There are moments in life when whatever you thought was holding things together simply stops. Not gradually, not politely—just stops.
For me, it was a mountain biking accident that fractured my neck at C2 and left me with a traumatic brain injury. The kind of moment where you don’t need a specialist to tell you something is wrong. The kind of moment that rearranges your relationship with time whether you want it to or not.
Recovery didn’t come through insight. It came through time—more time than I wanted and more than I would have ever chosen. Time, and meditation. Time, and sleep. Time, and the slow recognition that effort wasn’t the lever it used to be. There are phases of life where pushing harder helps. This wasn’t one of them.
What I ran into instead was a kind of space I hadn’t fully understood before—not conceptually, not from a book, not from a model. A space between things. Between stimulus and response. Between what I wanted and what was actually happening. Between the part of me that wanted to fix something and the part of me that was being asked to sit with it.
Somewhere in the middle of that stretch, a delivery showed up—27 boxes from the first print run of And: Volume Two. I wasn’t allowed to lift anything heavier than a book. So a good friend—one of those friends who shows up without needing a speech—moved every box from the sidewalk, up the stairs, into my office. One by one. No drama. Just steady effort.
I remember sitting there afterward, surrounded by something I had helped create but almost hadn’t lived to see. I picked up a copy and started thumbing through it. Not reading it the way you read something new, but the way you look at something that now carries a different weight.
When I got to the end—Chapter 42 on Multarities—it hit me. One of those moments where the room doesn’t change, but everything else does.
If that accident had gone differently, I wouldn’t have been there holding that book. I wouldn’t have seen the work of colleagues I had spent years with. I wouldn’t have seen the nine chapters I had written or co-written. And I wouldn’t have returned to the chapter that had been the hardest to write—not because of the ideas, but because of the constraint.
I had asked Barry for an exception on the length. It was the final chapter. The subject mattered. It felt like it deserved more space. He said no. Not because he didn’t understand the request, but because he did. Others had asked. Fairness mattered. And then he said something that stuck: “You can use what’s edited out for future work.”
At the time, it felt like constraint. Sitting there holding that book, it felt like direction.
There’s something different about holding something you might not have been alive to hold. It removes a layer of abstraction. It clarifies what matters and what doesn’t without needing explanation. I remember thinking, very simply, I’m lucky. Another in a long line of second chances. And another chance to do the work I’m meant to do—and to do it in a way that holds over time.
That moment didn’t give me new tools. It changed my relationship to the ones I already had.
I had worked with polarities for decades. I had maps, language, frameworks, and tools. I knew how to help leaders navigate tension, complexity, and interdependence. But what I had been calling the “center” of a polarity—the neutral point, the place between—shifted from something I could describe to something I had to live inside.
It wasn’t just a conceptual location on a map. It was a place you can inhabit. A place that has to be practiced. A place that, under pressure, is very easy to lose.
In my own work, I began referring to this as And Presence—not as a philosophy or a technique, but as a lived capacity: to remain present to both poles without getting pulled into one at the expense of the other, to act without forcing, to adjust without drifting, and to stay connected to others without losing yourself.
Around the same time, I revisited the work of John Kessler and Integral Polarity Practice. What struck me wasn’t just the similarity of language—it was the depth of structure. Kessler doesn’t treat polarities simply as tensions to manage. He frames them as developmental fields we live within, beginning with what he calls primal polarities—those we are born with—and extending into more concrete polarities that emerge as we develop in relationship with others and the world.
In that framework, Agency AND Communion, Control AND Submission, Facilitation AND Inquiry, Alignment AND Deviation aren’t just behavioral choices. They are expressions of deeper dynamics that shape how we perceive, relate, and act. And at the center of each polarity, he identifies what he calls the Still Point—a state of Being from which these tensions can be held without distortion.
Different language. Different lineage. Same territory.
What became clearer to me—through experience more than theory—is that most of the decision failures we see in leaders, teams, and systems are not failures of intelligence. They are failures of presence. We don’t lose because we don’t know what to do. We lose because, under pressure, we lose access to the space where wiser action becomes possible. We get pulled toward one side, react, overcorrect, justify, and then repeat the pattern with more conviction.
What Kessler maps as pathologies and what Polarity Thinking describes as the downside of overfocusing on one pole to the neglect of the other are not competing explanations. They are different views of the same breakdown.
This piece explores a deeper layer of that pattern—not a single polarity, but a Multarity, a set of interdependent tensions that shape how we relate, decide, and act in human systems: Agency AND Communion, Power AND Partnership, Facilitation AND Inquiry, Alignment AND Deviation.
These don’t operate independently. They move together, reinforcing or distorting each other depending on how we show up. When Agency outruns Communion, connection erodes. When Communion outweighs Agency, clarity dissolves. When Power is exercised without Partnership, control takes over. When Partnership is emphasized without Power, direction weakens. When Facilitation loses Inquiry, we stop listening. When Inquiry loses Facilitation, we stop leading. When Alignment dominates Deviation, conformity replaces discernment. When Deviation dominates Alignment, coherence breaks down.
These are not abstract dynamics. They show up in decisions every day—in organizations, in families, in communities, and in ourselves. They show up in how teams respond to pressure, how leaders use authority, and how systems either build or erode trust over time. And in a world increasingly shaped by Artificial Intelligence—where speed, scale, and influence are accelerating—our capacity to remain present in these tensions becomes even more consequential.
And at the center of all of them is that same space—the one I didn’t go looking for but had to learn to live in. The one where something shifts from trying to get it right to being able to hold what’s real long enough for something wiser to emerge.
This is not about choosing the right side or finding the perfect answer. It’s about developing the capacity to remain present in the tension so that action is informed by both what can be seen and what must be sensed. From a Wiser Decisions perspective, this is the difference between decisions that look good in the moment and decisions that continue to work as conditions change—decisions that stand the test of time for both Part AND Whole.
And Presence is what allows leaders, teams, and systems to access that difference—not by removing tension, but by engaging it in a way that sustains both performance and relationship, direction and adaptability, clarity and openness. Without that capacity, even the best tools, models, and intentions degrade under pressure. With it, complexity becomes navigable, trust becomes renewable, and decisions begin to reflect the full reality they are meant to serve.
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