ANNIVERSARY Countdown (Count-Up?)

Today is Friday, March 7th, 2014. We were married 986 days ago, on June 25th, 2011.


Sunday, November 24, 2013

Daydreams and the status quo

"Maybe your daydreams might find a home in mine."

That was the closing sentence of a friend's email yesterday. She is looking for new opportunities that will challenge her, that will broaden her already broad areas of competence. She is looking for something that will bring her into contact with more people. She has asked H and I to brainstorm directions for new pursuits.

It comes at a time when many people I know are hunkering down--for the winter, yes, but more for lives constrained by economic fact and spiritual imagination. I am not talking religion here, but the power to have something broader in one's life, the hope, the belief that we can dream.

It makes me wonder what my daydreams are. (And that's not to begin to take on the transfer of my daydreams to someone else.) It makes me wonder how our daydreams find a home with open windows or one with few doors and closed shutters. It makes me wonder when we give up daydreaming to walk between layers of need-to-do and how we bury desire to keep our heads down more than one might hope.

I had begun writing a post for another blog, inspired by the conflict in our town over the installation of equipment that would provide a WiFi hotspot at the center of town. I had begun writing in that blog about the manner in which we head-down keep fighting the old battles and forget to look to what can be. The local government worries about liability; the local historical society worries that it will introduce something unknown in the past; parents worry about access to the internet letting their children know things that they have not prescribed for them; the church worries about conflicts with god's waves over the town green.  And head down, we bull our way forward calling lawyers and building coalitions of outrage.

In the room that is made of anger and opposition, the doors and windows are firmly shut. There is no opportunity to daydream. No opportunity to imagine.

A childhood without imagination is a cramped and shriveled thing. A town without invitation to those "from away", that concentrates on our darker natures, our desire to assign blame for those things we cannot control is a poor place for civic values and the vaunted community we claim for this beloved place. A Historic Society that looks only to the past, cannot see what past paths have wrought in the now, or what is worth holding on to and celebrating. It becomes a place of dusty shelves with unseen artifacts rather than a place of learning that celebrates the shared geneology of the land and the shared home. And a church that worries that radio frequencies conflict with god's word has little faith.

In that other essay, I wrote about the way in which attention to the local can cramp our ability to see something larger. I wrote that I felt that I had been stuck inside the macro setting on a camera lens. There are deep pleasures in looking at the color and pattern in a leaf. There are lessons in the intricate weave of a vireo nest. I have always found that spinning a fistful of fiber into a lace-weight yarn is a meditation. But there are times when the neck-cramped position can make movement impossible. There is a cramp in my neck and my pedometer is silent.

That day of email, that day of focusing on the crisis at home, I happened to open another email from the management consulting firm, McKinsey. Please understand that this is not an endorsement. I haven’t even really read very far in the material they provided. But there is a post about the manner in which small towns in India are using technology for entrepreneurial access. There is a post about how important it is to make entrepreneurial acumen available in the US at the hands of the foreign students we have trained in our educational institutions and sent back to the nations of their birth. There is an article that describes the incentives for entrepreneurial work offered to immigrants to Chile in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. And I am struck by the manner in which my stuck macro lens hasn’t allowed me to think beyond solving the minutiae of local problems.

Now that is a dangerous row to hoe. I am a believer in the power of the local. I am committed to the importance of building sustainability in community institutions at ground level, and to understanding how local institutions work, and to talking with the power brokers who can make needed change or protect indigenous values and vernacular landscapes. But sometimes you can lose sight of the proverbial bigger picture.

Many years ago I studied with the founder of a field called Social Impact Assessment. He maintained that we needed to know the broad social impacts of change before we made planning interventions. It was a sibling to Economic Impact Assessment and the ever-popular Environmental Impact Assessment which attempted to assess how a new highway built below-grade level in New York’s Hudson River would impact fish spawning. That project timed out in controversy but we have since gotten one of the most splendid pieces of modern planning ever in New York’s High Line which reclaimed the old railroad bed and has turned decrepit warehouse districts into powerful public spaces and commerce. And yes, people were undoubtedly displaced.

My mentor Charlie Wolf talked about a radical idea—the no plan alternative. What if we did nothing, no highway, no commercial district, no social change. It was a radical way of re-examining who stood to benefit and who the losers were. It identified social costs and benefits of the perpetual momentum machine and the opportunities available to a steady close-up look at what would be lost if plans moved ahead.

It is perhaps where I learned to use the macro lens on community and on change. It was probably there that I learned that the vernacular was beautiful as is the veining in a leaf. Just so communities have midribs and veins that share resources and strengthen the whole.

But I find myself thinking about not seeing the forest for the trees. And that is an unusual perspective for someone so wedded to the particular.

