Fuck Around and Find Out
On always being, always becoming, and the art of conscious play
Being upfront — I'm borrowing this phrase from the streets of Philadelphia, where it carries a certain edge.
Here, I'm giving it a different life. Fuck around and find out, as I mean it, is an invitation. Be curious. Play. Explore. Collect the data and see how it all fits together. It's the scientific method applied to personal growth — and it might be the most important practice I know.
Always Being. Always Becoming.
Life only happens now. This moment — right here, as you read these words — is all there is. The eternal now.
And yet within that stillness, everything is moving. We are conscious energy experiencing itself through constant change. We never step in the same river twice — not just because the river is different, but because we are. The riverbed shifts. The water flows. And we ourselves are different from moment to moment, on the molecular level and on every mental, emotional, and energetic level we inhabit.
This is the paradox at the heart of it all: we are always being and always becoming at the same time.
This moment is enough. And it's always in motion. Both things are true simultaneously — the stillness and the flow, the being and the becoming. We don't have to choose between them. We just have to notice we're always already living inside both.
Several people in circle this week mentioned running into old friends they hadn't seen in a decade or more. What struck them wasn't how much had changed — it was the combination. How different the person standing in front of them was, and how something at their core remained unmistakably, recognizably the same. That unchanging something is what we might call inner innocence. An inner wonder. The part of you that is here to play, explore, experience, and enjoy.
That part never left. It's just waiting to be found again.
The Layers We Carry
Here's where the fucking around and finding out becomes essential — because most of us aren't starting from scratch. We're starting from underneath.
Trauma isn't the event itself. It's the protective layers we add in response. Like putting on winter clothing to survive the cold — necessary in the moment, life-saving even — but eventually, if we keep those layers on into the heat of summer, what once protected us now endangers us.
There's a story I love about a golden Buddha discovered in Thailand, its brilliance hidden for centuries beneath a thick coat of clay — applied, historians believe, to protect it from invaders. The protection worked. And then it became the thing that needed to be removed.
We do this too. We bury our original luminance under layers of grief, anger, fear, learned smallness. While most people have some level of Trauma happen in their life (the winter coat so we don’t freeze to death), most of our trauma is thin layers accumulated over time, like putting deodorant on top of yesterday’s deodorant, or make-up on top of yesterday’s make-up. The layer of dust that accumulates on your side table when you haven’t dusted for a year (or 20, 30, or 40).
One circle member put it beautifully — it feels like a reclaiming, a re-embodying. Like parts of the self that got stuck at a certain age, waiting. And when you find your way back to them, the recognition is immediate: oh, there you are. I can just embrace the joy and the wonder. The things that were so innocent before everything else covered them up.
Life's work, in many ways, is the gentle removal of what was never really ours to keep forever. Learning to change outfits easily, even in difficult situations. Play with your drag. Find out which layers still serve you — and which ones you've simply forgotten to take off.
A Doorway Is a Choice
One of the most practical tools that emerged in circle this week was so simple it almost hides in plain sight: the doorknob.
Before you reach for a doorknob — before you enter a new space, a new conversation, a new moment — pause. Check in. What are you carrying right now? What's the quality of your energy as you arrive at this threshold? And what do you want to bring with you into what's next?
We build the future with what we practice today. Every doorway is an opportunity to practice the transition consciously — to notice what you're being, and to choose what you're becoming.
One community member takes this further with a vivid personal ritual: before entering a space, she visualizes an orange glowing hula hoop of warm, positive energy surrounding her. She feels it shift her body. She notices the warmth. It's not performance — it's intention made tangible, a way of asking what do I want to radiate here? before the door even opens.
That's fucking around and finding out at its most elegant.
The Art of Conscious Play
A few years ago I helped coordinate a long weekend gathering in Vermont — sixty people, a few days together, and one shared invitation set at the opening circle: fuck around and find out.
Everyone set a personal intention. Something they wanted to explore, stretch toward, practice. More playfulness. More openness to strangers. More contribution. More presence. And then we released them into the weekend with that single instruction — go find out.
Throughout every circle that followed, we checked back in. Are you fucking around? What are you finding out? How can we support each other in this?
It was a powerful weekend. Not because anything was forced or engineered, but because people had permission. Permission to try, to stumble, to discover. Permission to become. Words don't teach — experience does. People need safe opportunities to explore and find things out for themselves, and when a group holds that container together, the individual practice amplifies into something larger than any one person could access alone.
That's part of what we're doing here, in circle, every week.
You Can Never Get It Wrong
Think of it this way. You take an action. You fuck around. Sometimes it hits. Sometimes it misses. You find out. Then you do it all again — moment by moment, step by step. That's not failure. That's the process. Those aren't mistakes. They're miss-takes. You took a shot. You collected the data. Now you know something you didn't know before.
The becoming never ends. Which means the finding out never ends either. And that's not a burden — that's the invitation.
Every layer you remove reveals more of what was always there. Every doorway you cross consciously is practice. Every moment of play, curiosity, wonder — every time you let yourself fuck around a little with what life might feel like if you loosened your grip on how it's supposed to go — you are becoming. And you are, always, still being here, now.
The only real question is which lens you want to carry while you do it.
You can move through the becoming through a lens of worry — cataloguing what went wrong, bracing for what's next, measuring yourself against some imagined version of how it was supposed to go.
Or you can move through it through a lens of wonder — curious, open, collecting data like a scientist who knows that a miss is just information pointing toward the next experiment.
Your choice. And you get to make it again at every doorway, every threshold, every moment you reach for the next handle and pause long enough to ask: what do I want to bring into what's next?
The inner innocence isn't something you lost. It's something waiting underneath, patient and golden, for you to remember it's there.
So — what's your intention this week? What do you want to explore? What would it feel like to approach one corner of your life with a little more play, a little more curiosity, a little less certainty about how it has to go?
Set the intention. Step through the door. Fuck around and find out.
Come practice with us — a space to return to yourself and become alongside others. Mondays at 7pm ET. More at HumanityRecalibrated.org.
— Sherwood
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