Embracing Deep Transitions With Wisdom

As we stand at the precipice of endings—of species, ecosystems, organizations, and systems themselves—the work of hospicing is to move beyond fear and embrace the deep transitions ahead with wisdom. To be stewards of this time, we must develop the practices and capacities to tend to these endings, not with urgency or control, but with a kind of stillness that invites the birth of new ways of being. Endings are not failures; they are part of a cycle that requires presence, reverence, and humility.

Our hyperfocus on growth and expansion has left us ill-prepared to sit with death—whether it be the death of industries or the biosphere—and this discomfort with grief prevents us from being fully alive in the present. How might we allow the crumbling of outdated structures without rushing to rebuild too quickly? How might we hold space for what is irreversibly changing, without rushing to save or fix it?

To envision a good death in this context is to reimagine how we relate to endings, not as catastrophic failures or moments to be avoided, but as natural processes that hold within them the seeds of renewal. A good death invites us to let go of the compulsion to control or extend the life of things that have outlived their purpose—be they industries, systems, or ways of being. Instead, we are asked to companion these endings with the same reverence and care that we might offer to a loved one in their final moments, knowing that the end of one cycle is the beginning of another.

[Cultivating] capacities and practices for conscious closures, hospicing, and making good compost, we need to move from narrow boundary intelligence, characterized by either/or and linear thinking, and forms of accountability that are defined in terms of single-goal optimization. Instead, we need wide-boundary intelligence that allows us to work with complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity.

There are mindsets that need disrupting, including universalism and logocentrism. In fact, what we need is more like disinvestment than disruption. We need to disinvest from these certainties and invest in our capacities for complexity. Drawing on diffraction, a concept that was coined by the physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad, we mean seeing different layers of a problem. If you diffract reality, you see that different people live in different realities, and yet all of them are present and moving all the time. This is work that requires wisdom, which is not the same as complexity. Wisdom is a commitment to the viability of the matter while retaining a sense of the mystery and movement of the whole existing beyond us. It is a different commitment, a different capacity. Wide-boundary intelligence, combined with wisdom, is the bare minimum we need to move forward with work in hospicing and deep transitions.