
The view from the ferry this week as I headed into Vancouver.
This weeks notes and noticing:
- July 14, 2025: transform: transforming conflict, dialogue and community
- July 15, 2025: people doing things they are good at: handy apps, polymaths and women’s football
- July 16, 2025: seeing the treasure: local placemaking and the Golden Ratio
- July 17, 2025: I’m in awe..: complexity, constraints, governance and amazing medical science
- July 18, 2025: the threat to beauty: AI, and the threat and promise of true creativity.
Let your curiosity carry you. And if you are a blogger sharing links and little notes like this, the part of me that chases rabbit holes would like to add you to my blogroll.
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Summer nights at the football. Our little band of TSS Rovers ultras celebrates one of the 9 goals our teams scored on Wednesday night.
The summary of notes and links published on the Parking Lot blog over the past week:
- July 7: heavy lifting. A new phone, a new US political party and a new season
- July 8: annals of democratic renewal: political violence, democracy, youth engagement and the role of community foundations
- July 9, 2025: here’s what I’m reading: A review of Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light and short story season begins
- July 10, 2025: playing at home: my Rovers win big and send a couple of players off to the professional leagues.
- July 11, 2025: the Kanesatake resistance: personal reflections on the events of this day, thirty five years ago.
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This is an interesting article from Rebecca Roache Aeon today: “What’s so awkward about awkward silence?“
“…conversations are shared endeavours. A conversation is something we’re creating with whoever we’re talking to, and this is undermined if one or other of us is silent for too long. In a 2011 study on conversational silences, the psychologists Namkje Koudenburg, Tom Postmes and Ernestine H Gordijn compared conversations to dancing: the ‘harmonious exchange of information through smooth turn-taking’ in a fluent conversation is satisfying in a way similar to coordinating one’s movements with those of a dancing partner. Dancing, like conversation, becomes awkward when it’s malcoordinated. Koudenburg and her colleagues found that people experience rejection when silence disrupts the flow of conversation. They explain: ‘people are, due to the evolutionary importance of group membership, highly sensitive to perceiving exclusion’. In other words, silences are uncomfortable when they make us worry that we don’t belong.”
I have two unresourceful patterns when I’m engaging in conversation. One is that I spend a lot of time listening and thinking about what is being said. I often have thoughts during these silences, but the conversation moves too fast for me to get them in. I am deeply sensitive to interrupting others and being interrupted and so I am loath to do so. So I sit on my thoughts and sometimes chain them together into the questions or ideas that I offer. I might write notes with me pen to track my thoughts. And sometimes they never come out, and other times they flood out as I try to catch up to everything that has flowed past. I don’t think either of those moves are helpful!
Other times, you can’t shut me up and I will go on and on stringing together thoughts and ideas and questions as they tumble out of my brain when it gets locked in the default mode network. Ideas associate themselves like a Glass Bead Game and they all come out, probably in a not so helpful way. These downloads are often met with confusion in my conversational partners. When I am in this mode it is very hard to regulate my verbiage. I have learned to ask for space and will say things like “I need to just think out loud here for a minute, can you indulge me?” Other times I will invite interruption, welcoming it like a life preserver thrown to a drowning man.
But I generally relish the silences in conversations when we are all in the sam flow. I love conversing in circle where we deliberately slow down the conversation and explicitly use silence as a tool that everyone has access to. In circle there can be unfamiliarity with silence as a part of the conversation, but there is minimal awkwardness per se, because the silence is ritualized and normalized.
Of course I live in a culture much like the one that Rebecca Roache lives in. Silence in conversation – well, in small talk really – is awkward because it isn’t the norm of the ritual of small talk in many Anglo-American cultures. While I understand and enjoy small talk, I like to be in a place with someone where we get deep enough that some silence is welcomed. This morning I ran into a friend on the trail who I ahdn;t seen in a while. We connected with a hello and how-are-you-doing but both of us have history together of going deep around life issues and it quickly went there. We paused and became quiet together and shared important news with one another in a loving, connected way. There was nothing awkward in the silences. The container changed and the silence became a critical part of the conversation.
