Evergreen wisdom in a moment of constant change
INTRO: WHAT USE IS WISDOM?
I am a tireless collector of wisdom. I like to joke that I have no real original thoughts — only curations of ideas collaged from across domains, geographies, and networks. And yet, I am sympathetic to the perspective of Brainpickings founder Maria Popova, who argues that curation is a form of authorship, and also of “pattern recognition — pieces of information or insight which over time amount to an implicit point of view.” After all, each of us stands on the shoulders of our respective giants, and true wisdom is always a collective effort.
But wisdom — like perhaps poetry, or joy, is not usually the first thing we reach for in a crisis. Understandable. It cannot disinfect, or form a protective seal, or care for those immediately struggling with the very real disparities of food and resources. Emergency relief is, at the outset, vital. And yet, while it may not be our first landing place, I believe that our wisdom will help us sail through rough waters with greater ease; like our creative and celebratory rituals, it can keep us afloat and allow us to weather the storm, even as we work to plug the holes in the vessel and steer our way to calmer shores.
I am lucky to be in a position where I have frequent occasions to reflect on the nature of change. As a consultant working with organizations and leaders seeking to implement new ideas in their fields of practice, I have spent years trying to understand the factors that influence our ability to adopt new practices, behaviors, and ways of relating.
“We are, all of us now, unwittingly thrust into a disruption of our old routines, and asked to adapt to an ever-changing new reality.”
The phrase “disruptive innovation,” coined nearly 25 years ago, is used in the business world to refer to those inventions that fundamentally change the way an industry functions. We are, all of us now, unwittingly thrust into a disruption of our old routines, and asked to adapt to an ever-changing new reality. Some of us are figuring out how to move in-person practices online; others are having to invent entirely new ways to support themselves financially or care for ailing loved ones; and all of us are navigating what it means to maintain our various social connections while keeping 6 feet apart from those outside our bubbles.
In such moments, when we feel like the ground has fallen out from underneath us, it can seem like our familiar strategies are no longer of use. In a recent Zoom call (because that seems to be the “open office” du jour), a colleague of mine spoke to this very challenge: with so much uniqueness in this present moment, she asked, what are our “evergreen” strategies?
The image of my favorite sort of tree — a distinctive feature of my New England childhood — has since lodged itself in my mind. So while I hope to offer here some thoughts on how we might move through this moment with wisdom, I want to start by addressing the “evergreen things:” how we maintain stability when the world around us has become its own “disruptive innovation.”
PART ONE: WHAT’S STILL TRUE?
The first step, I believe, in embracing change is taking stock of what is still the same. In fact, leadership wisdom encourages those who would advocate on behalf of change to begin by reminding others of the consistent things. This is because change is inherently unsettling; we tend to resist it because it means loss: loss of energy, loss of identity, loss of cohesion and understanding.
So, as we all wake up to the reality that we are experiencing a kind of ambiguous grief, it can be helpful to consider this question, recently offered to me and many others via an online meditation session with the renowned teacher Sharon Salzberg: “what’s still true?”
While this moment carries with it a loss of control and — for many of us — a perceived loss of competence (in actuality, what we are noticing are the natural strains of adaptation), we would do well to train our attention on the aspects of our lives that have not changed. Every time I take a walk around my neighborhood, I marvel that the buildings are all still standing.
Another mantra I’ve adopted for myself, in the spirit of acceptance, comes from Salzberg’s fellow teacher at the Insight Meditation Society, Chas DiCapua. “It’s like this now:” non-judgmental approach to presence offered in a recent talk. Yes, we used to commute to work, or school, or swing by the grocery store; now we do not. We used to wash our hands casually; now we do so with great care. It’s like this now.
So, some things are changing. But in truth the world is always changing, every day; we just notice it more now. It’s like someone has taken a bright light to the situation, or a magnifying glass, and amplified the existing conditions. Certain groups of people are more vulnerable to illness or loss of work than others; our healthcare and political systems are wildly unable to provide the resources we need to support our communities.
What’s still true?
