Moving On in the Wake of Destruction

April 14, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Since writing about Barry Lopez’s new book last week and hearing a lot from you about that post, I couldn’t escape the cry from his heart that we’ll all need to learn more about how to survive as we face the accelerating destruction of the natural world. But then I look outside, where the spring is exploding with life after the rain this morning and it’s hard—no, nearly impossible—to imagine that what I’m seeing has already changed and that I’ll need to get ready for even more troubling changes. Lopez argues that we’ll all need to prepare for life in this increasingly wounded world by learning from people who are already surviving on destruction’s frontlines, even though these battlegrounds are hard for us to see or even comprehend “from our comfortable seats by the swimming pool.” Nevertheless, Lopez invites us to look through his eyes at these “throttled” landscapes and to respond as if they were what we’re seeing around us too.

We need writers like Lopez to help us see what’s coming—like “the before and after” he describes when he travels between a majestic nature reserve, all purples and greens in Western Australia, and the wasted iron-mining sites that border it on three sides. It requires an imaginative leap through his storytelling to mobilize us into living with greater reverence somewhere between these two extremes.

After showing us what we’ve destroyed and continue to destroy—the fragile beauty along with the pain of its loss for those who live there and remember it—Lopez urges on our struggle to strike a new balance before the trade-offs get even worse. It’s his wake-up call from the wilderness. And because first world privilege makes it difficult to accept survival under diminished circumstances, he brings us stories from indigenous communities like the Aboriginal Australians who have learned (over millennia) how to adapt in the aftermath of natural disaster, whether caused by man or by nature itself. When our wisdom is joined with their wisdom, it may be possible for us to imagine new ways of surviving in Earth’s depleted future.

Settling for less. Learning new ways of living from indigenous people. Neither are what we’re accustomed to, particularly when the nature that we see around us lulls us into a false sense of complacency. We need an unusually powerful voice like Lopez’s to counter that complacency before its consequences become even more dire.

Unfortunately, as actively as we’re destroying the planet, we also seem hell-bent on destroying one another.

Understanding a community’s ability to survive in the aftermath of attempts to destroy it also requires an almost impossible leap of the imagination. How can I bridge the gulf between the community I experience around me and those communities struggling to survive the daily “shock wave” of life in Syria and in the ancient communities of western Iraq, or those who have returned to some kind of normal after the “killing fields” of Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia? Do the deepening divisions between rich and poor, authoritarian and democratic in the Western world, and the frictions between ethnic communities in much of the rest of it, mean that we have to find ways to bridge this gulf in our imaginations too, before these breakdowns grow even worse? Are diminished returns–and a new kind of survival–the best that we can hope for when it comes to our communities as well?

There are voices today who are crying out from this wilderness too, inviting us:

-to look long and hard into communities around the world that have almost been destroyed so that within our own communities we will hesitate to rip apart what binds us together and become more protective of our fragile connections to one another;

-to consider how political leaders and media outlets can quickly devolve into cheerleaders for murder and even mass murder, enlisting willing executioners from the ranks of the susceptible and the under-employed;

-to learn how communities facing annihilation have not only “come back” but also learned how to co-exist with these same murderers because new political leaders and very old community-building programs have helped them to do so;

-to understand how survivors move beyond grief and despair and can find a level of acceptance (if not forgiveness and reconciliation) after what it happened to them; and ultimately

-to accept that accommodations like this may become our new normal too as the ties that bind our own communities together continue to weaken and fray.

Surviving community destruction has much in common with survival in the wake of environmental destruction. There are voices calling to us from this wilderness too, asking whether the future will be delivered by Enlightenment-based progress–that our global villages will always continue to improve–or that we must instead look to more traditional ways of living to learn how to take care of everyone in a community, refuse to leave anyone behind, and know how to recover when our ties with one another have been broken.

Their message seems timely given the march from destruction to rebuilding that is the seasonal story of winter to spring, brown and dry to lush and green, the death of Good Friday to the life after Easter.

It can be glimpsed in the fresco (above) by Manuel Rodriguez Lozano, painted in a Mexico City prison while he was a political prisoner, its rich symbolism pointing towards his own deliverance.

