The life of any tree begins in the planting of a seed. The being, the life and essence of the tree is in the heart of the seed. It must be planted in the ground — nurtured by water and sun, nourished by the soil — and it is what breaks forth from within the seed that gives character to what emerges. First the roots. Then the stem which becomes the trunk. Then the branches, the leaves, the flowering, the fruit — which contains the seed that continues the cycle.
So it is with the human. The essence is within. We have all the ingredients inside of us. It is the nurture — our version of water and sun — and the nourishment — the soil we are planted in — that is exogenous. It is the revelation of that which is within us — the breaking forth of that essence — that becomes root, stem, leaves, flowers, fruit. This is the becoming, the process that the Subsoil framework expounds.
Our life's work is to reveal, layer by layer, the who. To answer with ever greater clarity — day by day, week by week, year by year — the question: who am I?
Imagine you enter a room full of people you have never met. You are there to network, to connect, to make an impression. Someone asks the inevitable question and without thinking you answer: I am a [profession] at [firm] and I do [function]. We all do it. But is this who you are or what you do?
We are human beings not human doings. However, we live in a world preoccupied with doing and doings to the extent that our lives become consumed by doing. We live in societies that only recognise the doing. We live from a place of doing and learning to do more. Instead we should be living from being and of learning to be more of our being. So the self learns to lead with doing — to perform competence, productivity, role, output — while the being waits underground. Unvisited. Unexpressed. Compacted.
That who is forged in the tension between personal agency and systemic constraint.
Personal agency is what is in the heart of the seed — the inclination to be, to think, to act from that being. Systemic constraint is the water, the sun, the soil. It represents the help or the hindrance to the emergence of the essence within the seed.
In the soil — the Underground — the duel between agency and constraint takes place. How well the heart of the seed holds its own, how it negotiates the nurture and the nourishment — this is what determines, in large part, how the tree emerges above the ground. That is the grappling. That is the Subsoil Work.
Sprouting from the trunk — which is the self — are distinct branches. Each branch is a specific strand through which the personal grappling, the Subsoil Work, is done — to arrive at Subsoil Knowing, the answers to who am I, who are you. The branches are the Subsoil Work and Subsoil Knowing made visible. They provide an account of the quality of the grappling — evidence of how we are navigating the tension between agency and constraint.
There is a fundamental distinction in this architecture: the self is the root, not the work. The work here refers to identifying the self with the roles we play in relation to others and the performance of functions within the systems we navigate. The self is the origin. The branches are its outgrowth.
The grappling is the way to the heart of the seed.
Are you ready to go underground?