I was reflecting today with a friend on the nature of the world right now. We were discussing some of the story collections I have from the early part of the pandemic when I was running Participatory Narrative Inquiry projects with organizations seeking to understand the effects of the pandemic on their services. It’s hard to remember that time, and it’s very hard to remember the “before-times,” as people call them. But reading these stories reminded me of what we all did together all of a sudden. It was meant to be a short-term intervention in our lives. It wasn’t.
I think the pandemic has fundamentally altered our reality. I remember the 2010s as a time when we were starting to get some things right, and for me, that positive aspect of the decade really took shape in the way public transportation was developing in the Vancouver region. During the 2010s, Vancouver built a light rail extension to the airport, began building a subway across the Broadway corridor on the west side of the city and rapidly increased the number of express bus routes and connections, even out to the suburbs. This whole era seemed like one where the focus was on connecting people for a larger public good. It symbolized a collective and concrete commitment to our region’s well-being.
But when the pandemic began, much of that progress halted, and we lost many of those public services because people stopped commuting and meeting in person. On our little island, a successful community-operated express bus ceased running downtown. Our late-night water taxi service disappeared. Deep in the city, streets were taken over for patios, and folks started living outside a little more leading to the establishment of more bike infrastructure. But the return to public transit was slow and still hasn’t reached pre-pandemic levels (as of last year, anyway). People are Uber-ing and using car share programs like Evo, but we’re not getting in the bus. We don’t have to. Lots of us work from home now. It is getting more and more individual.
And that’s what seems to have captured the shift for me. I have no data to back this up – maybe you do – but this shift has led to a diminishment of shared public experiences, replaced by individual, isolated realities. Ironically, while we aimed to work together to to protect each other from the virus, the measures we took dissolved the sense of collective public good into fragmented personal experiences. In fact, I think the reason that so many people feel manipulated and react with a strong desire for “freedom from the government” has to do with the fact that the response to the pandemic required us all to participate but left no space for us to co-create, at least not by the second half of 2020. The early weeks and months were full of community effort locally and our skills were all called into action. Being a person with online hosting skills meant that I could offer a weekly zoom call for local businesses here to keep folks apprised of the supports that were available to them and help them connect to efforts that were ongoing to keepbrikcs and morter businesses solvent during the March – June closures.
That began to change towards the end of the year when folks started getting fed up with the restrictions. We longed to be left alone. We resented governments telling us what to do. We started to see a massive rise in the rhetoric of separation, whether it was deeply individualistic calls for action or movements that pointed fingers, blamed others and backed into relationships to form movements, like the Freedom Convoy in Canada.
As we slowly emerge from this period, it’s evident that our minds and ways of thinking have been irrevocably changed. The information we consume through our devices hasn’t helped us make sense of this transformation; instead, it often exacerbates the confusion and sense of disconnection. We don’t want anyone telling us what to do. We are forgetting how to make things together, other than networks of outrage.
On top of the health crisis, we’ve faced a kind of psychological and cultural trauma. This hyper-individual experience of a global event has left many feeling helpless and detached. Change-making, which requires us to act together to serve a public good, often fails to recognize the deeper, collective nature of our challenges. We see many individual actions without much organizing, connection or collective effort to work with power, policy and resources. Outrage is close at hand. This disconnection and frustration manifest because people feel they’re doing something significant, yet it’s hard to see how these actions fit into the larger picture of systemic change.
Moreover, this period’s grief and unresolved emotions linger in our collective psyche. Many of us were forced into self-reflection during the lockdowns, confronted with who we are and what our lives mean. There is a ton of lateral violence out there right now: people taking out anger and aggression at others for small or even presumed transgressions. We can probably all tell stories of being on the end of a tirade from someone, and probably many of us have stories where WE lost it against someone out of proportion to whatever irritation provoked the outbursts. This unresolved grief remains within our systems as we try to “return to normalcy,” highlighting the need for deeper healing and integration of these experiences.
We were never going to return to normalcy, though. We are in a different place than we were and I cannot put my finger on it. I’d love to hear your reflections on what it has been like. Many of us who work with groups as facilitators have noticed a difference in how groups work. I see fear and reluctance to engage. I think lots of us are regressing in our ability to sit face-to-face with one another and have conversations, especially around hard issues. While I have experienced tremendous healing in hosting conversations and participatory initiatives, I have also seen initiatives fizzle. Folks are increasingly asking me to host Open Space meetings because they just need to put ideas out there and talk about them.
I have a growing desire to understand this state of affairs and put my finger on it in a way others recognize. I have been reading novels set in other pandemic times, but it seems that none of the brilliant authors I have read have caught on to the psychological effects of the pandemic on the collective psyche. I’m not seeing it in films or TV shows, either. It’s as if what we went through has been erased or skipped over in our collective history. We aren’t really telling the story of it, nor are we telling stories that acknowledge it. Has anyone read a novel that spans the years 2019 to now? Let me know. How are you seeing what’s happening?
Via Scott Thomas (@ScottGL1 on twitter) comes a very interesting note on a US weather service forecast from yesterday:
I live on a small island located in a steep-walled inlet that opens onto an inland sea on the Pacific Coast of North America. Our island is medium-sized, about 12 km long and 8 km wide. Part of it sticks out into the Strait of Georgia, which is part of the larger Salish Sea that exists between Vancouver Island and the mainland. Part of our island sticks into Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, an inlet that leads from the Strait 45kms inland to the mouth of a river valley that drains the Coast Mountains. In winter, katabatic winds can blow more 100km/h onto the north shore of the island, coating it in ice and snow with a -25C windchill while 12kms away on the southern shore of the island, it can be a nice warm, calm, and sunny spring day, where the temperature feels 30 degrees warmer.