It is also evident in Philip Gourevitch’s writing about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and even more so in how the minority Tutsi tribe that was nearly annihilated by the majority Hutus have built a new future among these same Hutus over the past 25 years.

From this tragedy, many Rwandans (like most survivors) have achieved a quality of being that Finnish people call sisu, a word that has no real equivalent in English. Sisu comes from taking action against the odds and finding courage when it’s difficult to do so. With sisu, you sense that you’re going beyond your capabilities and harnessing inner energy that has never been harnessed before. Something like sisu enables you to move on and not give in to resignation or despair despite the enormity of the challenge.

We’ll all need the endurance of sisu—and other kinds of perspective too—if we’re to survive the destructions of nature and diverse communities that seem inevitable today if we keep our present course.

1. Genocide and its Aftermath in Rwanda

In the spring and early summer of 1994, 800,000 people (mostly Tutsis) were systematically murdered by bands of Hutu génocidaires in what Philip Gourevitch describes a “an unambiguous case” of state-sponsored mass murder. He wrote the book, “We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families” to document the tragedy 25 years ago, and he has been revisiting its consequences ever since.

In a Frontline interview, Gourevich described how the Rwandan government at the time used a pop music station (RTLM or Radio-Television Libre Milles Collines) to rally young Hutus with genocidal propaganda that eventually targeted the resented Tutsi minority with elimination. Over time, it’s directives became shockingly personal.

disc jockeys who would say, “So-and-so has just fled. He is said to be moving down such-and-such street.” And [the genocidaires] would literally hunt an individual who was targeted in the street. And people would listen to this on the radio. It was…a rallying tool that was used… to mobilize the population [into a murderous rage].

The genocide dissipated for several reasons, including an on-going civil war, the involvement of U.N. peacekeepers, and huge numbers of refugees fleeing to camps outside Rwanda. When Gourevich visited the following year:

the country was still pretty well annihilated: blood-sodden and pillaged, with bands of orphans roaming the hills and women who’d been raped squatting in the ruins, its humanity betrayed, its infrastructure trashed, its economy gutted, its government improvised, a garrison state with soldiers everywhere, its court system vitiated, its prisons crammed with murderers, with more murderers still at liberty—hunting survivors and being hunted in turn by revenge killers—and with the routed army and militias of the genocide and a million and a half of their followers camped on the borders, succored by the United Nations refugee agency, and vowing to return and finish the job.

But as he could report just 15 years later in a 2009 New Yorker essay:

Rwanda is [now] one of the safest and the most orderly countries in Africa. Since 1994, per-capita gross domestic product has nearly tripled, even as the population has increased by nearly twenty-five per cent, to more than ten million. There is national health insurance, and a steadily improving education system. Tourism is a boom industry and a strong draw for foreign capital investment.

What accounted for Rwanda’s rise from the ashes? Clearly there were several factors, but one of them was that the Hutus and Tutsis who returned to their lives together had gained a kind of acceptance of their mutual tragedy, and, by doing so, unlocked extraordinary energies that might otherwise have remained buried in grief, despair, revenge or the fear of revenge.

One factor in this turn-around was that a new government vowed to protect all Rwandans and actively promoted local processes that aimed at reconciliation. Paul Kagame, a leader who governed his country with an authoritarian hand through much of this recovery period, was elected in 2003 and immediately repurposed a system of community courts that had previously acted without lawyers to resolve local conflicts called gacaca.

With gacaca, towns and villages would conduct communal, town-hall style trials to hold those who had participated in the genocide accountable and to mete out punishments. Gacaca both encouraged and rewarded confessions, but confessions also had to be verified by other community members. Because the Tutsi and Hutu had usually returned to their homes, people almost always knew one another, the identities of those who had suffered or been killed, and who was likely responsible for the atrocities.

