ChosenFutures - Blog

Connected to What?

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I still remember the phone number of my best friend when I was growing up, but I don’t know my husband’s cell phone number. Of course his number is in my phone, so I don’t need to remember it, but I also don’t have occasion to learn it by repeated dialing. Is this a gain or a loss? In Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A practical philosophy for building a good life in the digital age (HarperCollins, 2010), William Powers brings the wisdom of an eclectic group of thinkers to the plusses and minuses of living in an age of increasing connectedness.

The book’s title refers to the “tables” Hamlet uses in Act 1, Scene 5 to write down what he has heard from his father’s ghost. We moderns take no notice of this moment; we are used to keeping notes and reminders on pocket-size gadgets. Elizabethan theater-goers, on the other hand, would have recognized these writing tables as a popular new means of coping with the information overload of their time. Powers points out that these newfangled tables actually incorporated two much older inventions, wax tablets and handwriting, and he reminds us that new technology does not necessarily make old technology obsolete. His own favorite handheld device is a Moleskine^® notebook, which warms up much faster than any electronic device and offers few distractions from the observation he wants to capture right now.

Socrates and Plato, Seneca, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Thoreau, and Marshall McLuhan are the mixed group of advisors Powers surveys. The common theme is connectedness, especially how people in previous times of rapid, even chaotic change coped, grumbled, and experimented with new technologies of connection from writing (which Socrates distrusted) to modern media. Powers argues that it often took a generation or two for a society to incorporate a new technology so it would effectively help human beings connect with each without becoming overwhelmed by all the information coming their way. He gives examples of early adopters and proto-luddite skeptics in relation to writing, international mail (in Roman times), printing, railroads, the telegraph, and the increasing speed and density of cities from ancient Athens to the present day.

Powers argues that we 21^st Century humans can be happier and more productive by making choices about how and when to connect with the breadth of information and potential relationships in the world and when to go deep into actual relationship, including relationship with ourselves and our thoughts and feelings. He describes his own family’s choice to turn off their modem on Friday nights and leave it off until Monday morning and the positive results not only in shared family activities but in clearer thinking and greater creativity. His suggestions remind us that we don’t have to wait a generation or two to come up with solutions to our modern (electronic) servant problem, we can thoughtfully choose our own definition of a good life and take steps to live it now.

Styrofoam and Curiosity

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I was walking my dog shortly after Thanksgiving of 2009 when I crossed a trail of polystyrene pellets (commonly known as Styrofoam). It was garbage collection day, so I figured that when the truck picked up the garbage, a packing box tipped or fell and pellets scattered in the wind. Feeling somewhat self-righteous, I picked up a fair number of them, stuffed them in one of the plastic bags I carry for cleaning up after the dog, brought them home, and put them in my garbage – inside the plastic bag. I knew they aren’t recyclable, even in San Francisco, and I knew they don’t biodegrade, so I figured they were better off in landfill than drifting into San Francisco Bay.

Over the next few days, I spotted quite a few more pellets, and I picked up a lot of them. Some of them were newly scattered, some seemed to be the residue of the first spill. The weeks between Thanksgiving and January 1 are actually high season for polystyrene gathering. A lot of gifts get shipped in that period, many of them are packed in pellets, and a lot of the stuff gets thrown away. The rest of the year there’s far less of it around, although I can usually tell when someone in the neighborhood has had a birthday or is getting married. Picking up pellets and larger pieces of polystyrene packaging has become a hobby for me, or maybe it has become an eccentricity.

After two years of picking up the stuff, I got curious about how much I gather in a year. It was late last year, high season for packaging again, and I kept noticing how many pellets I was dumping into the kitchen garbage bag. We’re pretty abstemious about garbage in our home. The City makes it easy by requiring that we pay for garbage collection, but households don’t pay for compost or recycling pickup. So there’s not much in my actual garbage pail, the one destined for landfill. The last few weeks of 2011, most of our trash was the “fruit” of my collecting.

But in 2012, my harvest is going into a box in the basement, at least until I get a good idea of how fast it piles up. I’m not sure what I’ll learn. I hope it won’t feed my self-righteousness. Maybe I’ll find a way to use my experience to help educate other people about how to throw out polystyrene pellets so they really end up in landfill rather than blowing in the wind. Not creating the material in the first place would be better than putting it in landfill, of course, but the streets of San Francisco are way out on the end of this particular supply chain. I’m not eccentric enough (yet) to start a campaign to ban pellets as packaging. I’ll see where my curiosity leads me, though, and meanwhile I’ll do my little bit to clean up the microtrash in my neighborhood.

