Walls are such satisfying things in many ways: the implied permanence, the sense of security and safety. They are tangible. We can lean on them, shelter behind them and take comfort in their existence from a distance.
The challenge is that we can become wilfully blind to their nature: who they keep inside, who they consign to the outside, who builds them and who owns them. Who they offer security to, and whether they are actually keeping us safe or keeping us prisoners. Left unattended, walls ossify. They cease to serve and become instruments of power.
In recent posts, I’ve found myself leaning more towards organic metaphors: sandbars, tides, skies, and other things antithetical to walls. Boundaries in nature are not fixed perimeters; they are places of transaction. The notion that a line should be impenetrable is a human contrivance.
Much of today’s narrative is cast in the language of chaos. Whether AI is a bubble, whether it will take jobs, whether it will destroy us. That narrative presumes our current ways of operating are acceptable, which is absurd when what we are doing to the planet and ourselves is visibly and viscerally unsustainable. A walk along the coast or through the empty quarters of the desert reminds us: when it comes to sands and walls, sands win. Walls are rigid; sands move. Walls appear strong, but sands work around, over, and under them.
T.E. Lawrence wrote of the desert not as emptiness but as fullness, as demanding as the sea. To move across dunes was not to conquer them but to learn their rhythm: to travel lightly, to rest in the heat of the day, to let the night sky give direction when landmarks shifted. The Bedouin taught him that permanence was an illusion; dunes move, and the traveller moves with them.
A wall insists that control is possible if only the stones are stacked high enough. A dune reminds us that the path is drawn anew with each wind.
The fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun saw the desert as a crucible of vitality. City life, he argued, softened people with comfort and walls; desert life sharpened them with scarcity and movement. Civilisations rose strong from the edge of the dunes and declined once they retreated too far behind their fortifications. Shifting sand, in his telling, was not just instability but renewal. Hardship bound people together, gave them cohesion and imagination.
The sands are not random. Their movement shares much with tides. The tide carries the shoreline in and out, in rhythms older and larger than us. When the sands feel chaotic; tides remind us that change has patterns. We can’t know every ripple, but we can sense the flood and the ebb. Timing matters: there are moments to press on, moments to wait, moments to let go.
In The Alchemist, Santiago crosses the desert with a caravan, guided less by maps than by omens and the counsel of Bedouin who knew the land. He learns that once you enter the desert, there is no going back; the only question is how best to move forward. What appears to be emptiness is full of signs: the warning of a tribesman, the shape of the stars, the silence of the sand itself.
The lesson is not about mastery, but about attention. Blake wrote that a grain of sand can hold the whole of creation if we are willing to see, and the metaphor of the desert teaches us to move with tides we cannot control, to trust that patterns exist even when the ground shifts. For us, the message is similar: when walls no longer protect and the sands shift beneath our feet, it is the posture of listening to subtle signals, inner omens, and universal rhythms that keeps us moving.
Move where?
The question is how to move when we no longer have a line of sight to the destination. Whether organisations or individuals, the problem is the same: what to do in that uncertain space between probabilities and possibilities, where no data can guide us because the future has no dataset.
The response of organisations, or rather the capital that controls them, is usually a flight to safety. Retreat behind the walls. Avoid risk, unload costs, and take cover until the storm passes. Work on the assumption that capital endures, even when it consists of little more than questionable stories.
As the sands move, I doubt that holds. Capital without creativity grinds to a halt; creativity without capital has no power. What comes next requires a different relationship between the two. Not capital buying creativity, but capital and creativity working as partners. Creativity may need money to deliver, but it is fuelled by something deeper: meaning and purpose.
Bruce Chatwin, in The Songlines, listened to how Aboriginal Australians understood the desert. For them, the land was not mapped with fences but with stories. A songline was a path traced in memory and melody, a way of navigating terrain that shifts and never truly belongs to anyone. Chatwin saw that meaning was not built into stone but carried in body, voice, and community. The desert asks you to walk, to sing, to remember. To exist without walls is not to be lost; it is to live by rhythm rather than enclosure. In a world where structures are reshuffling, there is something instructive here: carry maps in narrative and practice, not only in fixed lines on paper.
And so to AI. Large Language Models do not think in words. They work with probabilities. They predict. They cannot imagine. This is not to dismiss their power, but to recognise their boundary. AI predicts; it does not imagine. That boundary matters.
Where we move will be determined by human imagination and courage. By creativity in the service of community. Capital will be important, but it will be the passenger, not the driver. In the age of exploration, new worlds were not opened by those who held the capital but by those who carried the risks of imagination and craft with courage. Now is no different. We must operate far enough beyond the boundaries of what we know, but not so far as to get lost. We need all of our senses, not just the cold logic of calculation.
We have to turn up as humans: thinking, not just calculating; sensing, not just judging; and perhaps most of all, taking the risks that matter, where the possibility of a dream disarms fear of failure.
What we lack is not another wall or another map, but a vessel to hold these tensions long enough to work with them. A space where dreams can be nurtured, where possibility can be tempered into practice.
The Athanor: A Space to Think, then Act.
The Athenor is not a metaphor alone. It is a crucible where walls and sands, capital and creativity, can be brought into conversation. A sanctuary where what appears to be chaos can be worked until it reveals patterns. Not in mass webinars or crowded conferences, but in small groups: circles where people can talk plainly, test ideas, and find their own direction.
The point is not to receive a strategy but to shape one, to trespass past the dogma of inherited fences, to experiment with boundaries, to hold both walls and sands until something new emerges.
On 1st October, I will open the Athenor: an online sanctuary for those who want to work on their own strategies for the world as it is becoming, not as it was. Small groups, steady heat, shared conversation. A place to escape the busyness of the way we work now for long enough to turn uncertainty into practice, and practice into possibility.
The athanor, the furnace of the alchemists, was never about speed or spectacle. It was built to hold a steady flame, a quiet fire that could burn for weeks without faltering. In it, substances softened, mingled, and slowly became something new. For the alchemist, the athanor was as much a mirror of the soul as a piece of equipment: a reminder that true transformation comes not from flashes of brilliance but from constancy, patience, and faith in unseen processes.
The athanor sits on the boundary between what is disappearing and what is emerging. It is a temporary, yet necessary space where new artisans can develop their best work, away from the demands of scale and efficiency.