One of my favorite parts of living in a small city in the Midwest is that many of us tend to wear multiple hats for each other. When you get to know someone new in one setting, if you stick around long enough, it's a pretty good bet that you'll encounter them again in at least one other setting. These multi-faceted interactions yield some nuances and texture in relationships that I think are hard to find in less personal settings, and perhaps larger cities.
Continue reading "The joy of nuanced relationships"
Tag: culture
It's not really useful to me when someone tells me that they know what will and won't work for my life, the people around me, my community, and so on.
That tends to scale up pretty far: it's not really useful to me when someone tells me what will and won't work for the entire population of planet Earth. There's biology and educated guessing and mathematics, and then there's fortune telling and speculation. I think one of the great wonders of life on this planet is that none of us can know, none of us can grasp the seemingly infinite variables that contribute to what happens from this moment forward.
I don't think we should be blind to data and trends and evidence and probable outcomes, and that we should not incorporate our observations about the world into our decision making. But, I also don't think the human brain was designed to cogitate on the lives and futures of the other 6.5 billion people on the earth, or the other millions of square miles that we don't inhabit. It's a fun exercise and a worthwhile one, but it perplexes me when people insist that they can discern the right way for all of us to live based on what might or might not come out of the billions of interactions happening every second. The magic of the universe seems well beyond the grasp of any one person.
I've talked about oil prices and peak oil here in the past (on several occasions, really). You may remember that we had a panel of experts here in November to provide an outlook on the economic health of the area, and one of them said that as long as the price of oil doesn't reach $70/barrel, we'll be okay. Hmm - at the end of the week the price went up to $75 a barrel, a record and people are paying US$4/gallon in some areas. And - oh my - they're actually noticing.
Perhaps its just an "Earth Day" thing, but it seems the impacts of human activities on the planet - and the resulting implications it has for our way of life - are making headlines more and more these days. Al Gore's movie about global warming is making waves around the country. Tim Flannery's disaster-is-nigh book The Weather Makers is really making the rounds in the media. President Bush is warning of a "tough summer," saying "The American people have got to understand what happens elsewhere in the world affects the price of gasoline you pay here." (Maybe a new official definition of "homeland security" is emerging?) Arnold the Terminator is weighing in, talking about the "self-inflicted wound that man has created through global warming." Even some local politicians are getting election heat for their role in narrow-minded and harmful decisions about the land in our community.
Is this a passing fad? A turning point in popular awareness of these serious issues, with unprecedented lifestyle changes and policy decisions to follow? An incremental corporate co-opting of the awareness that already exists for fun and profit? Or something else entirely? Regardless of the motives for any particular effort or project or headline, I hope that the end result is an increased appreciation for what seems to be some of the most significant (though largely self-imposed) challenges our species has faced. I hope that, as Rachel Carson put it so well, "the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."
Today I felt especially like a mindless automaton checking items off a list. It's pretty rare that I have that experience in my "day job" at Summersault, but sometimes the combination of a burst in client project activity + a bunch of administrative things + an overflowing inbox + accumulated personal tasks from the weekend add up to a big long to-do list of calls and e-mails and paperwork that I just have to plow through. A lot of our organizing tools in the office environment seem to promote this: a numbered e-mail inbox, an ordered list of voicemail messages, a stack of papers. It's all so linear and narrow. Sometimes I'm tempted to scatter my paper inbox around the building and create a little scavenger hunt for myself - decipher a clue to figure out which bill to pay next! Or I want to delete, without response, every other odd-numbered e-mail message whose subject line contains the letters "s" and "a", and just be okay with that. Hmmm. It's all too easy to just get in that flow of "next...next...next" without really fully appreciating the people and ideas I'm encountering and the contribution I'm making to the overall work that Summersault is doing, let alone the incredible wider world that's going on around (and just fine without) me. And like today, sometimes it takes seeing how amazing the Sun is in the warmth and light of Spring it brings, or thinking about a far away friend who has had a loved one die just yesterday, or hearing the sounds of laughter from the kids playing in my neighborhood...all of these things help me remember the things I need to remember, and the checklists start to fall into place.