Roache summarizes her article with the set of thoughts that became clear to me as I was reading her essay:
“Something that emerges from all this is that it’s not silence itself that is awkward (or not). The capacity of silences to be awkward or comfortable is set against our efforts to connect with and understand other people, to be seen by others in the way we wish to be seen, and to be accepted. Running through all the aspects of awkward silence we’ve explored here is a common thread of anxiety about how well we’re engaging in connection and understanding with the people we interact with. In a comfortable silence, like the ones you enjoy with those you know and love, that anxiety isn’t there. With them, you don’t struggle to connect and understand. You’re already there.”
That is the essence. It’s hard to tell what part of this is me and what part is the culture I am soaking in, but I notice the chatter that happens oftentimes becomes a shield against connection. Our world right now is suffering from a deficit of trust. It takes a long time to cultivate connections across differences and early moments of connection – through small talk, mostly in my culture – are so influential in whether or not a channel of openness emerges.
In facilitation practice making space for silences can be important because it may both lead to, and reinforce a deeper connection between people. This is much easier to do in small group facilitation than it is is large group process work, but it can be a useful way to use the power one has as a facilitator. I remember one large gathering I did with about 120 people, and many diverse and simmering conflicts that were rising to the surface. I called for 15 minutes of silence. These people did all have spiritual practices and asking them to be silent was a call to their practitioner selves, but even so many told me how difficult it was to sit in that silence. The result, however, I believe, was a general ability to be willing to slow down and reflect for the rest of the gathering and let the silence do the work of opening up resourcefulness between them.
The awkwardness is information. The response is trust. If trust can grow, the silence can become a powerful part of the dialogue, and the space can do its work.
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ChatGPT made this image of a cranky psychology professor playing soccer while a bellicose commentator looks on and the players stare bewilderingly at the proceedings that are not a part of
Imagine a scenario in which a well known radio host with a penchant for American sports talks with a Jungian psychologist weirdly obsessed with the culture wars, about football tactics. Neither one knows what the hell they are talking about, but they have large social media followings so somehow we should listen to their opinions. ChatGPT helped me out here, because I’m incapable of writing this dialogue without losing my mind.
Chuck Dugan:
Welcome back to The Morning Yardage, I’m your host Chuck Dugan—gridiron guy, diamond devotee, and, uh, recently inducted into the world of world football! That’s right, we’re talking soccer. And with me today is a real thinker, Dr. Leonard Ambrose Penwright, a Jungian psychologist and… well, something of a European football aficionado?Dr. Penwright:
Thank you, Charles. It is both a privilege and a burden to speak into the void that modernity has fashioned around our ancestral games. Soccer—what the Europeans call “association football”—is, fundamentally, a sacred reenactment of the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus.Chuck:
Yeah. And that’s why they play it on grass.Penwright:
Precisely.Chuck:
So, let’s get into it. There’s been a lot of talk about this whole “false nine” business. What is it, Leonard? I saw it on a YouTube video, and I gotta say, I didn’t see anything false about the guy wearing number nine. He looked real enough.Penwright:
The “false nine” is emblematic of post-Freudian identity collapse. It’s a striker who refuses to strike—like a lion who meows or a Protestant who dances. He descends into the midfield, displacing the masculine telos of the goal. It’s essentially a Jungian shadow figure, disrupting the natural order.Chuck:
So… is he like a tight end?Penwright:
No, he is less than a tight end. He is an archetype of the dispossessed prince. Tactically, this was pioneered by the Belgians during the Crimean War. Or possibly the Dutch during the Enlightenment—it’s disputed.Chuck:
