It’s my birthday on Saturday. Join me in donating to:
- Ta7talíya Michelle Nahanee’s work on Decolonizing Practices
- Teara Fraser’s work to fly essential services and goods to indigenous communities during the pandemic
On Saturday it is my 52nd birthday. It seems to be a feature of getting older that birthdays and other gift-giving holidays become less about the stuff and more about the relationships.
For this birthday, I’d like to invite any of my readers, friends, and colleagues to join me in donating funds to two local indigenous women who are doing powerful work for others. We can gift to them and through them to support a better world. For my birthday this year, I’m donating $200 to each of their initiatives and I invite you to join me and give what you can. In these times, and perhaps always, the work of indigenous women is critical to support.
One of the gifts I receive all the time is the gift of living in Squamish territory on a little island called Nexwlélexwem (Bowen Island) in the Squamish language. I am grateful to live here and grateful to have so many friends and colleagues from the Squamish Nation who have schooled me on the cultural landscape that surrounds me.
The word “Chenchénstway” is a Squamish word meaning “to lift each other up” and it’s a key value in Squamish life. It is one of the values that permeate the landscape where I live and it’s the core of the work of one of my friends, Ta7talíya (Michelle Nahanee), who has assembled a powerful collection of teaching and practices in the service of decolonization. Her work is opening eyes and building capacity and she holds it with the energy of a matriarch. Donating to Michelle’s work helps her to develop new resources and grow the impact of her work. You can learn more about her work and offer a donation at the Decolonizing Practices website. You can also sign up for a 4-week online program there, so consider that too.
The other woman I’m donating to this year is Teara Fraser. Teara is a pilot and an entrepreneur who is single-mindedly focused on indigenous women’s leadership development, including her own. She created the first indigenous-women owned airline, Iskwew Air, which flies out of Vancouver. During the pandemic, along with the Indigenous LIFT Collective, she has been raising funds to fly essential goods and services to remote indigenous communities along our coast.
I’ll be donating to that initiative this year too and hope you will join me in supporting this work.
I’m grateful to be living and working on Squamish land, and deeply grateful for the work these two women do in the world.
These sea lions are afraid to be in the ocean, because a small family of orcas are nearby, and they hunt sea-lions for food.
Years ago I was facilitating an Open Space meeting for people working in philanthropy, several of which were self-identified libertarians. They were unfamiliar with the process, and had the common misgivings about it seeming “unstructured.” People often confuse an empty container with a lack of structure, but in truth, Open Space meetings are highly structured. They offer a form and a process to help a group self-organize around issues of importance to the participants themselves. The process invites a radical blending of passion for a subject and responsibility for doing something about it.
Witnessing the empty agenda wall and the circle of chairs, one of the libertarian participants complained that the lack of structure was making him nervous and he needed to be told what we were going to talk about, what the outcomes were going to be and what would be done on the day. I teased him a little about being uncomfortable with freedom, to which he responded “well yes, THIS kind of freedom.”
That was interesting.
Harrison Owen has called this common experience “freedom shock” and it is what happens when people who are used to be told what to do suddenly get the freedom to take responsibility for their own actions. The way to deal with it is to keep asking people what they care about and what they would like to do about it. Fortunately, Open Space provides a mechanism for others who feel the same way to find each other, so that you are not alone, and can connect your ideas to other people’s.
As the restrictions on our societies are lifted gradually, I am seeing examples of “freedom shock.” Although many of us bristle at being contained and constrained, for many of us, the orderliness of structure and rules he’s us to cope with uncertainty and fear. When those rules are loosened, the become principles, and it is up to each person to interpret those principles according to context and need. We go from being confined in our homes with only sanctioned reasons and times for leaving, to being allowed to get out into public while “maintaining social distance and being aware of others.”
Everyone will interpret these new principles differently, and there is conflict and anxiety around whether one is interpreting the order more broadly that another person.
