Whole Life Times began life as a magazine, and the magazine will remain at its heart. But after more than four decades, I have been thinking increasingly about what a publication such as Whole Life Times can become when an article no longer has to end at the last page, and when readers can move naturally from reading to listening, watching, exploring, questioning and meeting one another.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n When I began Whole Life Times<\/em> in 1982, the world of publishing was very different from the one we inhabit today. There was no World Wide Web, no Google, no YouTube, no podcasts, no Zoom and certainly no artificial intelligence waiting patiently for us to ask it a question. If you wanted to bring ideas to people, a magazine was a wonderful way of doing it, and in many respects I still think it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is something quite different about opening a magazine and allowing yourself to wander through it. You may begin by reading an article you deliberately sought out, only to discover another subject a few pages later that you knew nothing about and would never have thought to search for. One article leads unexpectedly to another and, every now and then, you encounter an idea or a person who changes the direction of your thinking altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That quality of discovery has always mattered to me because Whole Life Times<\/em> was never intended simply to provide information about a narrow range of subjects. From its beginnings, it has been concerned with the relationships between things: between personal and planetary health, psychology and spirituality, science and consciousness, sustainable living and social change, the arts and human creativity, and between the way we live our individual lives and the kind of world we collectively create.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The quarterly magazine remains a wonderful way of bringing those different conversations together, although what has changed enormously since 1982 is what can happen after we turn the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Imagine that you are reading an article in Whole Life Times<\/em> about restoring wetlands and something in it captures your interest sufficiently for you to want to know more. In the traditional magazine model, unless the article contained a bibliography or a few useful references, that was usually where the journey ended. You might go to a library, search elsewhere or perhaps contact the author, but the magazine itself had largely completed its role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It no longer needs to work that way, because that same article can now become the doorway into a much larger exploration. You might move from the article to an extended interview with its author in a Whole Life Times Dialogue<\/strong>, where you can hear the person explain the ideas in their own voice. From there you might discover research papers, books, organisations and projects through the developing WLT Reference Library. Perhaps the subject is taken up at a Whole Life Times Connect<\/strong> gathering, where people interested in the issue can meet online and continue the conversation, and perhaps a related blog article appears several weeks later and eventually leads to another contribution in a future quarterly issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What interests me about all of this is that the article no longer needs to be the end of the journey. It can just as easily be the beginning, and this is increasingly how I am thinking about the future of Whole Life Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t want to replace the magazine with a website, nor do I want to transform WLT into an endless stream of online content competing for people’s attention, because there is quite enough of that already. What interests me much more is how we might preserve the coherence, editorial judgement and serendipity of a magazine while using the possibilities of the digital world to connect the knowledge within it and allow readers to follow those connections wherever their curiosity takes them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For many years, the obvious way to take a printed magazine onto the internet was essentially to reproduce it on a screen. We created digital editions, page-turning magazines and downloadable PDFs, and these remain useful and enjoyable ways of reading Whole Life Times<\/em>. What I have increasingly come to appreciate, however, is that a website gives us possibilities that a replica of a printed page cannot, and that realisation has influenced the redesign of WholeLifeTimes.org that is now underway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The quarterly issue will remain important, and readers will still be able to experience each issue as a coherent publication. At the same time, the individual articles within those issues can gradually become part of a much larger body of knowledge that can be explored independently of the particular quarter in which they originally appeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An article about anxiety published several years ago, for example, may still be valuable to someone exploring Holistic Health today, just as a conversation about regenerative agriculture does not cease to be useful because another quarterly issue has appeared. An interview concerned with leadership, consciousness or ecological restoration may actually become more relevant with time rather than less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This has led us towards a different way of thinking about the accumulated knowledge of Whole Life Times<\/em>. Instead of allowing valuable material simply to disappear into an archive of old issues, we can increasingly organise it around the subjects people actually want to explore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Someone interested in Holistic Health<\/strong> should gradually be able to enter that part of Whole Life Times and discover relevant articles, Dialogues, books, research and resources accumulated over many years, while someone interested in Sustainable Living<\/strong>, Leadership for Sustainability<\/strong>, OneSelf Discovery<\/strong>, The Arts<\/strong>, water or another developing area should be able to do much the same. The date and issue in which something appeared will remain an important part of its history, but it need not determine whether anybody ever finds it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I like the thought that, approached in this way, an archive doesn’t have to be simply a place where old material goes. It can gradually become a living resource in which something published many years ago can be rediscovered because it speaks directly to a question somebody is asking today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The quarterly rhythm of a magazine also leaves three months between issues, during which a great deal can happen and many ideas, conversations and developments deserve attention