Forty Years to a Sentence

Notes from the Edge

“So what are we getting done today?”

I didn’t quite know how to tell the person at the hair salon what it is that I want. Because it’s a feel, a look. A sense. Not a “style.” And then we catch up on what is happening in our lives. “Finally!” I respond when she asks about my book — I’d told her I was writing. And nudged on what it is about, my mind goes into swan mode. You know, serene above water and paddling fast under water.

“Transilience. It’s a user’s guide for how we humans work. It started out as a book for Angry Moms, then I realized that I really needed to have my thinking about how we actually do work on solid ground before jumping to the how-tos for doing better with all moms contend with in our world today. So here’s the book — Transilience.”

And the conversation turns to Angry Moms. Not Transilience.

And I still haven’t really said anything about Transilience.

“It’s about the layer beneath.”

“It’s about our three minds.”

“It’s about how things change in human affairs.”

“It helps us understand what AI governance needs to be.”

“It shows us what we can do better in global affairs.”

“It makes sense out of daily life.”

Silence. No matter which version or collection of words I test out with different audiences. Yet it speaks to everything we experience as human beings.

Words don’t work. Or at least, the words fall flat for others when they don’t “see” or “sense” how I am using them.

And I dare say, we all experience this kind of challenge when we try to express our experience to others. So some lean into song and the feel of the strings, or ivory, or bow. Others paint their pictures and weave their thoughts and rhythms into poetry or wordscapes, finding just the right word or phrase to give shape and form to their world. Others into the poetry — the php-phoetry — of code, pared down to simple elegance that produces what they envision. Yet others into the thrill of the ride, the instant felt camaraderie of burbling engines, the slice of cool air on your face and the feel of the surface of the road beneath the bike’s wheels. We just know. We just share it and don’t need words.

And I can’t find the words to explain. Even the word itself that I started to name in a thesis in 1983 — the leap to a next level of organized reality I called at that time faithing, because I had no other. And even when I did find the “right word” that captured best what I was trying to say — transilience — it only gets quizzical responses. It draws blanks. It solicits empty thoughts, no meaning when people hear it. And so the step to explanation or sense of meaning is still unmade. Is it a thing that has a size, an edge? And if so, what’s on the other side? Turtles. All the way down.

And the face of the lady at the hair cuttery keeps her kind smile there for a moment and then it is lost in something more immediate.

“Is this short enough?”

This happens to me everywhere.

It happened last year at the UNODC’s convening of the Conference of States Parties on UNTOC, sitting with people whose work is human trafficking — people who carry, every day, the weight of what fragmentation at scale actually does. I knew Transilience had something to offer that conversation. I could feel it. I could not find a single sentence to put it down on the table without it sounding either too clinical or too soft for the room.

It happened in a discussion with a software engineer thinking through the complexities of use LLMs in enterprise situations and the issues of governence — the speed problem, the alignment problem, the human-in-the-loop problem. I knew the three minds were exactly the missing piece. I could not say it in a way that didn’t sound like I was reaching from another discipline to claim relevance in his.

It happened over dinner with a friend who lost a parent. She was trying to describe what was happening in her — the way her body kept reacting to ordinary things as if they were threats. I had the language. I could not find a way to offer it that didn’t feel like I was making her grief into an example.

The locations change. The difficulty doesn’t. From the hair salon to the United Nations to the call about AI governance to the dinner with a grieving friend — the same thing keeps happening. The thing I am pointing at is real and present in every one of those rooms. The language for it slides off, every time, in slightly different ways.

I have been trying to find words for this since 1983

What I first saw — at twenty-something, in the thesis — was not an idea. It was how things shift and change. The way things change and transform in quanta, in leaps, because of how things were coming together inside the person. Something I could feel when I was moving, when I was working with my own body, when I was watching other people closely. I knew, the way one knows in the body before one knows in the head, that there was an architecture underneath what we usually call thinking and feeling and deciding. I could sense the architecture and — importantly — the fluid nature of how it moved. I could not name it.

The word I reached for first was faithing. It was wrong. I knew it was wrong even as I wrote it. But it was the closest word available in 1983 to what I was trying to point at, and I needed some word in order to begin. So I used the wrong word, knowing it was wrong, because the right word hadn’t been built yet.

And then I waited. Not deliberately. Not patiently. I waited the way you wait when you can’t quite do the thing you’re trying to do and you’re not yet willing to give up. I read. I worked. I taught. I watched. I married. Had children. I worked in UN circles  — this farmer’s daughter, trained in physics and the history and philosophy of science, turned out to be good at it. I was consumed by all that for years. Then something I didn’t see coming brought my way of engaging the world to a standstill.

A yawning gap in my understanding of people rose up in front of me again, so I turned back to the basics of why relationships don’t work. “Why do they (me?) do that?”

I was back at the drawing board, this time building from what I knew could hold, and testing out new ways of understanding what was going on inside people. The dynamics. The architecture. The mix of all of it. The need for cohesion and continuity from our inner world to our relationships, and into the organizations, institutions, and cultures we shape. Humans are the common element through all of it. We are a species and are so because we have commonalities. Which school we go to is less about how we function and more about our cosmetics and the articulation of those surface differences. I was more interested in how we actually work. What was underneath.