As we concentrate on the minutiae of old feuds and allegiances, as we speculate on the potential for legal suit by people who fear change, as we champion the no-plan alternative, we lose sight of what can be. We lose sight of the children who can become entrepreneurs bringing new businesses to a cash-strapped economy. We lose perspective on the child who can find writers and musicians and artists who inspire their creativity. We lose sight of those who can find meaningful work and those who can make meaningful work. We lose sight of the character of a community that supports its best impulses rather than its fears. In a "visioning" process  on the new town building, there was no desire for space for the arts or for a library...just for what we already know.

As I stretch my spine and my legs for a walk on a sunny day after days of immobility, I don’t have THE answer of how to walk between the local and the larger of course, but there are times when I think we need something that is unfamiliar, something that stretches us and makes us think about what is possible rather than what we know. For an ethnographer that is a dangerous idea.

I am off, for now, to seek some daydreams.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Shifting gears

I drive a car with automatic transmission that makes the appropriate decision about what gear I should be in as I round a curve on an icy road. The car has something called paddle shifters that will override that decision to some extent. I have not used them.  I learned to drive stick shift in Ireland when I was out of college on the "grande tour"  - only mine was less grande and more tour. I took lessons from a very attractive Irish "lad" so that I could save money by renting a stick shift car and so I could learn to make turns on the "wrong" side of the road. I "drove stick" from time to time after that trip, but most of my life has been "on automatic".  Make of that whatever metaphor you like.

But as I sit here staring at the computer screen, I realize that I have spent an inordinate amount of time switching back and forth between the email program, the internet search engine and H's book that I have been editing. Occasionally I get up to add wood to the wood stove or to snack on something - empty calories indeed.

I am having trouble with emptiness and trouble switching gears. I finished grading my students' work ten days ago. Since then, I cleaned out the supply closet, fixed the knitting conundrum that I have been dealing with, cleaned the litter box and did the storm windows - and most of that took part of one day. I also walked 5.5 miles yesterday and will head out shortly - before dark - for another walk. Tonight I have a scheduled talk with a colleague. I have filled a contractor's bag with shredded paper - the product of my mother's tax records, and financial statements, some of which date to 1988. There remains a box to do. 

I planted the garlic I bought a few weeks ago, and the tubers I pulled up in search of the  hole that was allowing some small critter into the wall of the bedroom where it wakes us with its skittering at night. I put manure on 4 of the 5 garden beds and need to mulch them and get cardboard down on the weed whacked bishop's weed that lines the east side of the property across the street. That will need to get covered with mulch. But it is chilly inside the house and I have all the lights on, because the grey sky makes it look like dusk instead of being just past midday.  I don't want to do anything other than sit by the stove with a book or take a walk to further compete with myself on my tiny fitbit.

What I really want though is to be back to my writing. I seem to have forgotten how. I don't know which document to open or where to start with the book manuscript I have been working on for a decade. I usually pick it up again at page 1 since that seems obvious, but the result is that I am stuck on what has been edited a hundred times, and by the time I get to the meat of the ideas, the areas where I can make useful progress, something else gets in the way, and the project languishes until the next time I try to find a thread unraveled from the fabric, a place to begin. I have an assortment of files, and an assortment of folders, all of which made sense when I was working on them more actively. That was then.

Now it is easier to address the calendar and contact list fixes. It is easier to plan a meeting with colleagues. It is like the yellow footprints on the floor that we used to use to learn to do the cha cha. Tell me where to step and I am on it as they say. But there are no yellow footprints for the writing. Unless you are doing it and there is that thread left unfinished. Unless it is recent enough to require a finished thought or narrative or persona.

There have been reams of paper covered with writing about the devastation of the multi-tasked life. But I am finding that I have been devastated by a to-do life.... one which is laden with the Scyllas of preparing for the seasons' changes and the sultry whispers of Charybdis in the form of organizer demons that call to me to set up a meeting, follow up on a commitment to find someone to talk about the new health insurance plans, edit some copy on our web site. There are the siren calls of novels and magazines and books not yet opened that draw me deeper into this distractable head when there is only one path I should be following.

The writer Ann LaMott once wrote something about writer's block. She said something about it not being about being too full, but rather about being empty. There's that word again. I suspect what I need is to turn away for a time, do something I haven't done before. Venice was good for finding my voice, but that's a bit more of a financial commitment than I can make right now. And this isn't really about writer's block.  You know when you are about to shift gears from a stop, to enter the two way street, and you aren't sure which is the wrong side of the road?  There is that hesitation, long enough that someone comes into sight, and you have to wait again for the traffic to clear. I am trying to get to the point where I know the shift well enough to make the turn in a natural rhythm. I am trying to get to the point where I don't grind the gears when I pull away from that stop.