without necessarily requiring a full magazine article. This is where I think the renewed Whole Life Times Blog<\/strong> can play an increasingly useful role, giving us somewhere to continue thinking between quarterly editions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some blog posts may respond to developments taking place in the world, while others may introduce an idea we intend to explore more fully later. A blog may draw attention to an interesting book, organisation, person or project, or continue a conversation that began in the magazine. Over time, the distinction between these different parts of Whole Life Times becomes less important than the relationships between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An article in the magazine might lead to a blog, which might lead to a Dialogue, which in turn might become the subject of a WLT Connect gathering. Something that emerges during that gathering might suggest an article for a future issue, while an interested reader might follow the original subject into the Reference Library and discover a person, organisation or body of research that we have never featured directly ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As these relationships develop, what once looked like a number of separate publishing activities begins to look much more like an interconnected body of knowledge, conversation and people. That is what I have in mind when I describe the direction in which Whole Life Times<\/em> is moving as a living knowledge network<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One reason I like the idea of a network is that it reminds us that knowledge doesn’t reside only in articles, books, databases and websites. Much of it resides in people and in the relationships between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the years, Whole Life Times<\/em> has introduced readers to an extraordinary variety of writers, researchers, practitioners, thinkers, activists, artists, educators and people experimenting with different ways of living. Each brings not simply information but connections to other people, ideas and bodies of knowledge, and the same is true of the people who read the magazine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Traditional publishing has sometimes obscured this because it encouraged us to imagine a publisher or editor on one side and an audience on the other, with information travelling primarily in one direction. The digital world gives us an opportunity to make that relationship much more reciprocal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A person reading an article may know a great deal about one aspect of its subject and may be able to point us towards a project on the other side of the world that deserves attention. Someone attending a WLT Connect gathering may introduce two people who subsequently collaborate, while a researcher appearing in a Dialogue may point us towards somebody else whose work opens an entirely new area of inquiry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When those relationships begin to matter as much as the individual pieces of content, Whole Life Times<\/em> starts to become something rather different from a conventional publication. It remains a publication, certainly, but it can also become a meeting place and, increasingly, a guide to a much larger world of ideas, knowledge and people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is another reason this direction seems increasingly important to me, and it has to do with how radically our relationship with information has changed since Whole Life Times<\/em> began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1982, one of the great challenges was finding information. Today we face almost the opposite problem because we are surrounded by more information than any of us could possibly absorb. A search can produce millions of results in a fraction of a second, social media continually places material in front of us, video platforms contain more material than anyone could watch in several lifetimes, and artificial intelligence is making the production and retrieval of information easier still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a result, the difficulty increasingly isn’t obtaining information but finding our way through it. We need ways of judging which ideas deserve our attention, which sources are trustworthy and how one subject connects with another. We need to distinguish between something that is genuinely new and something that is simply being promoted as new, and we need places where people who want to understand a subject more deeply can move beyond fragments of information towards context and relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Curiously enough, thinking about this takes me back to the beginnings of Whole Life Times<\/em>. Before becoming its publisher and editor, I worked as a reference librarian, and I was attracted to librarianship partly because of the opportunity to help people find their way to knowledge. Over time, however, I became interested in something broader than locating the answer to a particular question. I became increasingly interested in the relationships between different fields of knowledge and in the ways information could contribute to learning, social change and our understanding of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I left librarianship and established Whole Life Times<\/em> in 1982, I don’t think I really left that idea behind. In some ways I simply changed the medium, and now, more than forty years later, I find myself returning to much the same underlying purpose, although the possibilities available to us are enormously greater than anything I could have imagined at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is also why I don’t think the future of Whole Life Times<\/em> should be measured simply by how much content we can produce. In a world already overflowing with information, adding more material for the sake of adding it is unlikely to be particularly helpful. Selection, context and connection may be much more valuable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A carefully chosen article that leads a reader towards three genuinely useful sources may be more helpful than a page containing a hundred links, just as a thoughtful conversation may illuminate something that remains obscure after reading dozens of disconnected summaries. What I would like Whole Life Times<\/em> increasingly to help with is not simply the accumulation of information, but the process through which knowledge begins to become more coherent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This becomes particularly interesting when we follow a subject far enough to discover that its boundaries are rarely as clear as they first appeared. A discussion of human health may lead us towards nutrition and exercise, but it may also take us into psychology, relationships, environmental exposures, community, meaning and the ecological conditions within which human life occurs. A discussion of water may begin with scarcity and