A little reflection today about social change and Occupy coming out of a conversation yesterday.
When I was a young man we talk about “movements” like we were on the go. From whatever place we were in we will move to another. And we marked this action with marches and demos, dancing and action. The feeling of action was powerful and palpable.
Once in a while we occupied a place and sat there for a while. But in general we were all about the movement. We made ourselves different from those we were working against and we moved.
Occupy did two things to change this, or at least introduce some new strategies. For one, they began by staying right where they were: occupying the place where you already are seems like not a very radical form of action, but fully occupying a space, living there, governing yourselves, creating services: that was somehow new, and over the past year I have thought about what it means to choose simply to be present and fully occupy your own space.
Second, the occupy movement in it’s declaration of “we are the 99%” played at a halfway gesture towards thinking about what social change looks like if you first have to build relationships with many who are your traditional “enemies.” The 99% contains a lot of people that you and I would rather not be associated with in any way. The choice was a conscious practice of seeing each other together. Occupy breaks down, as has always been the case, when difference drives people apart. If difference could drive people together, if we could practice handling difference with a container of relationship, then something new might be born.
And third, Occupy gave up the idea that any of us know exactly what changes are required in the world to make it better. Obviously there are strategies, tactics, policies and experiments that can be tried, but there are no answers. Refusing to publish demands is a key piece of this acknowledgment that a) the world is too complex to direct its evolution and b) any action that does not work with existing power in some way is easily crushed. Once demands are issued, the anti-Occupy narrative can be framed and the movement is marginalized and dissolved.
Occupy was, and continues to be, an experiment. It is not a new experiment but it is a recent iteration of an age old experiment to see what happens when we choose to stay where we are and deepen relationships. It continues to share learning, but for me these three practices of occupation, building a common container to hold difference and staying together in no knowing continue to echo in my own work and practice with groups trying to affect changes.
Back in 1986 I was a young man who had grown up in an affluent neighbourhood in Toronto. I was unaware of the full story of my ancestry and although I was interested in the world, it was a pretty sheltered upbringing. I had just completed high school and had my eyes set on attending university to get a BA on my way to obtaining a Master of Divinity. I wanted to be a minister in the United Church of Canada.
As a result of my involvement with youth and social justice issues within the United Church, I was chosen to be one of several hundred Commissioners selected to attend the Church’s biannual policy and decision making gathering, the General Council. In 1986 the General Council was held in Sudbury Ont., and that year a significant and historical event took place: the Church made a formal apology to Aboriginal congregations for the role the Church played in the residential school system and in the devastating advance of colonization across the Canadian cultural landscape.
This was the first such apology in Canadian history between a non-native institution and indigenous peoples. It is perhaps not as well remembered that the indigenous representatives who were present deliberated with the Moderator of the Church for a long time before they announced that they were not accepting the apology but instead would release a ststement at a later date. That statement was two years in the making and in 1988 the response came: the Apology was still not accepted, but it was acknowledged and there was hope that it was sincere and at any rate, “We only ask of you to respect our Sacred Fire, the Creation, and to live in peaceful coexistence with us.” It was a call to alliance.
During the days of that General Council, I sat next to a Cree minister from Island Lake, Manitoba named Tom Little. At one point Tom turned to me and asked: “What will you do to make the apology real?” I made him a promise that, as I was going to Trent University a month later, I would supplement my history degree with courses from Trent’s highly acclaimed Native Studies program. Within months of arriving at Trent I knew my path had opened up. I dropped history and became a full Native Studies major. My life, work and spiritual path completely changed. If not for that decision, my great aunt would never have revealed to me my own indigenous ancestry (which is non-obvious in a genetic sense!). From 1989 I began living a real life of reconciliation, as what one of my teachers called “a living treaty.”
Canadians live in a space in between. We live within indigenous territories. We take pride in our connection to land, but suffer a terrible blind spot when it comes to knowing and understanding the deepest history, language and culture of the land. The zeal to recreate our lives – the zeal that all immigrants share – obscures what is already here. It deprives us of a rich world of thought and meaning that can only make us better humans if we open ourselves to it. If reconciliation is to be a real thing, it must be transformative for people and for the relationships that we share.
If you are a Canadian, now is the time to open yourself to what the invitation to reconcile really means. Who could we become as communities and as a country if we allow ourselves to be changed together rather than simply expecting one group of people to change and heal on their own? What can you do to be an ally?
It doesn’t have to be as life transforming for you as it was for me. But it could be.
UPDATE: Check out this booklet from Jennifer Ellis that documents a gathering around residential schools called UyidYnji Tl’äku: I Let it Go Now.
In this article, stringing together some obersvations about Louis CK and Mary Halvorson, Seth Colter Walls touches on the wellspring of collaboration.
He writes a little of the play that replaces rehearsal for true improvisers, of finding outlets of artistic practice where
“no one person is responsible for all the tunes–if tunes are even the order of the day. Such groups aren’t the ones that players use as reputational tent-poles; they’re the ones that successful artists keep going in order to keep the channel for new sounds open. It’s the jazz-world equivalent of Zach Galifianakis’s avant-chat Web-show “Between Two Ferns,” the sort of thing that happens in the background of an otherwise thriving career.”
