“We all long for the Moment of Truth – where we choose to sacrifice safety and security to do what must be done, with as much courage, grace, and dignity as we can muster.”
– Jamie Wheal, Recapture the Rapture
There are many types of Moments of Truth. There are courageous acts of heroism that I have seen so many of my friends perform during combat operations, and there are moments that require, as my friend Jordan Hall calls it, infinitesimal courage: the courage to do the thing that no one else will see.
The moment that Stefan told me that he was going to initiate the Argonauts was one of those Moments of Truth. He was clear that he was not going to “found” it, the Argonauts is not a singular “thing” that a single man could “do.” He didn’t start it because the art of sharing and relating with one another as humans in community instead of isolated life forms has been the central point of humanity.
Stefan was clear that he was going to initiate the latest evolution of his calling. Because creating from a selfless place of creating community has been and is his life’s mission. And it is harrowing. Because, although connecting and sharing with one another, and finding a community to belong to, is a core component of the human experience, there are so many ways to get it wrong.
In these times of increasing uncertainty and chaos, our default settings often lead us to want to surrender our independence to the one who seems most certain, most likely to have an answer that is more likely to get us out of this mess. But in today’s exponentially expanding environment of multi-nodal complexity, it is impossible for any one person to have the answer. Today’s world doesn’t take one of us, it takes all of us.
Our lived experiences initiate our journeys. Both our ecstatic moments of bliss and our traumatic setbacks, amplified by our relationships. In the past, our experiences were limited to our personal encounters and to those of our immediate community. Today, we have the capacity to experience the joy and tragedy of all of humanity at an unprecedented scale. And the speed and intensity of this hyperbolic expansion of sensations overwhelms our capacity to make sense of the world as we now know it.
Which is why the Argonauts core operational unit is the circle. With no beginning and no end, the circle is an ongoing conversation where we as humans can gather to relate our experiences and integrate the core components of a meaningful life. The circle is where we can both surrender our individual fears and our elations, and, in being seen, heard, and understood, we can both celebrate and heal. Connecting with other humans is how we can evolve from contrasting “either, or” dilemmas into contextual “yes, and” possibilities.
The circle is where the present is. The wheel turns. And so we begin again.
Welcome to the next (r)evolution.
Curt Cronin is a retired Navy SEAL, Entrepreneur, and Change Agent. During his 20-year-long career as a Navy SEAL, living and working in an environment where milliseconds made the difference between life and death and winning or losing, he honed his talent as a catalyst for transformation and rose to eventually lead at the Naval Special Warfare Development Group.
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