PART TWO: WHAT IS BEING REVEALED
“They say there’s no such thing as a natural disaster,” explains the writer and cultural theorist Rebecca Solnit, in a strangely prescient interview from 2016, “meaning,” she goes on, “that in an earthquake, it’s buildings that fall on you.”
We are experiencing a crisis, undoubtedly. But the crisis is not (just) the virus. The crisis is the collision between the virus and an unsustainable way of life. Political austerity, capitalism, hustle culture and workaholism, structural racism and xenophobia: these are the ingredients — like baking soda to vinegar — that combine with the Coronavirus to produce a volcanic eruption.
“…the crisis is not (just) the virus. The crisis is the collision between the virus and an unsustainable way of life.”
If we begin to look, then, not at the virus itself, but at this point of intersection, we can start to understand the particular nature of the chemical reaction that is taking place. In short, this moment is revealing to us certain things about how our lives were already structured.
Part a series of stunning webinars hosted by Haymarket Books, radical thinker Naomi Klein reminds us that crises — like all moments of transition — create openings. They loosen the soil and make space for new ideas to emerge, for the previously “impossible” to suddenly become possible. We are not the first to recognize this. adrienne maree brown reminds us that the very root of the word “apocalypse” means not “end of the world,” but in fact an “uncovering” or “reckoning.”
This is as true individually as it is collectively. Those of us who work as artists, designers, educators, and general improvers-of-things have learned to see challenges as opportunities. Discontentment and disruption are incredible precursors to ingenuity and invention. There is much to be attended to in this time, and what we pay attention to we can learn from.
What follows here is a series of offerings: my own learnings mixed with wisdom I have gleaned from others whose ideas I’m following in this unsettling and unstable time. I believe that good can come of this moment, but I don’t like to think in terms of silver linings — the spirit of which seems to minimize the huge amount of suffering we are currently enduring.
Instead, I choose to think of this goodness as a kind of emergence, the way new life springs up when old roots are cleared away and a plant can finally breathe easy. I believe that this can be a moment of reprioritization, one where we begin to disentangle the practices that are serving us from the ones that are not. Some of these are like leaves that have long since dried up and need now to be cleared away so that new ones can sprout.
In doing so, we don’t leave the old plant behind. Rather, we build upon it. That is the spirit in which I hope you will consider the following pivots.
PART THREE: LEARNING TO PIVOT
A pivot is, quite literally, a movement in which one foot stays planted while another takes a step or a turn in a new direction. To say we are pivoting is to say that we are retaining some connection to what was — often referred to as “normal” — while simultaneously turning to face something as-yet unknown.
We are in a moment of crisis, and many of us are experiencing the typical trauma responses of fight, flight, or freeze. Some right now are fighting: trying to claw their way back to how things have always been and unable to admit or accept the wisdom of this moment. Many organizations are trying to run “business as usual,” programming performances and workshops just a few months out, as if the pandemic will somehow melt away like an unseasonable snowfall. Others are freezing or fleeing entirely: closing up shop or giving up on making progress until the situation feels a bit more tenable.
Both of these are understandable responses. But I believe there is a middle way. We can both utilize our previous ways of working while also embracing some new practices. We can pivot. This moment offers us a curriculum, if we are willing to become its student. Or, as my collaborator Micah Bernstein recently shared with me, they are looking to “meet an unusual circumstance with unusual practice.”
This is going to look different for everyone. Nina Simon published a lovely piece on this site specifically for cultural workers that articulates four steps for taking stock of actual community need during this moment — rather than simply pushing out programming. In it, she encourages us to slow down, reach out and figure out how our skills can best serve the current moment.
As we do this (and I think we should), I also hope we take the time to reflect on how this moment might offer us an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how we relate to our work and our communities moving forward. As Arundhati Roy has written in a now-widely-circulated blog post, “the pandemic is a portal” to new ways of being.
Below are 5 pivots — not an exhaustive list, certainly, but a start — that I believe we are being called to make in this moment. It is a list of things we might or might have to reconsider and that I hope we will keep and learn from in our “new normal”:
- From local to global
Before the pandemic, I was far more likely to see those living in close proximity to me: at a party, a cultural event, or just around town. Now, like many others, I have experienced the limitation of physical distancing lead to a re-connection with loved ones around the world. As my immediate physical movements have narrowed, my scope of thought has widened.
