The Caring Trickster in us yearns for what? a shelter, a sweat shop, an oasis?
I guess it´s heaven and hell. Or beyond?
I outlined in my article the advantages of trickster energy "Our business world lacks trickster energy" https://patriciavonpapstein.medium.com/our-business-world-lacks-trickster-energy-1c9596578bb8
In short I can say that the trickster energy comes to us through different modes.
When you feel the Caring Trickster inside you…
It shows up as:
- the itch to challenge your own story
- the laughter that cuts through despair
- the sudden shift of direction that seems wild but feels right
- the creative spark that comes out of nowhere
- the impulse to slip between the lines to reveal what’s real
- the courage to face darkness with a grin
The Caring Trickster is a paradox in motion: part healer, part disruptor — part nurturer, part saboteur. It is our fictional character that unsettles to protect and protects in ways that unsettle.
Which destination does our Caring Trickster yearn for?
Let’s look at my metaphors — shelter, sweat shop, oasis, heaven and hell — and then weave them.
A Shelter
The Caring Trickster wants a place where curiosity can unfold without rigid rules. It yearns for a home where masks can be removed because mischief has made reality bearable.
A Sweat Shop
Symbolically, the sweat shop is the engine-room of change. It represents the uncomfortable labor of self-reinvention, the psychological workshop where heat, friction, and pressure forge new identities. This “sweat shop” is the place where we confront our own bullshit and hammer it into wisdom?
An Oasis
The Caring Trickster gives refreshment with a wink: “You may rest—but not forever.” The oasis is relief after intensity, clarity after confusion. This yearning is for peace that renews, not peace that freezes.
Heaven and Hell
In this picture the Caring Trickster seeks both -emotional heaven and hell, because only their tension produces watchfulness. It arises from navigating both. Its mischief breaks heaven open, its tenderness cools hell down. The Caring Trickster wants the transformation that happens when you pass through both.
So, how does our Caring Trickster make itself a home?
The Caring Trickster yearns for the threshold — a space of “in between “what we were, what we are and what we might become.
The Shiver Smile Sigh Etiquette Academy - the Threshold Zone
Now , that I´ve tried to decipher how the unchartered nice space for our trickster energy might look and feel, let´s continue exploring.
The Threshold Zone: where the Old dissolves and the New is not yet born
If the threshold is the Trickster’s natural habitat we can acknowledge it as the unstable hallway between identities. Nothing is fixed, but nothing is lost.
Superb powers rarely develop in times and spaces of comfort. They arise from friction, imaginative leaps, and rebellion against what no longer fits. The threshold zone is the furnace where potential gets heated, softened, and reshaped. Superb powers require a dissolving of ordinary boundaries. This boundary-melting is what allows the psyche to access the “superb”.
Here we go! The Countdown is close to take off.
Imagine a Mycelium as the Trajectory for Superb Powers
A trajectory, in its literal sense, is the path something follows through space or time. Psychologically, a trajectory becomes a patterned direction of development, expression, and transformation. For this idea, I don’t see a trajectory as a straight line but as a dynamic arc—a tendency your life-energy follows as it grows. A trajectory has momentum, orientation, and character that shapes how your inner powers move into the world.
I’ve fallen in love with mycelial infrastructures because they describe human behavior far better than hierarchical input-output models ever could. Instead of ladders or pyramids, we have webs. Instead of top-down instructions, we have subtle signals, distributed intelligence, and emergent forms. Mycelium is alive with responsiveness, adaptability, and non-linear growth— like our inner development.
So, let's embed the idea of trajectories into a mycelial structure.
Think of each trajectory as a node within a living mycelial web.The connections exist, but they are flexible; they do not imply order, superiority, or predetermined direction. Growth is organic, relational, and multidirectional. A trajectory is not a pipeline, but a cluster of hyphae, a living thread of potential.
Milestones of behavioral development become clusters along each trajectory, small nodal blooms where growth, learning, or transformation concentrate for a moment—just before branching outward again.
And when multiple clusters connect, overlap, or cross-communicate, emergent expressions appear new behaviors, new identities, new capacities evolve that could never have arisen from a linear path. In this living network, your superb powers are not single abilities but patterns of interwoven growth, always in motion, always becoming.
My Dadaistic mind wants to add:… with the faintest surreal shimmer—like a mushroom quietly wearing a paper hat for no reason at all.
Now from imagined structure to practical delivery.
Say hello to Flowspire, Otherlust, and Chronofunk!
The amazing trajectories of superb powers as I design them have different manifestations. I combine childlike imagination, curiosity for the strange and pacing to life rhythms in a potpourri of behavior potential.
FLOWSPIRE Ascendant Play and Mastery Trajectory
FLOWSPIRE evokes a feeling of inspiration rising naturally, a creative momentum that fuels fresh ideas without force or strain.
Imagine you can describe the world like a 3- to 7-year-old child in magical picture language. A tree can be an animal; a timeline is blurred into a 200-year span. This ability is what the adult mind and body need to protect themselves against degeneration and distortion.
Childlike imagination turns into a superb power if we train our power of imagination to travel into undefined mind territories. This is in sharp contrast to infantilization, the manipulation of grownups into a state of refusal and denial of feeling responsible for one´s own action. This superb power works as well as a bold cure against overly intellectual heavy thinking.
The impact of this superb power trajectory can be experienced, for example in:
- Glee of describing thoughts and feelings in voluptuous expressions;
- Protective instinct for all kinds of resources on earth, in the sky, in the waters;
- Unafraid dialogue with all living creatures such as mushrooms, plants, animals, stones, data, liquids, the elements.