Eventually more than 12,000 gacacas were convened and more than a million cases adjudicated with a remarkable degree of public participation and little violence. Gourevich notes that there “were surely false convictions of those who insisted on their innocence, and …a surprising number of acquittals of those who had probably been falsely accused in the first place. But in many cases…confession was its own reward…[with] sentence[s] for multiple murders reduced to little more than time served.” Gacaca justice, as imperfect as it was, produced a degree of catharsis in their communities and, by allowing these communities to work though the facts and consequences of a shared tragedy, to leave some of its pain, despair and desire for revenge behind. Fifteen years after the genocide, Gourevich:

didn’t see any great hope in the eyes of the people I visited… But as I travelled around Rwanda there was a greater sense of ease among people than I remembered. It wasn’t anything that you’d notice if you hadn’t been there before, because what I was feeling wasn’t so much the presence of strikingly positive energy but, rather, the absence of a mood of wary inwardness. The country was becoming less spooked. At times, it was simply a neutral place to be, like anywhere else. It was normal, which [in itself] was extraordinary.

One of the lessons involved finding this new normal. Gacca courts released the steam from a pressure cooker that could now be reused for rebuilding the country’s injured communities. A remarkable nation-wide recovery in a relatively short-time frame is partly explained by gacca justice. But it was the impact on individual survivors that teaches us the most, a cautionary story with only the faintest traces of hope. In documenting and characterizing what individual Rwandans have said about their recovery, Gourevich shows us how the texture of survival feels when we’ve allowed our communities to be torn apart and are left with no alternative but finding the slow way back.

2. The sisu of survivors

The Rwandans who spoke to Philip Gourevich tell us that community rebuilding from the point of destruction is incomprehensible, cynical, frustrating, taxing, re-traumatizing, but all the while, necessary. For the most part, members of this new community have been unwilling to forgive. Like other kinds of survival, the day in and day out of it is difficult, driven by a tenacious kind of coping instead of the promise of brighter days ahead. The passage of time always erodes pain, but it takes even longer to replace the emptiness with anything that approaches reconciliation.

Here is some of what Gourevich found. The quotes below are from a series of interviews that he gave earlier this month.

-On surviors being re-traumatized: the motto of the gacaca courts was “truth heals,” but the fact is that the truth also wounds all over again. “Every time I come to gacaca with an open mind I get even more upset.”

-On forgiveness: “Pretty much everyone I asked in Rwanda told me the same thing,” Gourevich says. “The most fundamental basis of forgiveness is an internal decision, by the forgiver, to forego revenge—literally to let go of the idea of getting even. I called this modest, a sort of bare minimum, but think about the scale and scope of offenses and injuries we’re talking about, and what it would mean for Rwandans not to forgive [even in this limited sense of the word], and you see it’s no small thing.”

-On the mix of incomprehensibility and necessity in doggedly seeking reconciliation even when you have no hope of finding it:

none of the survivors I spoke with thought that there was any better solution [than gacaca afforded]. Never mind reconciliation, Tutsis and Hutus had to coexist. Sagahutu expressed the sentiment most succinctly: ‘It’s our obligation, and it’s our only way to survive, and I do it every day, and I still can’t comprehend it.’ When I repeated Sagahutu’s formulation to other survivors and to members of Kagame’s Cabinet, it was always met with recognition: Yes, that’s it.

-on accepting the realities and trying to move on from them: There is a kind of “pragmatic civility.” “I know this person did it and am grateful that they’re not denying it anymore.” “We don’t have to be friends, but if we’re not a threat to one another [any longer] then other things can maybe happen.”

-and on how thoroughly Rwanda has attempted to rebuild its communities:

Rwanda’s relentlessness in pursuing genocidaires is unusual. After WWII, some Jews became Nazi hunters and kept at it for the rest of their lives, but they mostly focused on very senior figures. And I don’t know that I’ve ever come across stories or accounts of survivors of the Holocaust who say: I would like to go back, investigate and figure out who did this to my grandfather, who chased him out of his house, who put him on that train, who put him to death, and I want to haul them all into court. It probably wouldn’t be that hard to figure out who those people were in some parts of Germany, but most Jews just said: the hell with it…And of course, now they don’t live where it happened anymore. That’s key. Rwanda is unique, as you say…the most litigated genocide. It’s also the only one where everybody [still] lives intermingled in that way.