We are all of us learning to think more globally in this moment. “America first” no longer makes sense (as in fact it never did) when we see the inextricably though often invisible ties between us and those living across the globe. As Salzberg put it during a late-March teaching, we are learning that “what happens over there doesn’t nicely stay over there.”
Others have named this moment as an opportunity to unite in common struggles and called for solidarity between workers in different industries, different countries even. This in particular is borne out of the uniqueness of the need for physical distance. In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit describes how communities come together in the wake of disaster. She talks about how people would gather together in the streets to set up mutual aid and community-driven relief. But unlike the aftermath of an earthquake, or a blackout, or a flood, we are not driven out of our homes, but rather into them. Accordingly, we have an opportunity to think strategically and beyond our physical circumstances. For instance, in my neighborhood in Chicago, many have recognized that those most in need may not be our immediate neighbors. Using digital technology, we can reach beyond our usual scope and figure out how we can support broader social networks.
2. From productive to sustainable
By now, we’ve all seen the Tweets and memes challenging us to make this time ultra-productive: to pick up a new hobby, finish our novel, or bake the best homemade bread. Equally, we’ve seen the response that this is yet another manifestation of capitalism’s drive toward production. I’ve seen many well-meaning individuals and organizations push to produce the same, if not greater, output as they would have during ordinary times. The truth is that we can all benefit from slowing down.
The pace we were operating at was not sustainable before this happened, and it’s not sustainable now. Rather than asking, “what can I get done?” or “how can I keep X going?” we might start to ask, “how can I use this time well?” For many — myself included — that does mean continuing to produce work. And of course, most of us can’t simply refuse to work in this moment. But my hope is that we can find a sustainable balance of work and rest; of creating and wandering; of producing and letting go.
We are learning that it is okay to do without. While we should feel free to mourn any and all losses, the truth is that we can survive without our favorite brand of peanut butter. Many of the things we thought were essential are not. We are experiencing so many losses at once and it’s important to maintain perspective. A significant experience for me at the beginning of the pandemic was a reprioritization of my time and energy. At the same time that I mourned the loss of favorite daily activities — like my local gym closing shop, or not being able to attend live theatre — I was simultaneously able to experience gratitude for all that I could still access: phone calls with loved ones, green spaces to walk in, food that tastes good.
Now, as many of those same places are starting to re-open, we would do well to remind ourselves that just because we can doesn’t mean we should. While it is no doubt challenging to abstain from activities that were once an ordinary part of our routines, we need to remember that the risk is still there. And it’s our responsibility to be thoughtful about how and what we add back into our life. We can certainly miss particular things while also acknowledging that they are not more important than global health.
Similarly, our governments are starting to admit to us that the balance we seek is possible, that corporations endlessly accumulating profit does not actually make the world more habitable. It turns out that there are places for houseless people to live, there is money to support small businesses and others struggling to make ends meet. We have been gifted a win in the column of civic imagination, and we have to fight to make sure we don’t forget it.
3. From individual to collective
Our communities need taking care of. It is a mythology to believe in this moment that any of us is truly independent. We are seeing first-hand our dependence on essential grocery workers, health workers, governmental leaders, and many others.
While our circumstances are certainly different, and those with wealth privilege in particular are far less impacted, everyone in the world is going through this disruption together. When there is a contagion that spreads through simple contact, the idea that I am responsible only for me no longer makes sense. That we should wear a cloth mask not to protect ourselves but to protect others is as countercultural a piece of wisdom as we have seen in this moment.
Those of us in the U.S. have been bred on a particularly insidious brand of rugged individualism, which has now become literally toxic to our survival. Suddenly, we are being called on to consider the wide-reaching impact of our actions — impacts they have always had, but which are far more visible now. If I visit my friend-who-lives-with-her-elderly-parents, or choose to use a delivery service like Instacart, or eat at my local re-opened restaurant, who am I putting at risk?
