It’s a gift to read thoughtful takes on that language, concept and practices of being in complexity I never cease to be inspired by folks who write on this stuff. As someone who has to teach and explain this to all kinds of different people in all kinds of contexts, that inspiration matters.
Here’s Jen Briselli writing on her experience playing hockey:
Like much of our day to day lives, hockey is both complicated and complex. The complicated parts can be trained. The complex parts must be sensed.
Much of this has been made clearer for me because I came to the game late. Though I watched hockey as a fan, I didn’t grow up playing. I started skating in my late 20s, which means I don’t have the same muscle memory as people who’ve been on skates since toddlerhood. My stickhandling won’t turn heads, and my shots don’t challenge most goalies. But I do possess a fluency for the dynamics of the game and I know how to respond to whatever scenario I find myself in. I can track the shape of a play, notice when the energy shifts, sense when to step up and when to hang back.
Even when I’m one of the slower, smaller skaters surrounded by faster, larger men, my anticipatory positioning keeps the puck out of dangerous places. Despite my unremarkable skating, passing, and shooting skills, when I turn off my goal-oriented pre-meditative brain and rely instead on a visceral connection to what’s happening around me, I can often hold my own with players that are objectively more skilled. (It doesn’t hurt that we’re talking recreational beer league hockey here, but the principles hold true across any type of dynamic human environment.)
That echoes my experience of really learning how to play soccer in my early 40s, never in competitive full-sided games, but rather in small-sided rec leagues or friendly tournaments, where I get to practice all of those embodied skills.
I have a vague recollection of coming across Fernando Passoa at some point recently. Perhaps it was through Jose Saramago, whose novels I love, or it might have been that I read him directly in translation. I may also have come across his work when I visited Portugal a couple of years ago.
Regardless, I had no idea of the extent of to which he developed and wrote in voices that were much broader and deeper than mere pseudonyms or alter egos. He called his characters heteronyms, and they became channels for particular forms of artistic output.
In the current issue of Poetry there are a number of translations of poems by Ricardo Reis, Passoa’s heteronym who writes in a classical style.
Here is one:
I love what I see because one day
I will cease to see it.
And simply because it is.
In this placid interval in which I feel my existence,
More because I love than because I am,
I love both everything and myself.
They could give me nothing better were they to return,
Those primitive gods,
Who also know nothing.
The view across the Salish Sea to Vancouver Island, on a calm and quiet New Year’s Day.
A beautiful, mild and glass-calm day to start the year. There was fog at the mouth of the Sound that lifted during the morning. We walked in a large loop around the Cape Roger Curtis lands, looping through the trails and the Conservancy lands, nature reserve, and the waterfront path. All told its about a 7 kilometre loop and it takes you through forest, down creeks, past waterfalls and along the cliff tops of Ni7cháy?ch Nex?wlélex?wm, the edge of the world, the edge of Squamish territory, the southern edge of Atl’ka’7tsem/Howe Sound. It’s my favourite place on Bowen, looking out over the wide open Strait of Georgia and the Salish Sea. From the bluffs one can see, on a clear day, the islands of Puget Sound to the south and the norther Gulf Islands of Texada and Lasquiti to the north. Across the Strait the Mountains of Vancouver Island rise, and nearly all of the northern Coast Salish territories are visible. It’s an amazing place.
Today we saw 23 species of birds, including a pair of marbled murrelets, several hooded mergansers, buffleheads, red necked grebes, and a few of the hundreds of surf scoters that spend the winter around our islands. This is going to be a big year of birdwatching, with planned trips to Costa Rica and France and several trips to eastern Canada on the docket for this year. I’m wondering if I can make it to 365 birds for the year so we’ll see.
Back at home, Spurs drew Brentford 0-0 in an insipid draw, but in the hockey world, my Maple Leafs came back twice from being two goals down to win an 11 goal thriller 6-5. Auston Matthews scored a hat trick. Hopefully this signals a change in form for one of my blue and white teams. The other one may need to do some business in the January transfer window to regain some dignity.
Phil Rosenthal, being interviewed by Tom Power.
Phil Rosenthal, interviewed last year by Tom Power on Q at CBC talking about what it was like when he stepped into running Everybody Loves Raymond. It’s great interview, but I love the section that begins at 21 minutes. It was his first job as a show runner, and he learned from other bosses he had worked for. He was scared, and he was a rookie. But he established a clear vision and then took care of the connective tissue between his staff. He adopted a persona that was “nice” rather than dictatorial. He wanted people to love coming to work. He focused on the food that people ate, and hired a chef to delight the staff and give them something to connect over. Adopting the principles of “the army travels on its stomach” he knew that food would bring the cast and crew together in a way that abstract hand waving at values could not. The result was that the show created a feeling of family.