In an effort to rebuild its communities, Rwanda has confronted the looming problem that was “both behind and ahead of them” after the genocide in 1994. It’s efforts to find a kind of acceptance about what happened to their country are sobering because sisu makes nearly everyone who embraces it into an adult.

When I listened to Barry Lopez in Philadelphia a week ago, I was struck by how often he described those in the developed West as children (waiting for political saviors, for progress to sweep us along, for technology to solve our problems) instead of as adults who need to rely on ourselves and on one another.

Children also don’t like to be confronted with their own destructiveness, preferring to pretend that they never made a mess of things and therefore that the mess doesn’t exist at all. It’s something like that with the destruction of both nature and our communities today. If I don’t see the evidence of this destruction when I look out my window, it’s not happening, I have not helped to cause it, and I’m hardly responsible for limiting any more of the damage.

Conjurers like Lopez and Gourevich are calling “from the edge” to tell us about the kinds of survival that we can still avoid if we face the on-going destruction and respond to it like adults instead of children.

They’re also telling us that more of humanity’s destructiveness probably lies ahead and something about what our own surviving will look like when that destruction is closer to our doors.

This post was adapted from my April 14, 2019 newsletter. You can subscribe—and receive my newsletter in your in-box every Sunday morning—by providing your email address in the right-hand column.

An Enabling Perspective for Our Wounded World

April 7, 2019 By David Griesing 2 Comments

What is most exceptional about Barry Lopez is his perspective and how he manages to involve us in it.

The remarkable prologue to his new book “Horizons,” finds him in the last place we expect to find him. For an author who has brought us with him to the most remote corners on earth—the iron mines of Aboriginal Australia, the unfathomable expanses of Antarctica, an archeological site on Skraeling Island, Banda Aceh after the tsunami, Cape Foulweather’s “ghosted landscape”—Lopez is reclining on a beach chair at a Hawaiian resort, playing with his grandson in the shallow waves, swimming off shore to show him the sunken battleship Arizona, remembering an odd encounter with John Steinbeck when he too was young and thinking about writing, watching “the pool water shatter into translucent gems” after a tourist’s spontaneous, arcing dive. They’re the reveries of a summer day. And then this, as he looks out from the dreamlike circle of his life and family:

I want to wish each stranger I see in the chairs and lounges around me, every one of them, an untroubled life. I want everyone here to survive what is coming.

Until now, Barry Lopez’ most acclaimed book was “Arctic Dreams.” It is part travelogue and part meditation on the fragility and resilience of a particular landscape, along with its wildlife and people. Since it came out in 1986, he has written hundreds of articles, along with fiction and essays, but “Horizons” is “Arctic Dream’s” non-fiction companion and successor. It took him more than 30 years to recast what he had to say back then in the face of the profound impacts humanity has had on the earth in those ensuing years.

Robert MacFarlane remarked recently about the strangeness of calling what Lopez does in both of these books non-fiction, thereby defining them by “their negative and restricting relation to fiction.” Lopez breaks open the possibilities of non-fiction for me in the ways that he does for MacFarlane: with often gorgeous prose that is “stylistic adventure,” “ethical address,” and “secular spirituality” where land, wildlife and the traditional knowledge of ancient people are “tutelary presences.” Lopez is the medium that gives them voice when we can’t hear them for ourselves.

In his own writing, MacFarlane lets us feel the land, its wildlife and people too, using “the particular words” that conjure their essences and interactions most evocatively in an age when we’re losing “the language” that we once used to talk about them and therefore “the descriptions” that helped us to connect more deeply to the world around us. Out of MacFarlane’s concern about the loss of these words and memories over the same 30 years, he sees Barry Lopez’ own “life journey” as one “from hope to doubt.”

What I found most fascinating about “Horizon” are the contours of Lopez’ doubt today and how he involves us in the only outcome that seems possible given the uncertainties.

How can you warn us on our lounge chairs without disabling, through a sense of hopelessness, those you are trying so hard to engage?

