It’s Advent right now.
Although everyone talks about this being the “Christmas season,” liturgically speaking, the Christmas season begins on Christmas Day and lasts 12 days until Epiphany. In the Christian year, Christmas represents the incarnation of God into the world, and Epiphany represents the physical manifestation of Christ to humans.
These are times of joy and release that correspond with the return of light to the northern hemisphere and which come after a period of deepening darkness, which is Advent.
When you live on a small dark island in the North Pacific, this season, Advent, becomes meaningful. It is a time of rain and sometimes snow and a time of cloud and fog and the deepest darkness of the year. The sun is gone by 4:15 and doesn’t return until after 8 in the morning and because there are miles and miles of cloud stacked atop us, there are some days when it never really gets light at all. Everything that is not water is still and quiet. Creeks and rivers flow in torrents and the moody sea swings between calm and agitation at will.
It is a season of lingering. What lingers are the odd creature that should have left for warmer climes by now. A humpback whale that has decided to stay for the winter. A sea lion barking every night from its haul-out in the bay below my house is definitely out of time and place. The odd tourist who has wisely chosen to travel during a period in which they will have a whole mountain full of trails to themselves.
But what also lingers is the warmth of community. During the deep darkness of the Advent weeks, we move from event to event, experiencing light and warmth around the fires of other’s homes. We sing together, we visit and drink and eat and tell stories about our year and make plans for the future, and then we head out into the dark and rainy nights, flashlights in hand, careful with our steps, to make our way home. We travel between islands of light and warmth in a sea of darkness and cold. We linger on the memories of summer, or the impressions made by friends that we love. We linger on the memories of those who are no longer with us, who have died or who have moved away and who leave a little hole in our lives once occupied by the delight of a random encounter or intentional co-creation.
This is also the season in which traditions linger, in which a rhythm of community helps guide us and hold us through the dark season. The stringing of lights in Snug Cove and the annual lighting up of the village. The choir concerts and recitals. The reading of A Christmas Carol or A Child’s Christmas in Wales, performed yearly, as it was again last night, by the inimitable Martin Clark.
In the four Sundays of Advent, we reflect on the values and practices of Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. We do so in the darkest month, mindful of a world full of darkness. We reflect on Joy and Hope in its absence, and we practice waiting for it to return. I think one of the reasons why December is so full of contradictory emotions for people is that this is the time of year when we most deeply feel the loss of hope and joy and peace and love. And yet all around us, the market has seized on hope and joy as the reason for the season and exhorts us to buy and give and fill the hole of longing.
But that is not the purpose of Advent. Advent is the season in which we deeply feel the possibility of a world WITHOUT these things. And we acknowledge the pain and anguish of a world absent of light and love and peace and hope and joy. It is perfectly timed in the north to be a season of four weeks when we reflect on and embrace the darkness in anticipation of the return of the light.
We can be together in darkness if we hold each other there. We can have faith that moments of light will return, that love and peace will come back to the world. To people, to families, to whole nations. The liturgical seasons are both a symbolic representation of the reality of the heart’s topography and a container for practice. It is a aberration brought on by commerce that we are denied a chance to rest in sadness and despair together for a while. It is good medicine to do so.
As we approach the Solstice, I wish you days of subtle turning. That the fleeting moments of light that come into your life are grasped and held. That the sadness and despair you may feel at this time of year, in this time in history, can be acknowledged and held. And that joy and hope and peace and love may return to you and your beloveds.
Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.
— From “Gate A-4” by Naomi Shihab Nye
This is the start of a beautiful prose poem worth two minutes of your time to read, and just the kind of thing that I am happy to read today.
Geneviève Bergeron – Hélène Colgan – Nathalie Croteau – Barbara Daigneault – Anne-Marie Edward – Maud Haviernick – Maryse Laganière – Maryse Leclair – Anne-Marie Lemay – Sonia Pelletier – Michèle Richard – Annie St-Arneault – Annie Turcotte – Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz
Matteo Polisi dives into the arms of The Swanguardians after scoring a goal for TSS Rovers in the Voyageurs Cup, April 19, 2023 . I am somewhere at the bottom of that pile. Photo by Maddy Mah
Our friends Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Tim Merry interviewed Caitlin and me for their podcast From the Outside on the subject of community. It’s a really rich conversation.
In the podcast, we cover a lot of ground including really understanding the act and practice of crossing boundaries and thresholds to enter a community. There is a cost to crossing a threshold, a requirement to put something down before we take up the shared identity of community. That act is almost always accompanied by rituals and ceremonies that help to mark the liminal space through which we move when we change from what we are on the outside to what we become when we step inside.