Similarly, many of us are realizing that we can learn from people in communities that have already been asking such questions. People in the disability community have long practiced various kinds of social distancing and risk management. Queer communities deeply understand harm reduction behaviors, and how the actions of one person can affect the health of a collective body.
There’s another reason to care about the collective, too, beyond basic human decency. It’s the notion, well-understood by psychologists, that compassionate action can interrupt the self-centeredness of anxious thought. In this case, helping others is quite literally a salve for our aching souls. The ancient Jewish text Pirkei Avot asks, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
4. From habitual to intentional
Perhaps one of the biggest disruptions of this moment is the disruption to our habits. Personal habits, like getting our hair cut or going on vacation, have been interrupted. Similarly, organizations that rely on in-person gathering have had to re-think how and what they can offer in this time. As Simon’s piece points out, many cultural institutions immediately released large amounts of digital content, like virtual gallery tours and streaming plays. Schools have shifted to online learning and troves of remote learning experts appeared overnight to sell us custom curriculum and software.
While the impulse to translate our work to online space is a natural one, this is also a moment to ask whether such reinventions serve our original purposes. Is a streamed play the best way to replicate the experience of live theatre? Or is there potentially a more inventive solution that we are missing in our fixation on the original form?
For instance, I saw a Tweet suggesting that rather than move schools online, we should instead ask how to move learning online. School is a place where learning might happen, but there are so many other structures and opportunities for learning to occur for young people at home right now. Thoughtful educators have begun asking what might happen if we made life the curriculum. Artistic and cultural institutions are likewise places where creative work and connection happen, but they do not define these practices.
What we are experiencing right now is a need for adaptation and redefinition. Teams working remotely are discovering that new practices are required to sustain their communication. Rather than asking, “how do I do X remotely?” we can get further by asking “what is the core value that X provided, and how can I offer that in this time?”
It reminds me of a tool I used when I coached teachers on technology integration in classrooms, called the SAMR model. The easiest thing to do is to substitute technology for existing analogue practices — what a former colleague of mine referred to as “plugging the worksheet into the wall.” Instead, we have an opportunity to really examine what is at the core of our work and vision new, previously-inconceivable versions of the value we can offer our communities.
The artist collective I am part of — the Swarm Artist Residency — was able to offer virtual honey to our participants not by trying to digitize specific aspects of the rural retreats we were accustomed to offering, but instead by asking ourselves how we could replicate the core feelings of being at a Swarm residency. We asked ourselves (and our participants!) what would nourish them in this particular moment, and found that the answers were wildly different than they would have been in more ordinary times.
5. From reactionary to proactive
Figuring out how to offer new value starts with something lots of people like to say they don’t have time for: listening. Luckily, many of us are finding ourselves with a lot more time. Freed from the hamster wheel of churning out constant programming, events, and engagements, we now have to pause and ask how we might ethically engage with our participants in a moment of crisis and suffering. This is something we should normalize. As Klein said, “how do we go back to normal when normal is a crisis?” We really should have been listening in this way all along. Now we have the chance to.
In the adaptive leadership world, we talk about this as the difference between being on the dancefloor and on the balcony. When you get on the dancefloor, you can see what things are like on the ground, how the people you are serving feel and relate. But to imagine solutions that meet their needs, you have to climb up to the balcony so you can get the full picture. The balcony allows you to see the situation from multiple perspectives.
Anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed that there is certainly a lot of uncertainty. Nobody knows exactly how things will shift in the fall or winter, and lots of organizations and individuals are waiting for someone else to tell them the way forward. We are hoping for government or industry leaders to recommend what kinds of accommodations should be made to large gatherings, or how content should be moved online. Some of that is coming, we should listen to the experts — particularly the scientists — in their recommendations, no doubt. But what we should not do is wait for them to send us the detailed instruction manual. The writing on the wall is pretty unequivocal. Even if large, in-person gatherings become feasible again in the near future, there are going to be a lot of other needs that emerge between now and then. How do we move nimbly enough to create not just a band-aid to last us until the wound has healed, but a new skin altogether? How can we use this as a moment to re-examine the value we might be able to offer in this unusual (if not unprecedented) time? Our roles are all shifting and we would do well to pay attention.