1. Thirty Years Ago – 1986

The Lopez of “Arctic Dreams,” and much of what he recalls about his observations since, come from his being a fieldworker, meaning that his approach to the places he has visited are those of “attention and interpretation.” This is what MacFarlane has to say about Lopez’ well-honed conjuring tricks in his review of “Horizon”:

In one of the few even faintly comic moments in the book, Lopez recounts how the Inuit hunters refer to him as naajavaarsuk, the ivory gull, a species distinguished by its habit of “standing on the perimeter of the action, darting in to snatch something when there’s an opening”. One might add – though Lopez does not – that he is also an isumataq, a storyteller who “creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself”. The achievement of Lopez’s work has always been ontological before it is political; a “redreaming”, to use his verb, of the possibilities of human life.

Lopez always seems to have believed that if he describes what he’s experienced well enough, his readers and listeners can experience it too, trusting them to draw their own conclusions and to decide on how they’ll respond. In other words, Lopez invites a state of mind where decision-making becomes possible.

The last time I wrote about Lopez here, he talked about one way that he’s thought about it.

I gave a talk once at the Athenaeum in Providence, Rhode Island, and I asked the man who was my host, what is it that Emerson and all of these people did on a Sunday afternoon at the Athenaeum? Did they talk about politics, or did they talk about science, or did they talk about sports? What was it that made these talks so much a part of cultural memory for us? And he said they just elevated — they brought the level of the conversation up. And I reflected on that and thought, well, that’s what I want [to do].

On his own page, Lopez describes the conversation partners he’s after in unusually intimate terms: my “family, friends, mentors, professional colleagues—to whom I feel most beholden.” They are “people with whom I imagine I share a common fate.” For them, as he elaborates in “Horizon”: “You feel while you are witnessing such things that you must carry some of this home, that what you’ve found are not your things but our things.” It’s deeply personal sharing–like you’d do around a campfire–while reimagining the possibilities that are ahead of you together.

As the younger man of “Arctic Dreams,” Lopez was concerned about the environmental destruction and loss of habitat that he saw on his travels but challenged those who feared extinction was inevitable, believing that we had enough courage to reverse our course, even if our actions might not bear fruit in our lifetimes. Some of it may have been trusting too much that the conversation he had elevated would spur all those others to follow through. As he writes in “Horizon”:

Looking back, I see that this ideal—to imagine myself in service to the reader—had me balanced on the edge of self-delusion. But it was at the time my way of working. It didn’t occur to me that taking life [my role?] so seriously might cause a loss of perspective. How else, I would ask, could you take it?

The long road that Lopez took to “Horizon” involved going back to many of the places he had visited over the years to see what he had missed and to discover how the hope of “Arctic Dreams” could evolve into something sharper, with greater urgency and far less certainty.

2. Today

Lopez talked about this 30-year journey at the Free Library here on Tuesday, and during the hour and a half that he filled with his stories, I tried to track the emotions underneath them and how they have changed his role as an observer, interpreter and catalyst for those who are listening.

At the Free Library of Philadelphia on Tuesday night

I didn’t think that I’d ever get the chance.

As recently as a year ago, I’d heard that Lopez was gravely ill with a particularly aggressive cancer so I never thought I’d see him read from his work or sit in the same room with him. In addition to being something of a miracle, his appearance here this week was also a statement about his own resilience, the personification of survival in the face of his body’s self-destructiveness. He never talked about his illness, but his message was more intertwined with his own survival now and you could feel it.

Lopez is a tough old bird who’s been a relentless wanderer, a describer of all the shades of purple that the light reveals in a remote canyon, a professional diver, a chronicler of “the shock wave” of the Middle East, and the pilgrim who made his Pashtun guides take him to the empty niches at Bamyan where monumental statues of the Buddha carved from the living rock 1600 years ago had been blasted into oblivion by the Taliban–why?–because their voids called out to him. Voids like this are far more fixed in his vision today than they were 30 years ago.