My friend Ciaran Camman observed this morning that we are comfortable when we can feel the boundary. That seems true for me too. When I know what is allowed and what isn’t, I can relax into being in a small space. When the boundary is more permeable and less clear I can get anxious about what is allowed, what I am supposed to be doing and whether others are doing right. And in these times, the consequences of doing it wrong can be devastating, so there is no amount of risk and pressure in doing this.
Whether it’s COVID or working with containers in facilitated sessions or workplaces, the halting anxiety of freedom shock is a natural reaction to loosening constraints. As you become a skillful complexity practitioner and realize that loosening constraints is one way to influence a system, be aware of this emotional rebound.
And on a personal level, remember that you can always shrink your own constraints inside a larger system if you need more comfort and security. The way we handle too much freedom is by choosing limitations that help us make order of all the possibilities. I wear a mask in public, and although I am allowed to be out and about more, I’m choosing to stay home as much as possible, still treating myself as an asymptomatic carrier of COVID, despite not knowing if I have had it. These personal heuristics allow me to be comfortable, confident and live by my principles. I’m glad things are opening up, but aware too that I have come to be comfortable functioning in a small bubble and a part of me is nervous at this moment.
Just a little story about how I lost my assumptions about mask culture.
Here in Vancouver, over the past twenty years, it used to be very common to see people from Asia, specifically China, Japan, and Korea, wearing masks out in public. I have to admit that for a long time I felt it was kind of arrogant like you were wearing a mask because you didn’t want to contract something from me. To the naked eye, it didn’t look like folks were vulnerable. It looked like healthy, mostly young people were wearing masks to send a signal that somehow it wasn’t safe to be around me.
Last year, however, I was in Japan, and one day, crossing the street in Shinagawa, I saw tons of people wearing masks and I turned to my Japanese friend and straight out asked her “what’s the deal with everyone wearing masks?”
And she matter of factly replied “of course…because they are feeling a little bit sick and they don’t want anyone else to get infected.”
This realization hit me so hard that I may have actually stopped in my tracks, halfway across the street, on one of the busiest pedestrian crossings in Tokyo, upsetting the flow of pedestrians moving out from the busy Shinagawa station and causing a bit of grumbling from the folks behind me.
I was simultaneously overcome with gratitude, admiration, and shame. That was the beginning of my education in how key consideration for other people is as a rule in Japan. In general, folks there try to respect each other’s space, not to make noises too loud, to talk on their phones while on a train, to wait in traffic when there is a delay, or patiently line up for a ticket booth or a train. In a culture like that, of course wearing a mask is about consideration for other people.
These days I am wearing a mask when I am in my local village or in the city, and because of this particular epiphany, I find that when doing so I am a lot more conscious of my neighbours and the strangers around me. I wear a mask, because I might be infected with COVID-19 and be asymptomatic, and the kinder thing to do is to try and keep my breath to myself as much as possible.
Now I get why people are a bit put off wearing masks. I understand why people reason that “I’m not vulnerable, I probably won’t catch it, and anyway, the masks don’t protect you…” I get that because we live in a culture that prizes our individuality over consideration for others. We rationalize our behaviour based on our personal good first. And often that’s all the planning we do. The results of this behaviour are evident in things like climate change, or the inability to address the opioid crises, poverty or homelessness with radical solutions. The vast majority of people look at their own circumstances and believe that they are not connected to these problems, or that somehow they are immune to them.
In our culture, it takes an epiphany to change one’s view. It seems that one has to get sick, or become homeless or addicted before suddenly things become problems. We often hear stories of people who suddenly find themselves in dire straits complaining about the levels of service at hospitals for example, while for years they never paid attention as health care budgets were slashed to pieces.
One of the biggest lessons I took away from last year’s trip to Japan was about this culture of consideration, and it’s interdependance between the individual and the group (and yes knowing full well there are exceptions to the rule.) One of the things I am taking away from this pandemic is the same. There is no way out of this through an assertion of the individual over the health of the group. That is not how public health works. We must learn that our collective health is bound up in individual choices that we make and that our individual health and overall wellbeing is directly dependant upon the health and wellbeing of the group, and especially the most vulnerable in the group.
