This week I spoke with a reporter about women in finance, and especially about women in sustainable investing. I talked about the skills that are needed to translate across settings, and the opportunities that come about in emerging fields. This was all accurate, but not especially poetic.

I should have talked about salt marshes and wetlands and mangroves and treelines – ecotones, edges, the places where different systems come up against one another, where both systems are present and there is also something emergent, something that is neither one nor the other.

The edges are messy. The edges are diverse. The edges are full of experimentation and invention and innovation. The edges are teeming with life.

Dear ones, if we find ourselves at the edge, let’s be sure to look around, to take in the explosion of invention that tends to happen there.  And if we’re safely tucked in the center – whether at work or in society or in our own families – let’s wander out and explore. Let’s see what’s happening at the outer edges, the places we’ve been told are weird, or dangerous, or lesser.

At the edges, there is more mixing and mingling.

At the edges, there is less sense of “normal,” because we’re already betwixt and between.

At the edges, difference is more welcome, and more valuable.

At the edges, amazing things can happen.

Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things that you can’t see from the center.

     – Kurt Vonnegut