These boundaries are important because there is no community without boundary crossing. Peter Block writes really well about this in “Community: The Structure of Belonging” and I refer to his work in the podcast. He talks about practices for entering and leaving containers, including creating barriers to participation that balance inclusion with commitment and also the practices of leaving a container. He suggests that when people leave a meeting, they let everyone know why they are leaving. Such an act is a kindness as it shows a concern for clarity in the space.
A couple of weeks ago I was reminded how important that practice is. I was having a lovely long coffee with my friend Bob Turner who is a former mayor of Bowen Island and has lived on our island since 1989. We were both sharing our experience as long-time islanders that we don’t recognize so many people anymore and nor are we recognized by as many people as used to. In the times we have lived on the island, the community’s population has turned over many times. In fact, we have probably experienced 50% turnover in the last five years alone. We are both open to change. Having devoted ourselves to living long-term in this community, we have seen it go through phases, epochs, and generational shifts. And while that’s fine there is a lingering sense of something – sadness? nostalgia? grief? – that is hard to put a finger on. And I think we named it
I was telling Bob that I was recently working with the Squamish Nation and their Language and Culture Department and I was very struck by how the Squamish people who work in that department are motivated in their work by the deep family histories they come from, rooted in the villages of the Squamish Nation. There is growth and change in those communities, but there are powerful rituals for acknowledging the losses of people.
Bowen Island is a settler community meaning that, other than a very small handful of descendents from original settler families, most people have only lived here for a maximum of two or three generations. People come and go, with very little tying them to the place. Squamish Nation people can’t do that. Your village is the source of your history and it spans back hundreds of generations out of remembered time. When someone is born or comes home or dies, there are important ceremonies that recognize that connection to the past. You might be given a name that was held by an ancestor or receive songs and responsibilities that are rooted to place. You are inextricably tied to the community
It’s just not like that on Bowen Island. Notably, while Bob and I were trying to put our finger on the melancholy feeling we were having, we decided that it came down to the fact that so many of the people we knew here and had close relationships with have just slipped away into other lives in other places. We don’t really hear from them anymore. They certainly don;t form the background of relationships and conversations that make up community. And unlike those who have died, there was no ceremony to acknowledge their passing out of our community. You just wake up one morning (or one post-pandemic year) and realize that person you played soccer with, or sang with or used to see on your regular walk is just no longer there. You don’t know why they left or where they went. There is just an absence and then a small space where they used to be that closes ever smaller until a person who was an unforgettable part of your life is suddenly “What’s his name, the guy with the brown dog that drove that old work van.”
There are boundaries we cross to join community and I wish for the boundaries to cross to leave it. When folks are leaving Bowen I love it when they tell me. I get to honour them, thank them, share some stories with them and then send them on their way. It gives all of us closure. It always a little sad when folks who have been a part of my life take off for their new chapters, but the ritual of saying goodbye makes it so much easier. Otherwise, we just imagine the slow trickle of voices flowing away into silence and nostalgia.
I asked DALL-E to make this image, because I can’t find the great photo i took of streams converging on a beach.
This is one of the things I love about my daily RSS feed. The first thing I see today on my NetNewsReaders list is this blog post from my fiend Mark McKergow in Edinburgh who shares his framework of time, which he has articulated in the Uers Guide to the Future. I like this conception of time, because of the big hole in the which he calls “Ant Country”. Ant Country is that time when the context you are in is important. Mark describes it as the “least useful zone” for planning, becasue it is too far away to predict wat will happen there, but not far enough away that it provides the somewhat reassuring clarity of a vision or a destination. It’s where anything can happen, where life is going to self-organize around your efforts in unpredictable ways, knocking you off course or delivering the resources you need right when you least expect them. “Planning” is rarely helpful here – think about the five year plans we all made in 2019 – but you can and should be prepared for this zone.
Here’s the framework:
User’s Guide to the Future Framework, originally published in McKergow and Bailey, Host, 2014.
I am working with a couple of clients right now looking at their future and it strikes me that there is always an oscillation between that far future and the immediate here and now, and many people can’t actually distinguish between the two, or worse set, they see them as closely connected. Here it is useful to distinguish once again between ordered systems and unordered systems, which helps us distinguish between knowable future and unknowable ones. In his article, Mark talks about ascending Everest, and also uses the metaphor of taxi drivers getting passengers to knowable destiations. These are “knowables” even if the route from here to there is yet to be discovered.