CHRONOFUNK Temporal Improvisation Trajectory
CHRONOFUNK is the unpredictable groove of how we actually experience time — a playful blend of Chronos (clock time) and Funk (a cool, offbeat rhythm).
Imagine you have a sense for becoming and decline, for beginning, culmination point and ending. You can act attentively to cycles, swings, tides, streams, flows, not against them. CHROFUNK appears when you want to bend timing to your advantage, sense the right moment to act or wait, recover quickly from disruption, or improvise inside deadlines and pressures.
It manifests so refreshing differently from New Age romanticism of "everything is magical", but also from the cold analytical sterility of "if something that cannot be measured does not exist".
The impact of this superb power trajectory is about:
- Sensitivity for utilization of resources, what to care for and what to let go;
- Transformation of ancient knowledge to modern time needs;
- Foreseeing the limits of technology.
OTHERLUST Strangeness Impact Trajectory
OTHERLUST is the irresistible craving to explore and embrace everything unfamiliar, strange, and wonderfully different from every day. This is not mere empathy — it’s the magnetic pull toward what is not you.
Imagine you feel prepared to experience the tension between minimum two but possible many discrepancies, contrasts, contradictions, perhaps paradoxes. If you are brave enough not to want to balance, reconcile or erase the tension then you have entered the OTHERLUST sphere.
This trajectory of superb power forces us to escape the firm belief that the strange, the crazy, the untold can get a graspable shape if we define it, bring it into line, or grind it off. The neoliberal claim of "all can exist in loving embrace" is poison.
OTHERLUST celebrates the attitude to question ideas of superiority and comfort. it easily discovers cheap product lifting or service cosmetics.
The impact of this superb power trajectory leads us to being:
- Emotionally immune against manipulation and showboating;
- Sensitive to criminal underworld dealings;
- Playful with dirt, shadows, the dark side;
- Capable of navigating in the in
Together, the triad of trajectories displays this: A full spectrum of superb-power energy
It emerges when all three trajectories are in motion.
Chronofunk lays the horizontal rhythm, the pulse that keeps you grounded in time’s textured weave.
Otherlust creates outward expansion, reaching into the world with curiosity, contact, and delicious risk.
Flowspire ignites the vertical ascent, a rising current that lifts your inner fire toward possibility.
Together, these trajectories function as three living channels, each carrying a distinct movement of energy. When they’re activated at once, your superb powers stop feeling like isolated abilities and instead become a circulating force—a mycelial current rising, spreading, and pulsing through you in every direction at once.
As a final note, this is why I chose the simple sequence shiver • smile • sigh as the emotional banner for the initiative. These small bodily affirmations act like a recognition melody—an embodied signature that echoes the three trajectories themselves. A shiver awakens the senses, a smile opens the field outward, and a sigh releases energy upward and through. Together, they mark the moment when your superb powers come online: subtle, felt, and undeniably alive.
Guiding Anchors of Shiver.Smile.Sigh.
A little bit of morals will not hurt.Anchors exist to return to, small places of stability within a wildly growing mycelial life. The shiver–smile–sigh etiquette academy is grounded in three lived maxims: In Love with Mistakes, Age Matters, and Wealth Stewardship. These aren’t rules—they’re orientations. Subtle compasses for how we meet ourselves, each other, and the energies we unleash.
In Love with Mistakes
Where intrapsychic currents meet the unpredictable energies of real human encounter, we choreograph mistake-energy. Instead of hiding errors, we invite them into the room. Every misstep becomes a hinge, a pivot, a spark. We explore setbacks with curiosity and convert them into forward momentum, not correction.
Age Matters
Our encounters are designed as creative rides where generations move together rather than parallel. We experiment with unexpected constellations of intergenerational co-creation. What if elders are the guns—sharp, precise, explosive with history—and youngsters are the wise ones—fluid, sensing, world-strange in the best ways? By reshuffling roles, we reveal hidden capacities in each age.
Wealth Stewardship
Mistakes with wealth—whether they come from excess, neglect, or misplaced purpose—always reveal something. When resources drift away from meaning, our Caring Trickster energy twists or dims. We cultivate a stewardship that is neither hoarding nor self-sacrifice but a playful responsibility: wealth as nourishment for the collective mycelium, not a trophy or a trap.
Colleagues in Mind
There are other formats around that are designed to give unusual behavior a space.
I herewith mention four:
The House of Beautiful Business by Tim Leberecht, founded in 2017, https://houseofbeautifulbusiness.com/
School of Life, by Alain de Botton, founded 2008, https://www.theschooloflife.com/about-us/
School of Disobedience by Jani Leinonen, founded 2016 https://www.schoolofdisobedience.org/about.html
Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff https://www.teamhuman.fm/
Future will show how our different approaches fertilize each other.
The Shiver.Smile.Sigh. Etiquette Academy
See the practices of the shiver smile sigh etiquette academy as a jump board to support and entice superb powers, a director’s ‘cut for celebrating Caring Trickster energy. https://www.blisstobusiness.com/shiver-smile-sigh/
The series ends, for the moment.
Now make up your mind whether you are attracted, whether you are partly curious, but still have doubts, or whether you still want to keep distance. Tell me about your arguments.
Patricia von Papstein
The Dadaist Psychologist with a Fondness of Unruly Mental Health
Read the other essays of this series here
Essay III Skill Hot Lists the Future will Smile at
Essay II Questioning Behavioral Order Models
Essay I Articulating the Not Yet
https://www.blisstobusiness.com/2025/12/
Superb Powers Essays Intro
https://www.blisstobusiness.com/2025/12/08/superb-powers-intro/ 08/superb-powers-essay-i-articulating-the-not-yet/