It’s why MacFarlane describes “Horizon” as “a deeply wounded book” about “the throttled Earth.” Lopez seems less certain that he can reach the tourists in their lounge chairs around the pool and more reliant on networks of wisdom that still includes his “family, friends, mentors and professional colleagues” but now depends at least as much on the wisdom of traditional cultures that have found ways to survive in the face of war, environmental destruction and natural disaster. Unlike citizens of the developed world who act like children looking for heroes to save them, for thousands of years adults who know how to make decisions to care for everyone and ensure that no one gets left behind have guided “heroic communities” of indigenous people across the world. Today, Lopez tries to counter his doubts by imagining networks comprised of all the different communities that depend on adults with the knowledge to survive so that we can claim our uncertain future together.

When you face your own death and the death of the world you have lovingly observed and interpreted, there is far greater urgency in your message. From MacFarlane again:

The event horizon of climate change is swiftly narrowing its noose. Lopez’s writing throughout this book is pulled taut between his need to register the extreme urgency of the environmental crisis, and his long-held belief in time, patience and the careful observation of other cultures as the basis for a fix: “As time grows short, [writes Lopez,] the necessity to listen attentively to foundational stories other than our own becomes imperative.’

At the Free Library, Lopez talked repeatedly about the centuries of practical wisdom that enable traditional societies to repair themselves, to “go on,” whatever knocks them down. Instead of our Western view of progress—the confidence that things will always get better—he counters that the health of the world is following a very different path and that our only hope rests with those who already have (or are willing to nurture) the ability to start over again, to survive, even when they find themselves in the darkest places.

As I listened I found myself wondering: when is the last time that anyone I know had to figure out a way to survive from one day to the next?

And as with MacFarlane’s lost “words” and “descriptions of nature”: how much natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another has our freedom, wealth and belief in progress allowed us to forget, but that we’ll need to remember if we’re to adapt and survive in this increasingly “throttled” world?

There were glimmers of anger, impatience and disgust in Lopez’ uncertainty on Tuesday night, but only briefly and they quickly disappeared behind his refusal to despair. In a recent interview, Lopez acknowledged these judgmental tendencies when he talked about why it took him so long to follow up on “Arctic Dreams”:

I think I had a greater tendency when I was younger to judge, to maintain states of anger. I had impatience. And I had to bleed all that off before I wrote ‘Horizon.’

In their place, this new book and his coming out to talk about it is more like one of the prophet Jeremiah’s Old Testament lamentations. Particularly in his fifth lamentation, Jeremiah tells of how the people of God lived through the destruction of Jerusalem but in the end stubbornly refuse to abandon their hope despite a deep uncertainty about their deliverance.

Lopez sounded like an Old Testament prophet when he said of himself a couple of years ago: “It is necessary to have people out on the edge calling back to us about what’s coming.”

Like others who have cried out to be heard from the wilderness, his perspective today is forged by his own survival, his willingness to look at the voids that chronicle our race towards destruction, his urgent recognition that we have limited time to turn the tide, and his refusal to despair because so many of those he has encountered as he’s wandered this earth have also found dignified ways to survive.

Without hectoring or drama, the prophetic perspective in Lopez’ current stories invites us to re-imagine the future in ways that—quite frankly–seem impossible for us to ignore.

This post is adapted from my April 7, 2019 Newsletter. You can subscribe here and receive it in you inbox every Sunday morning

Whose Values Will Drive Our Future?

March 17, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When people decide what is most important to them—and bother to champion it in conversation, in voting, in how they act everyday—they are helping to build the future.

It’s not just making noise, but that’s part of it. For years, when Emily was in grade school, the argument for an all-girl education was that the boys dominated the classroom with their antics and opinions while the girls were ignored or drowned out. Those making the most noise hog the attention, at least at first.

Later on, it’s about the quality of your opinions and the actions that back them up. Power and money in the commons of public life is not synonymous with good commitments or actions, but it does purchase a position with facts and experts and a platform to share it that can hold its own (if not prevail) in the wider debate over what the future will be like and what its trade-offs will cost. Not unlike the over-powered girls in grade school, it takes courage to stand up against what the best-organized, best-financed and most dominant corporate players want.

Part of the problem with these companies today is that many of them are nurturing, so that they can also cater to, lower-level priorities that we all have. For example, we all want convenience in our daily lives and to embrace a certain amount of distraction. The future that some companies want to deliver to us aims at catering to these (as opposed to other) priorities in the most efficient and profitable manner. For example:

-companies like Amazon profit by providing all the convenience you could ever want as a shopper, or

-when when your aim is relief from boredom or stress, social media, on-line games and search engines like Google provide wonderlands of distraction to lose yourself in.