That is the lesson this pandemic is teaching us. Whether we learn this or not will very much determine how this thing will play out and what happens next in our world.
Sunday was one of these magnificent days we get on the south coast of British Columbia at this time of year, where the deep summer makes a preview appearance with warm temperatures, bright sunshine, and the scent of berry blossoms and new grass wafting on the air. It’s just humid enough that it is warm in the shade, and there is no bite in the breeze by the water. So it was a perfect day to launch the kayaks.
Our first paddle of the year took us out of Galbraith Bay on the northwest side of Bowen Island and had us exploring the shoreline around to Grafton Bay and back. The tide was low and there was lots to see, but most remarkable of all was the number of sea stars
Back in 2013, seas stars began dying by the millions. Over 40 species on our coast fell victim to what became known as Sea Star Wasting Disease which causes them to dissolve and die. Our once abundant sea star populations crashed. Our coast was once covered in deep purple ochre sea stars and the bottoms were patrolled by magnificent huge twenty-legged sunflower stars, with another few dozen species thrown in the mix. Overnight, these iconic creatures disappeared and some years it was nearly impossible to find even one.
The cause of the collapse of sea stars was attributed to warmer seawater – an effect of climate change – and the spread of a virus against which the sea stars were helpless. They had their pandemic, and it looked like entire local populations would be completely wiped out.
Last year, whilst paddling in the Gulf Islands, we saw some ochre sea stars in small patches on some of the more isolated islands, like the Secretary Islands in the Trincomali Channel. This was encouraging.
But yesterday, paddling at low low tide, we rounded a point and saw entire shorelines covered with young ochre sea stars. There were hundreds of them crammed into cracks and nooks and crannies. The vast majority of them were young, and clumping together protected them from hungry gulls that like to wolf them down whole. In a year these stars will be big enough to feast on the sea urchins that have cleaned out our local kelp beds, and thereby restore the balance of plants and animals in that little cycle. More kelp means more small fish, and that is good for the seals and sea lions and the salmon and the orcas. And so goes the chain of interrelationships and interdependencies that make up the marine ecosystem of my local fjord.
Seeing these huge groups of sea star survivors was moving, because I’ve missed them for these past seven years. And in a time of the global pandemic, where we are helpless against our own viral threat, it was good to be reminded of cycles, and resilience.
I hope our sea stars make it, and that they adapt to the ocean conditions and that they have somehow developed an immunity to their virus. I’m hoping they are different and no longer as vulnerable to climate change or disease. The threat of a second spike is always just around the corner, as it is with our virus at the moment. Witnessing a mass local extinction of an iconic species is sobering, and the reminder that survival is possible under changed conditions is encouraging.
I have no idea how OUR pandemic will play itself out: I imagine we will survive. But I’m interested in how we will be different too. This virus detests the things that will defeat it: collaboration, sharing of information, care and protection of the vulnerable, gentleness, compassion. Absent these things, the novel coronavirus COVID-19 will thrive and continue to run through us all, taking the vulnerable and randomly selecting from the rest. If we beat it, it will only be with the capacities and capabilities that make us the best of who we can be.
From the time my daughter was born in 1997, my partner and I went hard on studying learning theory to understand how kids learn, what’s good for them and how to support their growth. These little beings don’t come with instruction books. It’s hard enough to learn how to feed and maintain them, let alone figure out how to help their brains and hearts grow.
We studied for a lot of years and gradually landed on the work of John Holt, an educational psychologist who, in the 1960s and 1970s, studied how children fail in the Boston school system. Motivated by that work, he later wrote a book called “How Children Learn” which was a seminal text in what became the movement of “unschooling” or “life learning.” This is, to some, a radical approach to homeschooling children.
In the early 2000s, along with a few other families on Bowen Island, Canada where we live, we created a publically-funded homelearning support community called Island Discovery Learning Community. There, our children could come together with other kids and adults, with teachers and resources, and even with curriculum and assignments, to engage in self-directed learning in the community.