So step by step the framework emerged. Bones first, somehow. I used the very framework my old birthday nemesis gave a name to: an X-Y-Z 3D Cartesian graph, with time and unique location in space added. (I was briefly tempted to call them branes rather than dimensions, but then ‘three branes’ sounded too much like ‘three brains,’ and I was trying to talk about three minds.)

By the time I found ‘my word’ in 2015, I still hadn’t found a way to show the enormous relevance this has to daily life. To organizational design. To families. Politics and more. Most conversational efforts failed quietly — the way the hair salon conversation failed, with a kind smile and a return to safer ground.

What I am noticing now, looking back, is that some of what made this possible at last was never my work. The culture has been building, in the last forty years, the very words I needed in order to be understood. Nervous system regulation is now something people say at dinner parties. Embodied knowing has a literature. Polyvagal is a word that ordinary therapists use with ordinary clients. Somatic intelligence has stopped sounding suspicious. The whole vocabulary of what the body knows before the mind does has been quietly assembling itself in the public square, in books and podcasts and trauma-informed practices, in ways that were unthinkable when I started.

I could not have written the Transilience book in 1985 even if I had wanted to. Less because I didn’t see it clearly enough. More because the surrounding language wasn’t there yet to carry it. A sentence I can write now — the Guardian processes in milliseconds; the Navigator takes seconds — would have landed on nothing, forty years ago. The reader’s ear wouldn’t have known what to do with it. Now, increasingly, the ear knows.

Even the digital metaphors I sometimes reach for — bandwidth, processing speed, signal-to-noise — were not in everyday language nine years ago. Smartphones have brought a whole new level of technical vocabulary into ordinary conversation, and some of it turns out to map onto what I need to say about the three minds.

So the forty years were not just me struggling. They were also the world building the scaffolding I would eventually need to climb on.

Three things have stayed hard the whole way through. I’ve thought about them so often I might as well name them.

The first is that what I am pointing at has no edge. It is everywhere, in everyone, all the time. It is the medium, not the figure. And minds mostly see what differs, what contrasts, what has a border. Asking someone to see the three minds is like asking an eye to see itself. There is no clean place to put a finger and say there, that. Every metaphor I have ever reached for — alphabet, prescription lens, voices, the wheel — is an attempt to manufacture an edge so the pervasive can show up against its own invisibility. None of them are the thing. They are the edges I have been able to build.

The second is that the ground was already occupied when I arrived. I am not writing on a blank page. The page has faint pencil all over it from a hundred other frameworks. Mind gets read as cognition. Intelligence gets read as IQ. Parts belongs to Internal Family Systems. System 1 and System 2 lives next door and almost-but-not-quite means what I mean. Most of my work, when I am introducing this to anyone, is not adding something new — it is gently displacing what is already there. The reader has a mental model already installed. They will try to fit my framework into the slot they already have for this kind of thing, and they will miss the part that doesn’t fit. They won’t know they missed it. That’s the part that’s hard.

The third is the one that I think is most particularly mine, and most uncomfortable to write down. The framework itself says that knowing the words isn’t the same as having the capacity. That articulacy is not integration. That you can describe the three minds perfectly and go home and behave exactly as you did before. But to introduce the framework at all, I have to make the words available. So the introductory move is, structurally, the move the framework itself names as insufficient. Every time I write an introduction, I am doing the thing I am also warning against. I cannot skip it. I have to do it, knowing it isn’t enough, and find ways to signal that it isn’t enough without undercutting the words I am asking the reader to take seriously.

Part of why it took forty years is that I had to feel okay enough about this paradox to write inside it. I had to be willing to make the insufficient move because the insufficient move is the only move available, and refusing to make it leaves the framework forever unspoken. That took a long time. I am not sure I’m fully there yet. But I am closer than I was.

So this is what The Edge is for.

It’s where I write from inside the work — not pretending I have arrived, not pretending the language is finished, not pretending the next paragraph will land for everyone or even for most. It’s where I let the thinking be the thinking, with the seams showing, because the seams are part of what I have to teach.

The work isn’t done. It is only now becoming possible. The vocabulary I needed has finally arrived in enough of the surrounding culture that I can write sentences that have somewhere to land. The readers I need have started showing up — people who already feel the thing I am trying to point at, who only need a name for what they already know in their bodies.

But there is still no single sentence that carries it whole. There is still the hair salon. There is still the kind smile that lands somewhere else. There is still the friend over dinner, the coder on the call, the room full of people working on human trafficking, each of them deserving a sentence I cannot yet quite say.

I write here from the edge of what I can carry into words. Sometimes a piece will sound provisional, because it is. Sometimes a piece will reach for something it doesn’t quite catch. That’s the register of this space. It’s not where the framework gets taught. It’s where the framework gets walked toward, one sentence at a time, still.

If you’ve read this far, you already know the thing I have been trying to find words for. You knew it before I started writing. You knew it in your body. The work here is just to keep building the alphabet — until enough of us share it that we can finally talk about what we have all, always, been living inside.