In many ways the near future zones and the far future zones are equally easy to identify. What is right in front of you is yours to do, and you can see what you’re doing when you take a step forward. For the far future it is easy to identify where you want to go, whether that is a knowable and fixed place like a peak or an address, or a hoped for dynamic state, like a generally productive and meaningful work culture, one which might look very different from where we are today. The more knowable and fixed the future state is, the more you can concentrate on backcasting, using experts perhaps who can advise you how to get there (like a map or a cabbie with The Knowledge), or who can help you deal with the technical challenges (like a Sherpa). Linear planning can be very helpful in these cases, as the act of moving into that future is a process of discovering knowable information. Much of that information might already be available, and if it isn’t there are probably people around who can help you find it in a good and accurate way. That doesn’t take the influence of context out of the Ant Country stage, but staying true to the line you have marked through that country will give you a strong sense of direction and a robust plan to get where you are going. One must be careful to pay attention to the vagaries of Ant Country, but in general fidelity to a well put together plan is what you need.
But in the case where you are trying to shift a culture or engage in other highly emergent kinds of work, two things come into play that will help you through Ant Country. The first is knowing that your present state does indeed matter. A lot. Even though you might still be making adjustments and evaluating your immediate need, the history of the system you are in and then nature of the current state actually liit what is possible if you intend to make a move from a current place (overwork, poor morale, a sense of purposelessness) to a more desired state (ease, support and connection, meaningful work). Identifying that far off horizon is important because it orients you in a direction of travel. Instead of worrying about what needs to be in place before getting over the horizon, essentially everything from here to there is ant country. What I typically advise then is to look for patterns in our surrent state of being that provide us with information about what is more possible. That could ean looking for examples or patterns where small hints of our desired future are present. If what you want already exists somewhere in the system, it might be easier to try to grow more of that than to start fresh. This is what we call “affordances.” And it also means looking at the reason why these things never seem to take off, because that gives us some sense of things that we might try in the here and now and the near future. When we are heading in a direction with an unknowable future state, playing with emergence is the goal.
This means that we need to drive directly into Ant Country. We can start doing some things and then open ourselves up to the influences of context and the swirls of randomness that alter our course. Ant Country suddenly becomes the source of creativity and outside knowledge that helps break us out of the patterns that have hindered us and starts giving us options for new ways to get to the better place we have been aiming at. Instead of our plans, especially when we are trying to discover new things and break old habits, we need to get good at participatory leadership and iterative Adaptive Action…what? so what? now what?…probe, sense, respond…observe, orient, decide, act…all the little heuristics that help guide us in this zone are about making sense of the present moment and holding on to the desired future. And then comes the Deep Breath Moment.
Mark’s piece talks about the Deep Breath Moment:
This dynamic steering and adjustment is fine… until, sometimes, a more fundamental adjustment is called for. I call this a ‘deep breath moment’. It’s the time when the far future is re-examined, hopes and aspirations are revised, and a new direction is set.
I’ve experienced this several times in my life and work. What surprises me is that it can creep up without being noticed and appear suddenly, a realisation that something needs to change. Other times it can be a dawning realisation, something that starts as a quiet idea, keeps coming back and seems to get louder and louder until it’s inescapable. But when you do a re-set, a revision of hopes and set a new direction, the effect can be dramatic. Often previously stuck things start to move quite quickly – like pushing on the (push) door when you’ve been fruitlessly pulling and getting nowhere. Things fall into place in different ways. New connections get made. New possibilities arrive. And what was a frustrating stuckness becomes once again a moving and flowing process.
The first thing to say is that this is not a sign of bad planning. On the contrary; it’s a sign that the User’s Guide to the Future is being used well. One of the wonders of viewing the world as emergent is to acknowledge that the unexpected will sometimes happen, and that’s just how it is. The key thing is not to totally prevent the unexpected (which would be futile) but to respond to it well and to use it constructively.
In complex work, I recognize this deep breath moment as one of two things happening. First, it may be that I have found myself in a productive channel flowing towards that desired future. That is a sweet place to be in, but it means, like all affordances, that other options are now closed off to me. I am clearly committed to this path. Deep breath. “We all choose our regrets” as Christopher Hitchens was reported to have once said. Even in the service of the good and right thing that you wanted, possibilities are now forever gone. I find this an important moment of threshold crossing: especially the older I get. It’s poignant. I want my kids to grow up and be strong, but that means there will be that one moment when I picked them up and held them in my arms for the last time. Sigh.
The other deep breath moment I have experienced is the one where I have reached a dead end and I have to move out of the deep channel I am in and make the trek up and over a ridge to a better valley. In our lives perhaps we experience that with relationships that don’t work out businesses that fail, ideas that never take off. We put a ton of time and energy into them and they are over. Sometimes we double down, engaging in sunk cost redemption until someone takes a hold of us in the wilderness of Ant Country and says: “buddy, you’re done. Use your lats amount of energy to get up here and we’ll carry on.”
Working with clients, there is always a temptation to reassure them that the path from here to there is knowable, if we just study things are little more and make a good choice. But remember, the moment of a decision is a madness. Entering Ant Country is inevitable, and it’s going to require a deep breath, some keen awareness of where you are and where you have come from and some solid personal practice to stay in it.