A family is not always the best generative image for an organization. Families are complicated, and full of tricky dynamics. But when they work well, they anchor loyalty to one another and create sustaining love and friendship. When people talk about their workplace as “my family” it’s usually because they experience the best of what a family can be. A chosen family. Rosenthal gets that and he gets what it takes to put his optimistic worldview into practice. He says “Food is the great connector and laughter is the cement.” To paraphrase Harrison Owen, who was a devoted observer of high performing teams. trust the people and notice when they are laughing because that is a sign that it’s working.
In the past few years I have seen so many workplaces and organizations that could benefit from this simple wisdom, this gentle approach. It is often the small things that make the difference, that build the connective tissue that keeps a team going through the inevitable ups and downs of organizational life. you have to work on the love part, because people don’t always like each other, or don’t always like the behaviours and actions. If that isn’t attended to, groups of people can reach a social impasse and sometimes the only move left is to leave or come apart. That entails tremendous cost to individuals and to the organization. It is sometimes the only fix, but it won’t always leave you stronger. And even if it does, the work is to repair, to take a new approach and build trust and friendship and commitment to one another back into the work. It’s a long and slow process, because once trust is diminished, it is requires deep commitment to change to re-establish it.
We’re in a world where trust seems very low and self-awareness, responsibility, and a willingness to grow together is at a premium. These are what Harold Jarche calls “permanent skills” and they need training and practice on the regular. They don’t go away and there is no place or time when they are not helpful.
The other day I wrote a post looking at religion as an emergent container of meaning making that is both difficult to define and important in civic life. I’m writing this as a person who is religious to the extent that I practice within and belong to a 100 year old mainline Christian tradition with a mixed history in civic affairs, the United Church of Canada. It was involved in the establishment of both residential schools and public health care. It has championed and supported global solidarity and peace work and no doubt has left people feeling hurt by actions of its leadership. It was the first church in Canada to ordain gay and lesbian ministers and an early adopter of same-sex marriage. In many ways my life has been shaped by this tradition, even the two decades or when I wasn’t an active practitioner in a congregation.
As I have worked with many churches and faith communities of all kinds, I am acutely aware of the influence that religion can have on civic life. I am acutely aware that that is often “not a good thing” especially in this day and age. In the post I wrote the other day I was trying to explore how religion functions as an emergent product of a set of constraints. My basic idea is that religion itself is difficult to define and therefore difficult to either adopt or throw out in terms of its influence on civic affairs. Those of us that belong to religions have very different conversations about the role of religion in civic life than those who do not. Very few of my friends are religious, but with those that are, critical conversations about the role of religion in society are very different with them than with those who simply reject religion at all or say it should be a private matter.
Today I awoke to a beautiful Christmas present (yes this is the liturgical season of Christmas). My friend AKMA, an Anglican priest, Biblical scholar, and critical thinker, read and reflected on my post and offered some beautiful responses offered with grounded and gentle assertions from the perspective of one who inhabits a religion. He shared some sources which inform his thinking (knowing that I will chase these down for further reading!). Most importantly, he shared from a place of deep lived truth, with his characteristic humility and respect:
” I should own up that I take my faith and the sorts of congruent Christian discourse as true and real in a more than merely notional way. That applies even in a way that excludes other ‘religious’ claims. That’s just part of what I take believing to mean, and I’m keenly aware of the risks and presumption baked into that. At the same time, I know and recognise that other profound, admirable, illuminating people do nothold to what I believe, and some believe things that my faith contradicts. Since I have no specific reason to think I’m cleverer or more pious or more receptive to divine revelation than these among my neighbours, I must hold to my faith with a humility that obliges me to treat people’s divergent faiths with the respect that I’d wish them to show mine. I have more to learn than one lifetime…so I can’t by any means rule out the possibility that my Muslim neighbour has arrived at the true, real way of faith and I am wrong about many particulars.
All of which is to say that where Christian nationalists take their faith as a warrant to oppress others because they can’t imagine that they’re wrong, I take my faith as an obligation to honour others’ faith up to the point where our claims conflict, and there to handle that conflict as gently and respectfully as circumstances permit.”
His whole post is worth multiple reads, because what I think he is saying in response to what I am writing is that he isn’t necessarily interested in my framing and exploration of religion-as-container, but instead in sharing the way in which his participation in his religion guides his participation in civic life. And he does so in such a nuanced and expansive manner that it validates the point I was trying to clumsily make in my original post.
Viz:
The tricky task set before us entails finding a modus vivendi by which we who hold to particular exclusive claims about human flourishing can honour and respect people who take a different view, but who still want to live in a civic community with us, and how we can work together to minimise the damage done by fascist-nihilists who will contentedly imprison, torture, kill anybody who gets in the way of their implementing their will.
This is what I mean by religion as a powerful dialogic container. It is a bounded space of shared identity and meaning-making. Inside it, you see these conversations with contemporaries and with ancestors who have carried a deep questions about how we live together. AKMA’s distillation of such is an example for me about the role that religion plays in both personal and civic life. It feels brave to say it aloud. Thanks AKMA.