Beautiful tangles: an invitation

Lessons from tangled life: complexity not as a problem, but as a teacher.

Life is not a problem to solve.

It is not a strategy to optimise.

It is not a series of inputs you can control to achieve tidy outputs.

Life is complex.

Not just intellectually complex. Not just “systems and feedback loops” complex. But humanly, heartbreakingly, breathtakingly complex.

A gorgeous, gutting, tangled mess.

It’s dancing under a flaming sky with people who make your soul exhale.

It’s holding the hand of a mother who no longer remembers your name.

It’s running errands, making dinner, and forgetting what day it is.

It’s joy and despair, tenderness and terror, all braided together like threads that refuse to separate.

And yet …much of the modern world still tries to keep life in a spreadsheet.

We invest a great deal of time and effort in buffering against complexity.

• We teach ourselves to fear what’s not certain.

• We build systems that help us pretend the unpredictable doesn’t exist.

• We look to frameworks, tools, and techniques to manage the unmanageable.

But what if we’ve got it backwards?

What if complexity is not a problem to fix, but a reality to befriend?

What if unpredictability is not a bug, but a feature?

I’ve spent much of my professional life helping people and organisations make sense of complexity. I’ve written about it, taught it, mapped it, and framed it.

But the last few years have offered me a different kind of education - a lived, raw, sacred apprenticeship to what Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek called “the full catastrophe.”

Complexity stopped being a concept. It became my companion.

Not a theory, a teacher.

It taught me that no map is permanent.

That no single identity can hold all of who we are.

That everything is always changing, even when you can’t see it.

I learned that dancing with complexity isn’t something we learn in a workshop. It’s something we already know how to do. We’re just forgetful.

This series is a gentle invitation to remember.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing reflections and practical waypoints from my own journey. Some will offer language or frameworks, like my Waysfinder approach or the COOL stance. Others will simply offer stories, practices, or poetic nudges.

Together, they form a kind of field guide for navigating life as it actually is: messy, magnificent, unresolved, and alive.

This isn’t about simplifying complexity. It’s about honouring it … as alive, as life, as us.

It’s about rediscovering your capacity to stay in motion, to reorient, to breathe in the face of not knowing.

Because you’ve done this before.

You’re doing it now.

And you’re not alone.

Let’s walk awhile, through the tangle, and see what emerges.