Awareness
When we think of how we exert agency in the world, we often think of our labor: our ability to apply our efforts, and in so doing, alter the world in some way. Animists have a somewhat different relationship to labor, though. Consider knapping flint. We might think of this as a matter of the knapper shaping the stone, but a knapper who thinks like that will probably just end up with a bunch of useless flakes. Knapping requires listening to the flint when you strike it, coming to know it and understand it intimately, and shaping it in a conversation conducted by strikes that send sonic waves through the stone. From cave painting to wood carvings, we see over and over again a different idea of what labor means among animist peoples, an attitude that Michelangelo referred to when he said that his sculptures already exist in the marble block before he begins his work; he just chips away everything else.
It would seem that to animists, our labor doesn’t change the world nearly so much as our awareness. Skill and education train our awareness to notice some things rather than others, and skilled work has less to do with the labor we put into it (which, anyway, we only can because of the plants and animals that gave their lives to feed us in the first place) than the awareness that we bring to it. Our awareness allows us to see the potential within the people around us (human or otherwise), and by applying that awareness, we can allow those transformations to occur.
Living as they do in an abundant ecotopia, the people of the Fifth World do not experience many material scarcities, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t experience any. Chief among them, they still exist in time, and so their awareness remains a scarce resource. When you direct awareness in one direction, you can’t direct it in any other direction at the same time.
We bring a certain amount of mental energy to full, engaged awareness, which we drain as we use it. But the same world that we shape with our awareness also replenishes those stores. It pools in place, replenished by more-than-human voices, and when we connect with those places, we can replenish our capacity for engaged awareness.
Because of this, awareness forms the currency of the Fifth World tabletop roleplaying game. We measure it in moments, which you’ll want to use tokens to track. We’ll get into the rules of how you acquire and spend awareness later. Here, just bear in mind what awareness means to the sort of animists who inhabit the Fifth World, and what this currency really represents.