.
Some talk about one shift. But there have been so many. For some the shift happened in the 70’s with the limits to growth. We talked ourselves out of it then. Convinced ourselves that if we just innovated a bit more, we’d be fine. Technology was the solution. If we just became more efficient, we’d be fined. It wasn’t. It’s called the Jevons paradox - with every efficiency gain, more activities become economically feasible. The net effect is that our energy usage increases. We have no mechanism for stopping. Instead of efficiency leading to using less we keep accelerating. What would have happened if we had settled on mapping our systems for transformative capacity instead of innovative capacity back then?
There was also the shift in business that happened around the 90’s. Where business threw ethics overboard. A qualitative shift where those active at the time stopped listening to their internal compass. Some claim that Milton Friedman's theory that the job of business was to optimize for profit alone amplified the shift, rationalised it. At first, breaking the law was the stopping point, then it was about what one could get away with. How could they? You had to, if you didn’t then someone else would. Or so they said. A race to the bottom - a negative attractor. We were dazed into the materialist reductionist paradigm by neatness, countability and convenience. Clear, well defined objects that make up a whole. We’d rather be able to measure with precision than have unmeasurable potential. What would have happened if we would not have been stuck in the image of the system as a machine but instead worked with it as a living, complex adaptive system? One where each and everyone’s action made up the whole, where there were feedback loops?
Then there was 2008. The breaking point, peak abstraction. The risk that we had eliminated came crashing back. With a vengeance. This time people’s homes were in the balance. Since then it’s been accelerating. Social media, opioids, mental health, extreme weather events, kinetic war, trade war, geopolitical tensions, pandemics and so on. Each crisis reveals the interconnected web we live in. There is no longer an ‘away’. Fancy math is no longer able to substitute for accountability.
There are many more shifts of course, in longer time horizons. The point is that whatever is unfolding now is a part of a bigger now. A continuum of shifting. Tim Morton speaks of our age as the age of Hyperobjects. He speaks of our moment as a set of nested, dependent relationships that inform and afford each other. When I read him I see that resistance is futile. There is no way out. Actually it’s his sentence “There is no ‘away’ in the age of hyperobjects.”
Vanessa Andreotti speaks of the most important capacity for our time as a cultivation of responsibility and compassion. It's as simple as that. But if you’ve tried you know that simple isn’t easy. Simple requires rigour. Holding both of them, one in each hand. At all times. Even as we are on a monocycle on a tightrope making our way across an abyss while juggling knives. Always balancing, compassion and responsibility.
We need to learn how to be together in the face of destabilisation without disassociating or falling into despair. That capacity building is what the Waves gathering is fundamentally about.
The future is already here. It’s unevenly distributed.
So, you may ask “what shall we do now?” That is not the question for this time. There are no credible answers to that question yet. That doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can do. We just need to orient differently. First we have to ask: How can we find a way?
Fortunately there are a whole plethora of answers to that question. There are many that have worked and walked these paths for years, if not decades. They’ve mapped practices that help us find footing. Not by resisting the waves, but by learning to surf them—instead of ducking under every time the water rises and the fronts roll in. They’ve prepared so that more of us may get to set out to surf. If we have the courage. If we step into responsibility.
WAVES 25 is not just a gathering - it’s embodied rehearsal.
We may not yet have the ability to go out into the high seas. The ones that read this invitation and have the privilege and means to gather probably have water up to their calves, at the most. There is still time to train. To build your capacity. Build your balance. Dance together and practice stances that you will be able to use when it's time.
It’s not even about later. These stances are already useful. Surfing gives you a strong core. That is important whether you’re walking, running, dancing, fighting or trying to stay afloat in the deeper waters.
In some ways we are living in unprecedented times. Times that may seem dark. It’s just that when you peer into the dark long enough you’ll also begin to sense that it’s in the dark that plants grow. Unseen. In soil that gets their nutrients from compost.
Compost requires decay, destabilisation, collapse even. It is not pretty. It smells. Some of the best compost you can get is shit. It lives in places where we’ve been taught to not look, and definitely not go. We’ve been taught to avoid what smells. What if that is exactly where the medicine lives? What if the regeneration of the planet hinges on our ability to deal with our shit?
It’s messy work, yes. But it’s ours. And it cannot be done alone. This is why we gather.
To unlearn. To look at destabilisation together, and not the sanitised version of it. To practice being with it: deepening not disassociating, dancing not despairing and dialoguing not deflecting.
The waves gathering is an invitation for those that want to explore a new way of moving. That might mean discovering muscles you’d forgotten you had—and slowly beginning to strengthen them. It means making the shift not just about you, but within you. To get really close to it. To lean in, however uncomfortable that may be. Doing so with discernment and trust.
“Come over here. Stop staring at the ocean. Your looks are not going to make the clouds go away. Join us on the beach. We’re having a party and the Waves community is teaching each other how to breakdance.”
This pieces was written by Amit Paul. It is an evocation for you to get a feeling for what we may touch upon at WAVES25. The conference is for 3 days.
The first day invites us to slow down, soften, stay with the trouble, unlearn. We will dive into the pedagogy of inquiry, of deep learning. Vanessa Andreotti and Samantha Sweetwater alongside other brilliant thought leaders in the space will guide us.
Day 2: we’ll continue building muscles that most of us have not used for a long time. We’ll inquire and work together on pressing topics like AI, governance, new finance and business, and education. We are gathering people that are already surfing to hold space. And we’ll get help from facilitators to soften our habits of disassociation and despair.
Day 3 will integrate and embody. Reconnect to the world and allow us to discover the paths that are already there but may not be the ones we’re walking. Or perhaps it’s exactly the path we were walking but we’ve now found new companions for our journey.
One can write this invitation in many different ways. This is the soft, poetic one that calls to your emotion. Can you feel the resonance? Get your ticket.