Moreover, with the behavioral data these companies are harvesting from you whenever you’re on their platforms, they’ll hook you with even greater conveniences, forms of escapism and more stuff to buy in the future. Their priorities of efficiency and profit almost perfectly dovetail with ours for convenience and distraction.

This convenient and distracted future—along with a human yearning for something more—is captured with dazzling visuals and melancholy humor in Wall-E, a 10-year old movie from Pixar. (It’s worth every minute for a first or second view of a little trash robot named Wall-E’s bid to save the human race from itself.) In its futuristic world, the round-as-donuts humans who have fled the planet they’ve soiled spend their days on a We’ve-Thought-of-Everything cruise ship that’s floating through space. Except, as it turns out, the ship’s operators aren’t providing everything their passengers want and need, or want and need even more, like a thriving planet to call home.

Wall-E’s brilliance doesn’t come from an either/or future, but from a place where more important priorities are gradually acknowledged and acted upon too. It’s deciding to have more of some things and somewhat less of others. Back in the real world, that change in priorities might involve diverting some of our national resources away from economic efficiency and profit to support thriving families and communities (January 27, 2019 newsletter). Or, as in Wall-E’s case, using fewer of our shared resources for convenience and distraction and more for restoring an environment that can sustain our humanity in deeper ways.

On the other hand, as anyone who has tried it knows: it can be hard to find enough courage to stand up to those who are dominating (while they’re also subverting) the entire conversation about what we should want most. It’s our admiration for Wall-E’s kind of courage that makes Toronto’s citizens so inspiring today. Why these northern neighbors? Because they are trying through their actions to meet a primary shared objective—which is to build a sustainable urban environment that protects its natural resources—without losing sight of other priorities like efficiency, convenience and strengthening the bonds of family and community in their city.

And as if that weren’t enough, there is another wrinkle to the boldness that Torontonians are currently demonstrating. The City is partnering with tech giant Google on a key piece of data-driven redevelopment. As we admire them from afar, maybe we can also learn some lessons about how to test-drive a carbon-free future while helping that future to evolve with data we provide as we live and work. This fascinating and hopeful city is raising the kinds of questions that can only be asked when a place has the courage to stop talking about its convictions and start acting on them.

I was walking in lower Manhattan this week when I caught the sign above, encouraging me to bring my hand in for a palm reading.

I knew the fortuneteller wouldn’t find my future there, but she was probably right about one thing. Your prior experience is etched in the lines on your hands and your face. But as to where these lines will take you next, the story that Toronto is writing today is likely to provide better guidance than she will—and more information about the priorities to be weighed and measured along the way.

1. A Carbon-Free Future

Toronto has initiated two experiments, one is to gradually reduce its carbon footprint to nothing and the other is to build a community from the ground up with the help of data from its new residents. Both experiments are in the early stages, but they provide tantalizing glimpses into the places where we all might be living and working if we commit to the same priorities as Toronto.

When I’ve visited this City, it always seemed futuristic to me but not because of its built environment. Instead, it was its remarkably diverse population drawn in large numbers from every corner of the globe. Only later did I learn that over half of Toronto’s population is foreign-born, giving the place a remarkable sense of optimism and new beginnings.

Declaring its intention to radically reduce its use of fossil fuels, Toronto has taken a long stretch of King Street, one of the City’s busiest commercial and recreational boulevards, and implemented a multi-faceted plan that bans most private traffic, upgrades the existing streetcar system, concentrates new residential and commercial space along its corridor, and utilizes these densities and proximities to encourage both walking and public transportation for work, school, shopping and play.

In contrast to a suburban sprawl of large homes and distant amenities that require driving, Toronto’s urbanized alternative offers smaller living spaces, more contact with other members of the community, far less fuel consumption, and reclaimed spaces for public use that were once devoted to parking or driving. One hope is that people will feel less isolated and lonely as proximity has them bumping into one another more regularly. Another is that residents and workers visiting daily will become more engaged in public life because they’ll need to cooperate in order to share its more concentrated spaces.

