This is a story about mold. Don’t worry, it’s not the mold you’ve been desperately trying to get rid off in your bathroom. It is about the mold you meet every Saturday night. You know, that dancing little living thing, in the basement of your favorite club. The one that is taking over the walls and ceiling you stare at with tears in your eyes, and sweat dripping down your pits. When all of us are crying and sweating, sometimes, it drips from the ceiling, and gives you a little kiss on the forehead. But you are not bothered when that happens, you’re happy it responded to your cry and you laugh. You wouldn’t want it any other way. When you take a step back, from the emotionally charged dancefloor, to shed your tears of clarity, you wouldn’t want to be in a little textbook, sterile, freshly painted clean room. You would like the mold to be there, keep you company. It’s your reflection, and everyone’s before you, that danced their feelings off to the point of hot humid air to fill the entire building, take over it. And it may not speak, but you could swear that the energy it feeds off from makes it move and grow right there in front of you. Sometimes it dances with the beat of the music and others, it reaches as if it’s trying to comfort you. So what is it in these places? What is it that makes us that open? What is it that makes us realize that nothing around us is isolated?

With perspective also comes responsibility. The same way Bruno Latour explains the critical zones, how everything in an environment is interconnected, and how perspective is dependent on the observer, understanding synergy holds the responsibility of understanding that nothing can be completely isolated. Understanding that comes with a price. The mold we are so disgusted by and try so hard to get rid of in our bathroom, wouldn’t be there without us. Without our morning hot showers, or the leaking of the broken sink. We very often don’t take the responsibility of acknowledging that we are not isolated beings, and the energy we radiate reflects on our surroundings. So synergy is not only letting the hair stuck in our hairbrushes on the balcony so birds can make warm nests, it’s also the silverfish that feed on our dead skin cells we haven’t swept under the bed, and the mold that spreads a little bit more when we brush our teeth. So taking accountability for our personal contribution to all the things we know are there but we would rather them not, makes us one step closer, and one step smaller than what we think we are, and what’s in our control.

When we think of synergy, we think of partnership, collaboration. What we don’t think about is that synergy is also symbiosis, synergy is something that exists all around us and within us, without us realizing. Synergy is not giving something a boost and lifting it up. Synergy is communicating, working together, conjoining, collaborating but also, contributing to something. Synergy is not only the collaboration of two species to a mutual benefit, like honeyguides and honey beavers, it is also the trillions of bacteria in our gut that break down our food, as well as the mold that grows in the basement of a club that feeds on our breath, sweat and tears. Like that mold, sometimes we are not aware that we are contributing to that synergy, we don’t acknowledge ourselves as partners, we do not take responsibility. In synergy, a big factor is perspective. “There is no view from nowhere. Every Observation is situated and every perspective is built from a specific point of view, shaped by the position of the observer, the practices they engage in, and the networks they are part of.” (Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern).

So when you go back home that morning, take another moment. Take a moment with the mold in your bathroom, the one that feeds from the hot water that washes away all this sweat. It might feel like an invader in your home, but not this time. You are its home. Nothing but an extension of your existence. We forget that being is not solid. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” (John Muir). And when you dance, don’t forget about all the things around you that are there dancing for you.