gradually lead us towards climate, forests, soils, wetlands, agriculture, sanitation, cities, oceans and ultimately the planetary water cycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The more deeply we explore almost any important subject, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the boundaries we originally placed around it, and I increasingly regard that not as a problem but as one of the most valuable discoveries we can make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artificial intelligence introduces another intriguing possibility because, as the body of knowledge associated with Whole Life Times<\/em> grows, there will eventually be far more material than any visitor could reasonably browse page by page. Someone arriving with a particular question may have no way of knowing whether the most useful material lies in an article published ten years ago, a recent Dialogue, a book, a research paper or a resource recommended by one of our contributors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I can imagine a future Whole Life Times in which an intelligent guide helps readers navigate that growing body of material, not by replacing writers, editors, researchers or human conversation, and certainly not by pretending to possess wisdom simply because it can retrieve information quickly, but by helping people discover relationships within a body of knowledge that might otherwise become too large and complex to navigate easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A reader might begin with a question about water and gradually discover connections with soil restoration, climate, sanitation and human health, while another might begin with anxiety and find material concerned not only with psychology but also mindfulness, exercise, community, sleep and the relationship between human wellbeing and the environments in which we live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For me, this is where the technology becomes particularly interesting. Its value may lie less in giving us faster answers than in helping us discover relationships and possibilities we might otherwise have missed. We are still learning what artificial intelligence can and cannot do well, and there are many questions surrounding its development that deserve careful attention, but I think it could eventually become a very useful part of the way people find their way through Whole Life Times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With all this talk of networks, websites, Dialogues, blogs, online gatherings and artificial intelligence, it might sound as though the quarterly magazine itself is gradually becoming less important, whereas I think almost the opposite may be true. The more fluid and continuously changing the digital world becomes, the more I appreciate something a magazine can offer that an endlessly changing website cannot quite reproduce: the opportunity, four times each year, to pause and bring a carefully chosen collection of ideas, people and subjects together into an issue that has a character and coherence of its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have always enjoyed that quality of a magazine, both as a reader and as an editor. You can open an issue intending to read one particular article and find yourself drawn into another subject you knew very little about, perhaps encountering an idea or a person you would never have thought to search for online. There is something valuable in that kind of accidental discovery because it takes us beyond the increasingly personalised world in which search engines, algorithms and now artificial intelligence become very good at giving us more of what they already know interests us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For that reason, the redesigned Whole Life Times website is not intended to replace the quarterly magazine or gradually make it redundant. What we are doing is giving the magazine a much larger environment in which to live. An issue can still be enjoyed from beginning to end as an issue, but an article encountered within it can then lead naturally into a Dialogue, a related blog, a WLT Connect conversation, a book, research material or other resources, while older articles can remain discoverable through the subject areas of the website rather than disappearing into an archive simply because another three months have passed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In that sense, I think the quarterly magazine may actually become more important rather than less because it provides the rhythm around which this larger body of activity can gather. Every three months there is an opportunity to pause, consider what seems particularly worth exploring at that moment, bring those explorations together and then allow the conversations they begin to continue through Whole Life Times in the months and years that follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After more than forty years, I don’t pretend to know exactly what Whole Life Times<\/em> will look like ten years from now, and I think it would probably be a mistake to try to prescribe that future too precisely. Much of what has made this project interesting over the years has emerged through encounters with people, ideas and possibilities that could not have been anticipated beforehand, and I would like to leave room for that to continue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does feel increasingly clear is the direction in which we are moving. I would like Whole Life Times to become more useful as a place where people can encounter ideas they might not otherwise encounter, understand relationships they might not otherwise see, discover people and organisations doing worthwhile work, and then follow those discoveries as deeply as their curiosity takes them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For one person that journey might begin with the quarterly magazine open on a screen, while for another it may begin with a blog post, a Dialogue, a WLT Connect gathering, a question asked of the Whole Life Universal Guide or a recommendation from somebody else. I don’t think it matters very much where the journey begins if we can create an environment in which one worthwhile discovery can lead naturally to another.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen an article becomes a doorway<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
More than putting a magazine online<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A conversation that continues between issues<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The people are part of it too<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Finding our way through too much information<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
From information to understanding<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Where artificial intelligence may fit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The magazine remains<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The next chapter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n