Wild Voices

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The parrots are wild, free, and noisy. I usually hear them first, and then I look up to see them wheeling across the sky, calling to each other as they fly. Is their conversation simply practical? “I know where to find good berries. Take a right.” Are they keeping in touch, chattering about not much in order to let everyone know they’re still with the flock? That’s probably the truth, but I prefer to believe they are happy, calling out about the sheer pleasure of flying, of being alive, of being together.

They don’t exactly belong here. There are no parrots native to San Francisco, but there are now breeding flocks here. The original birds escaped or were freed, discovered they could do fine here, and they have made themselves at home. Apparently they have even developed their own San Francisco parrot dialect, so the chatter I hear is distinctive and local. They feed mostly on non-native plants, and they nest in non-native trees, all of which have been introduced by humans who migrated and settled here. Parrots have fewer natural enemies here than in their home territories, but the young are certainly vulnerable to the local hawks.

The first parrots may have been inadvertent immigrants. By now they have become part of the fabric of this colorful and unpredictable city. In a sense, we are all also inadvertent immigrants in the unpredictable world we now inhabit. We live with uncertainty about the economy, about climate change and agriculture, about the safety and reliability of many products of our scientific and technological discoveries. Too many of us feel isolated, dependent on our own slender resources and savvy, afraid to think too much about the future because we don’t know how we will find our way in this strange landscape.

The parrots are not isolated. I don’t believe I have ever seen a lone parrot. Sometimes when I hear them, I look up and see only two or three parrots. More often there are groups of five or eight or ten; every now and then I see as many as thirty. At that point they are hard to count, flying too fast for my eyes to single out each one, but also making the count irrelevant. They are many, they are together, and together they make an impact. They make enough noise so I have to pay attention, but they are unconcerned about my opinion of them, attending to what matters to parrots.

People are not parrots, but we also need our flocks. The parallels are obvious, yet they bear repeating: We humans also need each other – certainly for survival, but also because life offers much more pleasure with companions. We too need to attend to what matters most to us, making noise as we go about our lives, commenting on what we observe, attracting attention from others who may choose to join us. And we can be surprisingly adaptable, creating new versions of the good life in circumstances we never expected to live in. The more unfamiliar the territory, the more we need kindred spirits as flying companions.

Passports, Identity, Security

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team is missing the 2010 FIL World Lacrosse Championships in Manchester, England. They wanted to be there, they were prepared to be there, but an international disagreement about sovereignty and security kept them in North America. No one wanted that result, but everyone had principles to defend. Everyone stuck to their principles, and in the unintended consequences of their principles, everyone lost out.

The Iroquois Nationals team travels on passports issued by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which includes members who live in Canada as well as members who live within the United States. If the team had arrived at the Championships, they would have needed to present these passports from the country the team represents. The last time the team travelled overseas for a competition was in 2002, when the Championships were held in Australia. At the time, their passports were accepted by all the nations involved.

But international agreements have changed since 2002. The Haudenosaunee passports don’t meet new security standards, such as holograms and microchips, which are intended to prevent identity fraud. Team members would be eligible for passports from Canada or the United States, but they consider that travelling on such documents would be a denial of their preferred identity as Iroquois. (Go to http://bit.ly/aooGLq for the Haudenosaunee position on travel rights.)

For their part, British officials said that they would not issue visas unless the governments of Canada and the United States provided letters guaranteeing that the players would be permitted to re-enter these countries after the games. The US State Department did issue such a letter, carefully specifying that it was a one-time document prompted by special circumstances, but the Canadian government did not issue a similar letter and the United Kingdom did not issue visas. So the Haudenosaunee did not travel overseas and they have not been part of the 2010 World Lacrosse Championships.

"It really is a shame, as we feel like we're losing a connection with the sport's heritage," says Neil Goulding, spokesman for the Federation of International Lacrosse. "The Iroquois had been due to open the tournament with an ancient blessing ceremony, where sacred tobacco is burnt and prayers are chanted. Now the games are just going to start with a few words from Manchester’s Lord Mayor." [from aolnews.com, July 15, 2010]

The Iroquois have been playing lacrosse longer than anyone except maybe the Hurons, and their tradition of democracy is one of the oldest in the world. There was minimal risk of team members being stranded in England had they travelled on the tribal passports. The Haudenosaunee are even well along in the process of developing new passports which will conform to the new international standards, so that they can assert their sovereign identity in ways compatible with modern security technology. If all parties had made it possible for them to travel to the Championships this year, the issues of identity and security would have ended up as forgotten footnotes to the larger matter of becoming a world society which honors and protects everyone.