Facilitation or Hosting practice is improvisation too. Every time I work with a group I go in as a jazz musician, with a set list of “tunes” to play, which in group work as in music is simply a way to divide time into portions that carry and enable a narrative to unfold. Sometimes the unfolding narrative necessitates that we completely change the tunes we were planning on playing. Just last week for example, the group we were working with had come through some hard work rather earlier than we imagined, causing us to jettison our entire design for something that could take them onward from this new place.
So where do you learn how to do this? When I wrote recently on disruption, I talked about how learning how to deal with that is a capacity that serves marvelously in the world. In some ways for those of us who work with groups for a living, we are lucky to have a world that goes according to its own plan. You don’t need to work hard to seek out places where things change faster than you can account for them. It may be driving in traffic, walking in a busy street, participating in sports or music or dancing, socializing and playing in groups. All of these are training grounds where you can practice sensing and changing the plan, where you can try new ways of unleashing groups intelligence as a leaders, as a follower, as a bystander, as a participant. You can try and fail without any dire consequences affecting your bottom line.
In short, see your social life as practice, and your capacity to work with groups will be richer.
I was listening to a brilliant interview with the theologian and scholar Walter Bruggeman this morning. He was talking about “the prophetic imagination” and using the poetry of the Old Testament prophets to make a point about a key capacity that is missing in the world right now: the ability to deal with disruption.
SImply, disruption is what happens when the plans we thought we had have suddenly changed. It could be a major economic collapse – a black swan event – or something so small as your bus left early. How we respond to disruption is a key capacity for individual resourcefulness, and how we collectively deal with disruption is a key capacity for resilience.
It is interesting, as Bruggeman notes, that our frame for understanding the future is basically consumerist. We purchase certainty. It’s as if we invest in the present because it guarantees a given performance of the future. When we buy something, we expect to receive quality and a guarantee that if it doesn’t work according to plan, we can hold someone else responsible.
That understanding about the way the future is supposed to roll out infects everything we do. When events overtake our assumptions about the future, we look for someone to blame, someone to be accountable, someone to make it right. I can find all kinds of ways in which I expect people to OWE me something. It’s as if our participation in the social contract guarantees that our expectations will be met.
But they never are. We cannot all live in our ideal worlds. Diversity and complexity means disruption.
The greatest challenge of our time I think, both individually and collectively, is how to equip ourselves for disruption. There are many patterns that scale across dimensions of practice, and a few key ones may be:
- Self-awareness. Knowing your own response to disruption is helpful. Do you get stressed by unexpected change? Do you take it in stride? Does your community shake and shudder with fits and paroxysms or do you just give up? All of these reactions are common and they are interesting. And they are not anyone’s fault or anyone else’s responsibility but your own. Learning to be resourceful with disruption begins by knowing how you deal with it.
- Stop. When events overtake you it is wise to stop. The worst thing to do is to continue to pursue the course of action you initiated before the disruption occurred. As an individual, stopping is easier than doing it as a collective. It often takes a loud voice to get a group intent on achievement to stop what it is doing, so being prepared to stop means paying attention to the small voices – the ones inside yourself and the ones inside your team.
- Look for surprise. One of the basic operating principles of Open Space Technology is “Be Prepared to Be Surprised.” My friend Brian Bainbridge lived this principle, even from within the relative security and certainty of his life as a Catholic priest. As a result he welcomed surprise with delight. Looking for and preparing for surprises isn’t just a good self-help trick though. It’s excellent planning. And because by definition, you can never know what will surprise you, the best way to prepare for surprise is to train your outlook to work with it rather than against it. Lots of energy is spent beating back the results of surprise. We would do better to be able to see it’s utility and work with it.
- Welcome and engage the stranger. There is a Rumi poem called “The Guest House” I love that has these lines in it: “This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival”Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows who sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honourably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.” the stranger contains the answer. When disruption occurs, it is like a door opening through which floods unfamiliarity. That all comes with strangers and many of those strangers hold the answers to what to do next, but you have to take the time to engage with them. And never discount the stranger among you, the person you thought you knew that suddenly becomes a different in the midst of a crises.
- Choose wisely. Meeting the chaos of disruption with the order of stillness helps to create the space for wisdom. Not having stillness means one gets caught up in the rush and tumble of chaotic disruption and one reacts instead of acting wisely. Becoming still and then stopping has similar results. Balancing chaos and order gives us the time and space to make a wise decision. The opinions of others help here. If you are alone when your life is disrupted, you might not have the breadth of understanding to make a wise decision. You may end up travelling in a direction that takes you away from where you need to go. When you make a choice, choose wisely.
- Commit. Finally commit fully to your next move. This is principle that is alive in the field of improvisational theatre. The scene takes a surprising twist and as an actor you have two choices: hang on to the story you were previously developing or let the new story line change you. You can tell an improviser that only half commits to the new story. They become immediately stuck in a space that is too constrained to move. They are wanting to work with the new but unwilling to abandon the old. When disruption occurs it is already too late not to be changed by it. So commit fully to the new world so that you can be a full participant in it.
Halfway down the piano.