What Happened to Us?

I was wondering — have we left any room to be moved?

I keep returning to a particular kind of moment.

The one that reaches you before you have decided to be reached - that arrives in the body before the mind has had the chance to name it, the way a piece of music you have heard a hundred times suddenly opens differently on a particular morning, or the way a stranger holds a door and something in the quality of that small gesture stays with you for the rest of the day, or the way your child says something so precisely true that you find yourself standing in the kitchen unable to move, or the way grief arrives not as you expected it to but sideways, through something entirely ordinary, and you realise that what just happened was not small at all - that something in you has shifted, without announcement, and the world is arranged slightly differently than it was before you met that moment.

We have a way of naming this. We say we were moved.

The difference is not in what happens to us but in how fully we receive it - whether we are genuinely open to that change, or whether we meet the experience from behind glass, registering it without being reached by it. Being moved leaves something permanently rearranged, a before and and after that do not collapse back into each other, and it arrives before the self that curates and manages has had the chance to intercept it. That is what makes it trustworthy. It reaches what is actually there.

This is why being moved is not a feeling that accompanies Knowing. It is Knowing - arriving before we have decided what to think, before we have made it safe. And it belongs only to us. AI can summarise the music but it cannot hear it for the first time. It can transcribe what was said in a room but cannot be charged by what passed between the people in it. We can. We are the only beings who carry the encounter forward differently than we arrived at it - and that capacity, irreducibly human and irreducibly embodied, is not a small thing.

The botanist and ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes inBraiding Sweetgrassthat "paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart." What she is pointing toward is not attention as a discipline but attention as a relationship - the world acting on us as genuinely as we act on it, knowledge always moving in both directions, being moved the very evidence that real meeting happened at all. If nothing shifts in us, nothing truly arrived. We passed through. We extracted. And what we extracted - however accurate, however comprehensive - is not the same as what we would have understood had we been present to what was there.

This is what Knowledge Mindfulness has always understood: that Knowing, Being, and Doing are not separate capacities but one living loop - and the loop only deepens when an energetic force genuinely moves through it. Without that, Knowing stays on the surface, Being stays performed, Doing stays efficient but thin. Being moved is what makes the whole system real rather than merely functional - the moment something shifts in how we understand, which changes how we show up, which shapes what becomes possible in what we do, which feeds back into what we are capable of knowing next. Without it, the loop spirals, moving forward and upward.That is the difference between a life that functions and a life that genuinely evolves.

Being moved is not reserved for the extraordinary. A conversation that unexpectedly opens our eyes, heart and or soul. a book that finds you at the right moment, a colleague's admission of uncertainty when you needed honesty more than answers - ordinary moments carry the same transformative weight as the ones we would call significant, not because of what they are but because of what they open. Kimmerer speaks of this as the movement from love into grief into even stronger love - not a sequence of separate feelings but one continuous aliveness to the world, available whenever we have the inner ground to receive it.

This is where it becomes most urgent for how we lead. A leader who is accustomed to being numb as a defensive mechanism can still perform with great skill - but cannot lead transformation. Like a machine, there is less life coming in or going out. Transformation does not begin with a strategy. It begins with something real actually reaching someone. You cannot change what you cannot feel.

The capacity to be moved has not gone. What has gone is the space it needs to arrive. The polycrisis - the overlapping disruptions of our ecological, technological, geopolitical and social systems, each amplifying the others, arriving not one at a time but simultaneously - does something very specific to us. It fragments. It fills every available opening with urgency and noise, colonising the pauses, the stillness, the moments of unhurried receptivity that genuine encounter requires. Being moved needs interior space - a quality of openness that cannot survive when every moment is already claimed. The polycrisis does not wound the capacity. It suffocates the space the capacity needs. And AI compounds this in a different but related way - the more we outsource our sense-making, the more we are taught that we do not need to be present to experience, that something else can receive it on our behalf. Between the two, the interior space keeps shrinking. Not because we cannot be moved. Because we have left no room for it to arrive.

This matters collectively as much as individually. Being moved together - through shared difficulty, through music, through the quality of listening that makes it possible to say what you have not yet found words for - has been how communities build not just shared information but shared meaning, the kind that holds when everything else is shifting. "Wealth," Kimmerer writes inThe Serviceberry, "comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency." We are more connected than we have ever been and finding it harder to genuinely reach each other - because reaching each other has always required, at some point, that something is moving between us.

And yet the capacity is intact. It is waiting in every ordinary Tuesday, in the stranger's gesture, in the song, in the thing your child said - arriving all the time, in the smallest and most unexpected places, asking only to be received. In her words: "even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy." What we have lost is not the capacity but the habit of trusting it, of leaving space for it, of slowing down long enough to notice that something is genuinely trying to arrive. And those are not the same thing.

The blockage most of us feel is not personal. It is systemic. And that distinction matters more than it might seem - because what has a systemic cause requires a conscious, deliberate response. A choice to protect interior space in a world that is structurally organised to fill it. To stay genuinely open in conditions specifically designed to close us down. That is what tending to the Being Space means right now. And it is, I would argue, the most consequential choice available to any leader at this moment - because nothing genuinely transforms and evolves without it.

What has moved you recently - and what did it tell you about where you are?

With care for “ALL” Dr. Laila Marouf and the KMD team