World Cup Success

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Whomever you favored in the World Cup, we can all agree that Spain won the 2010 championship. We agree because there is a single set of rules followed by every national team and by every player who participates in FIFA competition. A formal sport is defined by its rules, so participating in the sport involves accepting existing definitions of success which determine eligibility, scoring, and winning. Part of what we humans enjoy about formal games and sports, from tag to chess to World Cup football, is that shared definitions of success allow us to focus on building the skills needed to perform excellently within the rules and to enjoy exercising or observing those skills in action.

World Cup success is defined by FIFA, and FIFA agreements also cover how that definition is arrived at. The process is elegantly circular, a closed system in which everyone agrees to the rules currently in force. Other kinds of success are much less easily defined. Most of our lives are spent in open systems which function under such names as “business” or “education” or “life.” In these arenas, how we define success makes a big difference in the skills we develop, the people we associate with, and where we look for support, feedback, or applause. In these open systems, there is no FIFA to set the rules, so it is important that we choose whose criteria for success we follow. Those who are most successful choose their own criteria.

Most of us start with borrowed definitions of success. We borrow from our parents and teachers, from the media, from the culture at large, or from subcultures such as religion, nationality, ethnicity. These borrowed definitions may make great training wheels, allowing us to try things out and to see how the definitions work for us personally. But borrowed success definitions run the risk of creating artificially closed systems, which are usually inelegant, inefficient, and constricting. They get in the way of true success. Genuine success arises in the open systems which constitute human life, including the group lives of a business, a family, or a community as well as each individual life. We discover our own definitions of success by experimenting, by improvising, by observing what works for us, and by acting to create more of what works for us. If we are wise, we keep experimenting and improvising, so that our definitions continue to be effective and enjoyable as times change and as we change. A particular national football team cannot choose its own definition of World Cup success; it has to abide by FIFA’s definition and develop excellence within that framework. Individuals and businesses are far better off, become much more worthy of the term “successful,” by creating and choosing their own definitions of success, which focus on and develop their own innate excellence to accomplish goals they set for themselves.

Remembering Trees

Thu, 06 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I've always admired city trees. Under conditions that are often way less than optimal, city trees do what they are meant to do. They reach for the sun, they reach for water, they shelter birds and squirrels, and they produce blossoms, pinecones, seeds, fruits so that there will be a next generation. From the trees' point of view, it's only incidental that they also provide us humans with shade, beauty, and oxygen, making the city a more hospitable place for us to live.

Over the last few days I have been saying good-bye to three tall, old pine trees outside my office window. We have been notified that the trees will be cut down on Monday, and I'm grieving the loss of shade and beauty. When I moved to this office almost eight years ago, branches swept down toward the ground outside my window. I loved looking out at them. Then, some years ago, one of the trees dropped a huge branch onto the parking lot, making quite a ruckus as it came down and dented a couple of cars. The cleanup afterward included pruning back the branches, which means my view now includes a great deal more of the backs of other buildings. I keep my curtains closed a lot. After next week I'll probably keep them closed all the time.

I understand about change. I understand about aging. The dropped branch was a reminder that these trees are way too close to the building and to the parking lot, a reminder that we humans haven't given these trees much space or soil in our dense city. I understand that building owners and their insurance companies worry about liability and damage. But I will miss seeing green outside my window. I will miss the big tall trunks. I will even miss the crows who commented loudly from the branches, distracting me from whatever I was doing.

Change alerts us, causes us to pay more attention. Strictly speaking, there will be more space outside my window, but already I feel more closed in, less connected to the world. As I say goodbye to the trees and thank them for what they have given me, I'm reminding myself to keep doing what I'm meant to do, whether or not conditions are optimal. I'm reminding myself to keep seeking and creating beauty and connection, human and otherwise. I'm reminding myself to be grateful for the friends and companions along my way and to thank them for what they give me.

Reality: Hard Facts or Creative Ideas?

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

“I have to be realistic,” always gets my attention. I know I’m about to hear someone’s beliefs about what’s possible or impossible. I’m about to learn a lot about that person, but I’m not going to learn what’s real. What people usually mean by “reality” is “here are some limitations I’m assuming are part of the universe.” Then they go on to describe what they believe is economically feasible or what they believe other people can respect. We don’t usually put it that way, of course, and we don’t usually notice that we are describing not some “reality” out there but our own idiosyncratic perspective on the world. The fact is (see, here comes a belief), we notice what we have learned to notice. That means we can also learn to notice things differently, to create new realities for ourselves, new paradigms of what is possible and of what is wise. More and more people now recognize that we need new paradigms, new beliefs, new realities. And that’s a good thing.