Right, right. And that brings me to the diamond midfield. Everybody’s talking about it. You stack your midfield like a fantasy football draft: you got the quarterback, the wide receiver, and then two guys hanging back to clean up spills. I think that’s how Real Manchester beat Liverpool United in the Champion’s Bowl back in ’96.Penwright:
You’re close, Charles. The diamond is a sacred symbol—four points, representing Carl Jung’s four functions of consciousness: thinking, feeling, sensing, and… something else. When deployed correctly, the diamond midfield becomes a psychic mandala. This is what separated the 1934 Prussian national team from the decadent Hungarian Romantics of the same era.Chuck:
A classic rivalry! I remember my dad telling me about that match. Ended 2-2 in overtime, right?Penwright:
It ended in ideological fracture, Chuck. The referee was a Catholic. That was controversial.Chuck:
Well, switching gears here—everyone’s talkin’ about the high press. I assume that’s when the goalie comes out with a lot of pressure? Like a blitz package?Penwright:
Incorrect, but spiritually adjacent. The “high press” is an attempt to enforce rigid cultural hierarchies. It’s when every player acts as the superego, suffocating the id of the opponent. It is, in many ways, fascist.Chuck:
Love a good fascist play.Penwright:
Indeed. That’s why the Italians did it best in 2006.Chuck:
Okay. One more thing—what’s your take on VAR? You know, the video robot referee thing?Penwright:
Ah, VAR. An insidious manifestation of late-stage digital panopticism. It neuters the spontaneity of the masculine heroic quest. It is Orwellian in scope and TikTokian in attention span. When a man cannot dive theatrically in the penalty box without being surveilled, what is he but a serf?Chuck:
So you’re against it?Penwright:
I’m against what it represents. The end of myth. The death of story. Also, I don’t understand how the offside rule works.Chuck:
Me neither, pal. But hey, that’s soccer! Stick around, folks—we’ll be back after this with more tactical analysis and possibly a Jungian interpretation of corner kicks.Penwright:
Ah yes, the corner kick—the final protest of the oppressed ego against the collective unconscious…Chuck:
We’ll be right back.
Now, Imagine Chuck is Joe Rogan and Penwright is Jordan Peterson and remind me again why their conversation on climate science is relevant to anything at all?
The conversation between these two influencers is as absurd as the one I had a robot create. Being open to other points of view does not require you to listen to complete nonsense in the service of somehow expanding your worldview.
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Spending the past few weeks immersed in football culture in England and back home at Canada fed my soul. There is so much about football that I love, from the complexity of the game, all through to the culture and atmosphere of the stadium. I have been a dedicated and deeply involved football supporter of the Vancouver Whitecaps (2010-2018, ended over a series of unresolved sexual abuse scandals) and of TSS Rovers (2017- the present). The thing that drew me to football as a kid was hearing Liverpool supporters singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” on the BBC Match of the Day broadcasts when I lived in England in the late 1970s. The SOUND. The sound of a big stadium full of enthusiastic supporters is unreal. It’s not something you are likely to witness in professional sports in North America except in soccer. And being present on a European night, like Finn and I were a couple of weeks ago as Tottenham hosted Eintracht Frankfurt, is absolutely magical.
The essence of football culture in the rest of the world is its organic and participatory nature, from the creation of tifo to the penning of songs and chants. As a songwriter, writing songs for my football teams has been a passion of mine. I especially love coming up with player chants, which are even more meaningful at the lower league levels, where young players ply their trades in relative obscurity, loved only by a small handful of fans.
As a complexity practitioner, I love watching the way football supporter culture ebbs and flows and wanes and flows again. I love the way we try songs out that flat out fail, or we have some instant inspiration that locks itself in as a tradition.
Recently the podcast 99% invisible did a nice piece on football songs, including some deeper history of this cultural practice that I wasn’t aware of. Even though it’s pitched at an American audience, and it is focused somewhat on Arsenal (I’m a Spurs fan, remember!) it’s well worth a listen. It gives us insight about what culture really is and how it really functions.