Unschooling is a serious commitment and we did this with our children until they were 13 and 10 respectively, following their leads, and guiding them until they chose to go to school. At that point, we treated their choice as another step in their learning journey and at the end of every year, checked in with them about whether they wanted to keep doing that. They said yes, and have both since made their way into university – our daughter first as a jazz musician and now studying psychology and criminology, and our son going part time to explore subjects that might interest him, currently focusing on economics.
I share with you this history so you know that I have some experience in what many of you are facing right now. Kids at home, not feeling like you are qualified to teach them anything, not knowing what to do and maybe even afraid that without school they will be set up for failure in life. It’s all real.
SO to give you some hope, I want to share a few key principles and practices that work when you are homeschooling kids. Your mileage may vary.
First, relax. Even if your kid took a whole year off school, it is not going to lasting damage to them. You are not falling behind, and your kids isn’t losing an advantage by spending a tremendous amount of time away from a classroom. Things will be fine. Trust me.K
Don’t replicate “school” at home. This is a recipe for failure. Your home is not a school and probably the last thing your kid wants is a full scale conversion of their living and playing space into a school run by a nervous parent who is trying to replicate a mass education institution with no good grounding in theory or practice. Your home needs to be a home, especially now, and it needs to be a place of safety and security and love for your kids. Try to avoid doing things that place pressure on your relationship and that cause the child to become angry, resentful, or distant. If your school district is giving your child work, make sure it doesn’t take up the whole day. Remember that they need time to goof off and let off steam. So do you, probably.
Notice that you are all learning all the time. Leaning always happens best in context. Your kids will have ample opportunity to practice reading, math, epidemiology, art, music, video editing, writing, research, cooking, animal care, mutual aid and support, ideation, design, technical skills acquisition, and life skills right now. Just like they do every day. Just like you do every day. Learning doesn’t stop, especially in a context that is always challenging and offering up new experiences. What you can do is take time to notice what they are learning, collect examples of their work and build a portfolio together. Homeschooling families do this all the time because if you never go to school, this is how universities court you to attend their programs. On your body of work.
Kids learn at different speeds. For busy parents who are not intimately involved in their kids’ education, it might come as a surprise to realize that your kids all learn things at different speeds. Our son taught himself to read at 4 years old. Our daughter didn’t start reading until she was 10. They both learned to read in a couple of weeks when they were ready to. If you are getting homework from the school and it seems to be taking your kid ages to grasp a concept that is because it takes them ages to grasp a concept. They might not even be ready to grasp it. They are not broken. There is not something wrong and they are not “losing.” You might need to put aside that concept and do something else. Don’t forget there is nothing essential for them to learn right now in this moment. You could spend months trying to teach a kid something when they aren’t ready to learn and find out that a year or two later, they get it right away. Don’t force it.
Adopt this simple pedagogy: STREWING AND CONVERSATION. Seriously, these two practices took us through a decade and a half of support our children’s learning. Strewing means that you flood you environment with interesting things – books, websites, podcasts, videos, games, challenges, work, interesting people – and you watch to see what they attach to. When they show some interest in something, engage them in conversation with genuine curiosity. Ask them questions so that they can teach YOU about the topic. Don’t quiz them or judge where their attention goes. Even if they spend hours playing Fortnight, get in there with them and understand what they are doing. Ask them questions about how they make decisions, come up with a strategy and work together. I daresay that you will learn something from having them teach you about situational awareness, rapid-cycle strategic iteration, and real-time collaboration.
Love them above all else. Can I just bluntly say, that being a parent right now is fucking hard. You’re not failing if you’re feeling that. Your kids are anxious, worried, and carrying a lot as they move through this disruption in their lives. They can’t see their friends and they are possibly even beginning to hear stories of people they love who are getting sick. If they can’t focus on schoolwork, don’t force them to. These are traumatizing times. What they need right now is probably a good hug and a cry. I’m not sure that is an age-dependent need, actually. The most important thing of all is to love them and care for them right now. Make them as happy as possible right now, because that is what will help them stay resilient, and that is the most important thing.