People are enjoying longer experiences, according to Ted Gioia, who has a keen eye for the trends in culture that are shaping our world and experiences. And while this is true for the individual consumption of cultural products.
BUT. As a person who spends time creating collaborative environments where people engage and co-create within organizations and communities I can attest that experiences of creating community together are becoming harder and harder, because people want to spend less and less time together. Clients who regularly asked for three-day -ong retreats now wonder if we can do the same amount of work in only one and a half. “Everyone is so busy” goes the line. But everyone is not busy. Everyone is retreating into individual immersive experiences. Even Taylor Swift shows, despite the fact that a fantastic community vibe emerges from her art and her fandom, is still a consumption experience. I worry that co-creative community activities are fading away, and have been for a long time. . The trends in consuming arts may be changing, but the trend in collaborative community is still fading away.
Spending time in deep community building activities matters. My friend Bob Stilger is championing Regenerative Responders, which is an initiative to build resilience in community from the ground up before crisis and emergency hits, so community can be ready to respond, not simply wait to receive help. The impetus for his work is in the stories he heard and witnessed from Japan after the March 11, 2011 Triple Disaster. Longform community practice develops the resilience needed for the times when it’s too late to do so. Movements like this exist all over the world, and I’ve written about Sarvodaya before, who came to my attention when they were first on the scene in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, long before the Red Cross arrived.
It shows up in sports too. My buddy Will Cromack posts today about how footballers are being deprived the immersive experience of just playing the game, long days spent kicking a ball around, training sessions that are just play, honing your craft becasue you have an endless horizon of the joy of co-creation stretching out before you. As he puts it:
Forgo the showcase tournament.
Go hit the ball against a wall.
Better yet, play 2v2 with friends.
More joy. More touches. More learning.The player’s work is to learn where to place their time and attention, and to seek challenges that invite growth. They must learn to welcome difficulty as a necessary step on the journey toward mastery, whatever mastery means to them.
There is no meaningful progress on the gentle slope with soft ground. The journey demands friction. And through that friction, players fall in love with the process.
I can get behind that: More joy. More touches. More learning. Consume good art. But create something too.
A fantastic comment on what it means to lose access to care for and what life is like right now in the USA for one trans person.
A new album from Australian band ZÖJ, Give Water to Birds. TO my ear they are to Persian classical music what The Gloaming is to Irish traditional music. From this interview, I can relate to this quote.
“For me, the music of nature is not only sound; it is also movement, light, colour, smell, texture, and temperature. The most powerful and inspiring sound in nature for me is its deep silence and stillness.
To this day, the most powerful sound in nature for me is the stillness of snow fall. This silence has been my most favourite sound since I was a child. I’d lay on mountains of snow in northern Tehran, gaze into the sky and let the snow lay on my skin. Everything covered in snow, quiet but alive, like a big orchestra playing the most beautiful song, in pianississimo.”
The aftermath of a goal celebration in the TSS Rovers men’s 2-1 win over the Whitecaps Academy on Wednesday at Swangard Stadium in Burnaby.
I’ve started – for now anyway, read the June 20 note for why this might only be a passing fad! – to post a daily or nearly daily set of notes drawn from my readings and surfing of the day. Call it a “web log” if you will. This is partly a strategy to return to the origins of blogging and it’s also a way to keep my dopamine seeking brain from hanging out on my phone and its library of scrolls, where it’s easy to read things and just post them on social media. I’m really, really trying hard to kick social media.
And so every day this week I’ve posted these notes, but they don’t get pushed out to email subscribers becasue I don’t want to overwhelm you with a daily email from me. Those who read blogs in traditional ways, through feedreader for example, will see these, as will those that just hang out here and check the recent postings. (Are there any of you that do that?)
At any rate, the enteries in these posts are loosely themed every day, with a theme that emerges from my reading. Every week or so, on a Friday, I thought I might send you a little digest of these notes because they contain some really interesting readings and links that you might want to check out for your weekend.
- June 16: Notes
- June 17: Accomdating yearning
- June 18: Starting over
- June 19: Service
- June 20: Desire lines
Enjoy.
It’s probably no surprise to my friends, but last year I was diagnosed with adult ADHD and I have been living and working with that SUPER helpful diagnosis ever since. A couple of weeks ago, CBC Ideas ran a two part series on ADHD and the Myth of Normal. Well worth a listen, especially for the part where neurodivergence is discussed as an evolutionary advantage. I especially appreciate that Edward Hallowell features in this series, as his book (with John Ratey) ADHD 2.0 has been massively helpful to me. I keep it close by as a user manual for my brain.
Speaking of books, I’m currently reading The Beekeeper’s Question by my friend and mentor Christina Baldwin. It is a beautifully written novel, and contains typically Christina turns of phrase and observations. The beekeeper’s actual question is so very Christina that if you know her it will break your face into a wide grin of recognition. The book attacks deeply important questions about our current society with a story set in the 1940s, long enough ago that the patterns are repeating again, and the lines connect then to now.
Chris Bolton’s lovely meditation on desire paths introduces a new term to me: Sneckdown. “Sneckdown” is a relatively new word used to describe the patterns of affordances that cars leave when driving in snow. This has to be one of the most Canadian words you can imagine but all those who live through urban northern winters know what this means.
We do indeed desire better futures, better societies, better ways to work together, right? I keep holding out hope, but this important piece tells us what the constraints are if we want to rebuild and reimagine democracy, let alone build a world where care and support are there to build wellness and prosperity. Is it over? It’s kind of over. What could be next?
To wrap up this week, my first as a 57 year old, I feel seen.
I read a couple of Peter Levine’s posts that resonated strongly this morning about undoing reckless damage to important government and democratic institutions and redefining the call to service for public servants. I don’t know very many other people that publish so widely and so freely on the topics of civic life and democracy, but Peter is one of the ones with whom I find myself nodding in agreement over almost everything. I think I retain an enduring love/hate relationship with government, but my years as a public servant were rewarding and I would recommend it to anyone, even with all of the attendant frustrations. Institutions are essential to democracy.
If you are in the public service and need some inspiration, Thea Snow has shared some resources she likes from a systems thinking lens; (h/t Benjamin) and if you are more inclined to work within the public service as a complex system, Chris Mowles reports on a talk by Carolyn Pedwell that does just that.
Service, of course, knows no bounds, and today Peter Rukavina paid tribute to his friend Stephen Southall’s mom Carol and family and Stephen’s incredible service to his mom through her long illness and death. I knew Stephen 35 years ago in Peterborough where we would often jam blues songs, him on his harmonica and me on the guitar and us making up nonsense lyrics. Facebook kept us in proximity in recent years. The whole post from Peter is a beautiful read and ends with this quote: “I hope death is like being carried to a bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep on a couch during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.” I think that was a quote was from Carol. Worth remembering.