If you count on the local weather forecast, which comes from a mere 15 km away at the Vancouver airport, you will have no idea about the weather on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island. The Vancouver airport is located on an island in an estuary at the mouth of a long and broad river valley and experiences completely different weather.
It still boggles my mind that people who live where I live fail to grasp the hyperlocal nature of our microclimates. If you rely only on weather apps and have no idea how the forecasts on these apps are made (or indeed what a 60% chance of rain means), then you might think that meteorology is a big lie. In fact, the limited accuracy of long-term weather forecasts is often one of the things that climate change deniers use to bolster their idea that you can’t forecast the weather and you can’t trust the “weather scientists.”
Trying to predict the intensity of an atmospheric river or the landing point of a compact sub-tropical cyclone is an important function for weather forecasters. But it is impossible to tailor forecasts to the hyper local conditions. I know, by virtue of the fact that my house faces southeast, that the gale warnings that come from an atmospheric river forecast are important for me to heed. The rain will fall everywhere, but it will be more intense on the windward-facing slopes and with a 90 or 100 km/h wind gust, it will be driven into the cracks and seams on my house. I have to seal things up if I don;t want leaks. I have to make sure stuff is bolted down or put away and that the fireplace remains dry, as the rain can be driven into my chimney under the cap.
Literally a few hundred meters away, over the ridge behind my house, there will be no wind. Rain, yes. But if you panicked upon hearing the gale warnings, you might be surprised to find that the wind didn’t matter to you at all. People express anger or frustration all the time on our neighbourhood Facebook pages. Sometimes folks will ignore a warning that actually applies to them, because the last one didn’t affect them at all. That lack of situational awareness is perilous and it is not the fault of weather forecasters.
We just do not have a very good sense of how complex systems work or how we are supposed to relate to them. There is a broad societal expectation that experts will give us answers. Weather forecasts do not provide answers, they provide guidance. To use a weather forecast, you have to also participate in sensemaking and decision-making. You have to have situational awareness about where you are and what information you have about your current state, and you have to have an idea about where the forecast information is coming from and what it means. You need to understand the cadence and granularity of the forecast and to know that forecasts about volatile weather systems can change by the minute. With weather emergencies, you need to be able to prepare and take action, even if the outcome isn’t as severe as the forecast made it out to be. And you also have to realize that things could turn out to be worse than the forecast for your area at any given moment.
This weather forecaster, upon retirement, offers us good wisdom for living in a society where we have tools and expertise that help us live with complexity. This little missive reveals what it is we need to do as complexity practitioners and experts in different fields and it also illuminates how to be a better consumer of data about complex situations, whether that is the economy, the weather, our own health or the myriad of other places where the future is just a set of probabilities.
I was struck by Daniel Miller’s research on Skerries, a small seaside town in Ireland which he discussed on the BBC’s Thinking Allowed podcast this week. The town he is describing is almost EXACTLY a match for Bowen Island, where I live right down to the demographics, the community dynamics and the fact that we don;t have a swimming pool, a theatre or a hotel and we do drink A LOT and have a cocaine problem. He wrote a book about his research but I was struck by the deep parallels between our two villages. In thinking about the commonalities it strikes me that the homogenous nature of our ethnic and age demographics, language, wealth levels, and isolation from but proximity to a major centre and the major constraints that generate such similar profiles on the surface of it. I can think of other places I’ve been too like Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia, Vankleek Hill in Ontario, Sooke, BC and probably Knowlton, Quebec that probably fit the bill too.
There is a reason for this consistency. The fact that two towns so far away on the globe exhibit such similar characteristics is remarkable but it is a testament to the power of global capitalism that created a class of English speaking upper middle class and wealthy people from similar professions and worldviews and fed us all memes (the original definition) that resonate with the lives we lead. Even the fact that I am subscribed to Thinking Allowed is a part of this phenomenon.
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.
My neighbour Raghavendra Rao Karkala has a show up at The Hearth on Bowen these next couple of weeks that is a captivating look at the images of dissent in the world. Spanning movements from around the world and from the late 20th century right up to the present day, Raghu has captured images of dissent, many of them portraits of dissenters in action. It is an unusual show for Bowen Island, in that it is explicitly political. I’m sure folks will resonate with some of the dissenters and not others. Maybe none at all.
The show portrays named and unnamed people, and while the political leaning is undeniably progressive, the longing that these images portray transcends partisan politics and points us toward dignity and self-determination in the face of power that dehumanizes and uses its monopoly of force and violence to enforce arbitrary laws and create dehumanizing situations. I think Raghu’s perspective is captured best by a pair of images of anonymous women. One shows an Iranian woman clasping a lock of her hair which she has cut and is holding above her head in defiance of the Iranian state’s enforcement of hijab. The other shows a woman in a near similar pose wearing a hijab which originates from protests in India in favour of the right to wear a hijab. The issue is self-determination and choice.
Many of these images show the dissenter’s head or face and their arms. The arms are raised or outstretched, sometimes in a fist, sometimes pointing, sometimes open-palmed. They are reaching for, pointing at, or demanding something that lies just outside their grasp. A future, a right, a shred of the dignity that has been stripped from them. It is the hands I most identify with. They are an invitation to join in the struggle from wherever we are, to do whatever we can to fully support the right of human beings to determine their futures and choose lives of fulfillment and peace.
For a privileged community like ours, I think the show poses the question of whether we can reach out to those in the portraits and join them in their struggle and dissent against the brutal use of power that dispossesses and dehumanizes them. The answer is not an easy yes. Who are these folks? Who am I in relation to them? What is the real cost of my support for them? And, hey, are some of these images directed at me?
Raghu’s show runs until November 3.