Hey Wait A Minute…
This is an article I recently posted in LinkedIn. At first I was going to take out the references to LinkedIn for posting here, but then I decided that the context of the intended audience there might add something , so here it is.
I haven’t written here for a while. My usual topics don’t seem to fit well with LinkedIn culture maybe -or maybe they do fit very well, depending on a person’s tendency or need to look outside “the box” at a particular time. I’m definitely not being critical of LinkedIn or its audience!
I’m just probably not in the mainstream LinkedIn crowd, and I’m not looking at typical marketing, manufacturing, or money-making interests. Well, I am in a way, but I guess it’s a more meta way. That alone puts the topics in a small niche. If I can get the words to come out right, the niche might get bigger.
For now, on account of my writing/thinking style and maybe spending too much time in meta mode, it might take a motivated reader. Kinda like the guy in the picture above, my topics are centered around Hey wait a minute moments. Maybe that’s the kind of motivated reader I’m referring to.
It’s that ascension to, or descent from, Hey wait a minute that I’m usually writing around. Sometimes those moments are about stubborn institutional, corporate, or “next big thing” problems, problem-solving, or innovations. Those are the decidedly exciting and positive ones.
The ones I’m talking about are a little more ambiguous, but still pretty exciting. Exhilarating but ambiguous at the same time. And it’s probably not gonna be about the current job, vocation, or task at hand. It’s more like “What the hell have I been doing?” or “What are we doing this for?”
Sometimes we wade slowly into this. For the picture at the top, I’m imagining that he stood on the beach for a while looking close and far, looking at the waves and the boats miles away. And I imagine that he’d done it more than once.
But this day was different. All those other days he returned to his car and drove home after the long day. But this day he sensed that he needed to wade in — somehow symbolic of his desire to grab hold of a vague sense of another perspective. A perspective that he had peeked into occasionally then left out of a duty and maybe an indiscernible benefit.
On this day, he waded in. The water was cold, it was cloudy and windy, and an entirely different world was churning in his mind. There was something there for him. He knew his so-creative mind was making an irrational connection between his desire to explore this just out of reach realm of thought and this water. And it wasn’t really spiritual.
It was cognition. It was an awakening through cognition into an intuitive leap of expectation. Moving further from a deeply rational sequence of doubts about his day in and day out occupations and preoccupations, he chose immersion in the water as a both gradual and impulsive, desperate, irrational and unavoidable expression of his desire to get There.
Which he did. It meant nothing and everything. Ironically, it was his very rational mind that today led him to be returning to the shore in a wet suit and shoes full of sand. And his personal baptism of sorts committed him to the growing sense he’d been having — that his life was not to be wasted on the meager constructs and scripts handed down and over to him. This wasn’t about achievement.
The world had become three-dimensional again. Maybe four-dimensional even, now that he was older than he was when he entered the two-dimensional world. He might keep his job. But he’s definitely more suspicious of the contrived creations that were his world earlier in the day. So what, exactly, now? Something. It’s gonna be something. We’ll see.
I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this, and of course I don’t just mean men. The thing is, it’s been around 500 years since the early stages of the Enlightenment, and I’d say we’ve been in somewhat of a rut for the last hundred. Funny, it was about a hundred years ago that the Arts and Crafts movement faded, which was an early attempt to point out the rut(s) and potential regrets of too much dependence on too much stuff.
But in the last ten years or so we’ve been seeing a shift. My sense is that it “started” in 2005 and it’s been moving steadily right up through 2018. It’s a gradual thing, and it’s a niche thing. That’s fine and maybe better than a large movement.
2018 is a milestone year for me. It’s been ten years since I left teaching to work on This Project. It’s also the year that my first (awesome) class of seniors in physics starts turning 40. Forty, that year when it’s often said that people are supposed to know “who they are” and “how things work -mostly”. Their vocations and often families are fairly set. Many have solid reputations in corporations or in their professions or communities, and many are seen by others as leaders in at least some way.
Some are just reaching 30, a decade when lots of people realize they can, or decide they should, live more of their lives with a bigger picture, more people, or different goals in mind. High school platitudes about dream-making can become a little…too little maybe. For others, it’s just a sad period of not being a 20-something. I never really understood that sadness, even at that age. Anyway…
I know that many of them have the same hunch and compulsion to get There as the person in the picture. Not all. That’s fine. As I’ve written before, we’re probably all better off if the majority of us work diligently within the conventional constructs and constraints of The Economy at least most of the time.
I would just like to know that they go to that beach, in whatever form it is, at least occasionally. Some wading in, some not. Some diving deep and returning with a commitment to make sure our conventions are rational — as seen through the eyes of people with broad and exceptional distance vision. It will take a lot of them. Probably more than we’ve had since the founding of our country during the Age of Reason.
We have more need and more potential to reason today than they did. And this isn’t just about the collective; this is about personal flourishing which affects community flourishing -then that reflects back to more personal flourishing. It’s not just a pleasant concept about joy and happiness. It’s much easier to grasp the significance in the negative.
That is, we don’t do well at all if we’re not flourishing in a broad societal sense. It’s not directly about fairness, equality, economics, dreams, politics, or profit; it’s about biology -odd as that sounds. In a society in turmoil over a multitude of Shoulds, that last sentence might cause some trouble. It’s a long story, but it turns out well. Flourishing is good, we just don’t think this way much.
It’s also the year my dad turns 80. An exceptionally intelligent, hard-working, and caring man who has farmed for sixty years and doesn’t plan to stop any time soon. He’ll be fishing with my mom in Ontario over his birthday on Lac Seul — the same lake they adopted over forty years ago.
I’ve had the good fortune to spend at least one “happy hour” each week with them for the last several years. I don’t know that Dad ever needed to wade into the water and deliberately immerse himself in order to regain the three-dimensional or four-dimensional view of the world. He’s just always been that way I think. That happens with some people, it’s just rare.
And even though he doesn’t necessarily see the point of all my focus on neuroscience, social psychology, economics, and certainly not on This Project which has become pretty costly to me in a few ways, it’s all related to a very similar understanding about peace, flourishing, and what I call deep stewardship.
It’s a deep dive, it’s not exactly the same as his, but it’s close enough that I’m always encouraged when I hear his reflections while standing on our own “beach” there. (That “beach” is the kitchen, overlooking the farm, where we’ve all shared so much wonderful time together as a family.)
There was and is a type of wisdom in earlier generations regardless of today’s stereotyping of all things before us as unenlightened and maybe uncivilized. Some of their heuristics weren’t explained well, but they often knew why a simple principle that banked on Pareto’s Rule was the best bet -even if not 100% effective.
That generation’s frustration with the decline of civility and many other heuristics makes it very difficult to get the whole picture from them. The phrasing and circumstances from their time, in addition to their frustration about Today, hides an understanding about flourishing that we’re only beginning to reach again now.
It wasn’t and isn’t everyone in those earlier generations. Neither the “good” nor the “bad”. Funny, with our decades of shaming against stereotyping, we somehow never see that it’s done against whole generations before us. No matter maybe. I think we’re starting to figure some things out better than we or even they ever had. Just…I hope we can avoid the stereotyping more broadly.
So, if you’re interested in these kinds of observations and developments, I write a lot about them at Medium at A Different Story (meaning narrative, not my last name). The last two posts have related to This is Water -the commencement address given by David Foster Wallace in 2005. We’re going a little deeper, because we have more than the twenty-three minutes he had. We miss you David.
Thanks for reading. I know it got a little long.
Tim
Our website is ReGroup.Farm if you’d like to see more about where this came from and where it’s going. Thanks for reading!