This is where design thinking becomes essential. Every organization I know of that is finding success right now is practiced in what is called iteration: the ongoing process of building upon previous versions of an idea as you get closer and closer to the right fit. Sometimes this means adding new components and features, but often it means eliminating them. In our current reality, restaurants in particular are being forced to iterate, as they can no longer serve dine-in customers with the same ease. Some have merged with other restaurants to share resources, while others have pivoted their business models entirely, selling meal kits and to-go cocktails to be enjoyed at home.
Being proactive means starting now. One thing I’ve learned as a leader is that we speak truths into existence. By naming the future we believe we can build, we take one step closer to realizing it.
OUTRO: WHO ARE YOUR TEACHERS?
That we are all the protagonists of our own realities is a piece of wisdom that barely needs repeating. And yet we would do particularly well in this moment — during which everything seems unprecedented — to remember the many, many people who have been through this situation before us. Not just pandemics, but floods, earthquakes, war, genocide, massive disruptions of organized society.
We have all faced this before. The instance is new, but the situation is not. And we will get through it, as we have before. Relationship therapist Esther Perel has been offering advice through her social media accounts and podcasts, not just for couples, but for anyone struggling with the unique demands of this time: “what, you think loneliness is new?” she seems to ask each time a listener expresses their incredulity at the sharpness of her insight.
Who are the teachers you are leaning on in this moment? How are you tracing the lineage of survival that you have inherited? Author adrienne maree brown has detailed her own journey and influences on her blog, reminding us that “everything is teacher, virus too is teacher, is practice ground.”
I believe strongly in practice. I believe that practice is how we learn to adapt, to grow our capacity to reach new purposes. What I’ve collected here are a few of the ways I think we are all learning to pivot, drawn toward new possibilities the way a fresh seedling is drawn toward the sun. I wonder what else we could consider. What pivots would you like to see us enact in this moment?
“I believe strongly in practice. I believe that practice is how we learn to adapt, to grow our capacity to reach new purposes.”
I tend to say I am an optimist, which does not mean that I in any way underestimate the challenge we are facing. But it does mean that I think humans have a knack for creating novel solutions in the face of novel challenges, and that includes viruses and their aftermath. There will be loss, and there will be new normal, a denouement. Simultaneously, I recognize that many of us are still processing this loss, and will continue to do so. Perhaps we have not yet mustered the will to turn our foot in a new direction, and that’s okay. The old world will have to die again and again before we can look around and call where we find ourselves “new.”
EPILOGUE: this is not the end
“This is not the end of the story; the end of the story is love.” These words from meditation teacher Jack Kornfield are a reminder that we still have a ways to go before we can see the full picture of this moment. What we are seeing right now is tough; we are inside the storm. There’s a song called “Time Heals Everything” from the musical Mack and Mabel, written in 1974 by the composer Jerry Herman. I recommend a listen, as the aching melody and prayerfulness of the lyrics so powerfully capture the kind of grief that has made taking solid action so challenging right now. It goes,
Time heals everything
Tuesday
Thursday
Time heals everything
April
August
If I’m patient the break will mend
And one fine morning the hurt will end
I started writing this essay in early April; it is now August, and I could fill pages with all that has changed in that short time. Writing and teaching and even leading workshops from my makeshift dining-room-office has become the standard. I have learned to hold coffee dates and happy hours and even dance parties over Zoom. I have also now, like many others, slowly started to venture out into the world for socially-distanced reunions with friends and loved ones.
So while the specifics of our circumstances will certainly continue to evolve day-to-day it’s likely that we will occupy a space of in-between for some time. In that period we have a choice: we can pay attention to what we are learning or we can pretend like nothing has changed. We can adapt or we can dig in our heels and wait for the return of a “normal” that was never actually normal to begin with. I hope we choose the former.
As Roshi Joan Halifax powerfully spoke in a recent episode of the healing justice podcast Irresistible, “We’re not moving back into the old world, and we don’t want to.”
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