It's an exciting day for those interested in building a better Richmond. Consultant and speaker Rebecca Ryan is in town to talk to business leaders, civic planners, elected officials, community members, and especially young adult professionals about how to move from "Brain Drain" to "Brain Gain" in Wayne County. I'm usually cautious about having outside parties come in to a community to tell it what it needs (and the costs expended to do so). But after meeting and talking with Rebecca at a reception last night and hearing her speak to community leaders this morning, I know that she has some great things to say (and a really engaging way to say them) about the state of our community and how we can be better in ways that really matter for the future. Of course, I'm a little biased in that Summersault is a sponsor of the event and I'm on the planning committee that brought her here, but this is definitely far above the standard fare. In any case, if you're reading this on 2/22 and are interested to hear her speak locally, she's got another gig tonight at the 4th Floor Blues Club at 5:30 PM - e-mail [email protected] to RSVP. I'll hopefully get a chance to do another post soon with some thoughts on the substance of these conversations.
I am hesitant to write more about the conversion of Hayes Arboretum land into commercial shopping space - so much has already been said. But I feel compelled to point out my sense that Richmond, as a community, is finding some good in a situation that, for a while, only seemed to have negative feelings and outcomes attached to it all around. Indeed, I am hopeful (perhaps naively so) that it may serve as a turning point in how we shape Richmond's future.
Continue reading "Oops, we ALL cut the trees down"
A few times in the past week or so, I've had someone use the phrase "To tell the truth..." or, "Honestly..." to begin a statement, usually one in which they're communicating some personal feeling or opinion about a subject they perceive to be "touchy." In most cases I think they mean it in the sense of "I'm going to be more candid or blunt with you right now than I might otherwise be," as opposed to "I've been lying to you about some or all of what I've already said, and now I'm going to tell the truth for a moment." But the phrases and the way they strike me serve as a reminder that honesty in word and deed is something I very much take for granted these days. I don't think it's a matter of being naive - I'm cautious enough and a good enough "judge of character" that I can usually tell when I'm being conned by someone who is being intentionally dishonest. What's harder to discern and deal with are the people who don't even value honesty enough to see dishonesty as a negative or harmful act - the folks who are lying to themselves as easily as they lie to others. But of course, that kind of deep personal honesty - in which we're always truthful with ourselves and others about an emotion, desire, observation, mistake, or other situation - is the hardest to practice. But, to be honest, I think it's also the most rewarding.
For the last several weeks I have been participating in a broad stroke study of law enforcement practices on city streets across America. I have done ride-alongs with police officers from coast to coast - Portland, Oregon to Austin, Texas to Cincinnati, Ohio to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. These ride-alongs are usually in the form of 22 minute segments during which I am transported to the ride-along locations using a technology called "Court Television." As the ride-alongs start to blur together and the study comes to a close, I thought I would share some of the conclusions that have come out of the experience, in no particular order:
Continue reading "Everything you need to know about Cops"
I was going to write something about the impact of hurricane Katrina - on our collective consciousness, the "energy crisis", politics, humanity's relationship to nature and the land, comparisons to 9/11, and so on. Then I read Dave Pollard's article, "Do Events Like Katrina and 9/11 Make Us Crazy?" and he got most of my key points in there, so now all I really feel motivated to say is, "uhhh, what he said." Thanks, Dave. (But don't forget to find your sanity again - there's lots to be done.)
Plastic grocery bags. Some people throw them away. Some people ball them up and keep them forever. Some people crochet them into wreaths, rugs, purses and other beautiful things. I definitely fall into the "keep them forever" camp, or at least I did until I learned that some grocery stores around the nation are getting smart about re-using these pervasive pabulum pouches, and offering you a discount on your purchase if you bring your own bags instead of using new ones. If done right, the result can be a leveling-off of the rate at which you acquire new bags, cost savings, and no extra hassle - a blessing for pack-rats everywhere.
Continue reading "Bring Your Own Bags, Save Money"