Toronto’s King Street experiment envisions a time when all of its streets will be “pedestrianized.” There will still be cars, but fewer will be in private hands and those that remain will be rented as needed—anticipating the rise of on-call autonomous vehicles. Streets and roads will also remain, but they will increasingly be paid for by those who use them most, further reducing the need for underutilized roadways and freeing up space for other uses like parks and recreational corridors.

Toronto’s experiment in urban living also promotes a “sharing economy,” with prices for nearly everything reduced when the cost is shared with others. Academics like Daniel Hoornweg at the University of Ontario’s Institute of Technology have been particularly interested in using reduced prices to drive the necessary changes. It’s “sharing rides, sharing tools, sharing somebody to look after your dog when you’re not there,” says Hoornweg. Eventually, the sharing economy that started with Uber and Airbnb will become almost second nature as it becomes more affordable and residents exchange their needs to own big homes and cars for other priorities like a sustainable environment, greater access to nature within an urban area, and more engagement over shared pursuits with their neighbors.

For a spirited discussion about Toronto’s King Street experiment that includes some of its strongest boosters, you can listen here to an NPR-Morning Edition segment that was broadcast earlier this week.

2. Toronto’s Quayside Re-Development

Much like in Philadelphia where I’m writing this post, some of Toronto’s most desireable waterfront areas have been isolated from the rest of its urban center by a multi-lane highway. In response, Toronto has set aside a particularly lifeless area “of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials” that’s spread over a dozen acres for the development of another urban experiment, this time in partnership with a “smart-cities” Google affiliate called Sidewalk Labs. In October, a coalition of the City, Ontario and Canadian governments contracted with Sidewalk to produce a $50 million design for a part of town that’s been renamed Quayside, or what Sidewalk calls “the world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up”—a sensor-enabled, highly wired environment that promises to run itself.

According to a recent article in Politico (that you can also listen to), Quayside will be “a feedback-rich” smart city “whose constant data flow [will] let it optimize services constantly” because it is “not only woven through with sensors and Wi-Fi, but [also] shaped around waves of innovation still to come, like self-driving cars.” For example, in keeping with Toronto’s other pay-as-you-go priorities, one of Quayside’s features will be “pay-as-you-throw” garbage chutes that automatically separate out recyclables and charge households for their waste output.

Here are a couple of views of the future development, including tags on some of the promised innovations.

The new Quayside neighborhood in Toronto

A truly smart city runs on data that is generated from its inhabitants and behaviorally informed algorithms instead of on decisions that are made by Sidewalk’s managers or public officials. Not surprisingly, this raises a series of legal and quality of life questions.

On the legal side, those questions include: who owns the data produced by Sidewalk’s sensors and WiFi monitors; who controls the use of that data after it’s been generated; and whose laws apply when conflicts arise? On the issue of data privacy (and other potential legal differences), the Politico article notes that there are:

few better places to have this conversation than Canada, a Western democracy that takes seriously debates over informational privacy and data ownership—and is known for managing to stay polite while discussing even hot-button civic issues.

Moreover, because Canadians view personal privacy as a fundamental human right instead of one that can be readily traded for a “free” Gmail account or access to Google’s search engine, Sidewalk has already stipulated that data collected in Quayside will never be used to sell targeted advertising.

Undesirable human impacts from machine decision-making have also been raised, and Sidewalk is hoping to minimize these impacts by asking the City’s residents in advance for their own visions and concerns about Quayside. A year of consultations is already informing the initial plan.

Longer term, urbanists like Arielle Arieff worry about “the gap between what data can and cannot do” when running a neighborhood. Part of the beauty of city living is the connections that develop “organically”–chance occurrences and random encounters that a database would never anticipate. Arieff says: “They really do believe in their heart and soul that it’s all algorithmically controllable, but it’s not.” As if to confirm her suspicions, Sidewalk’s lead manager seems equally convinced that today’s technology can “optimize everyone’s needs in a more rational way.”

Given the expertise and perspective Toronto will be gaining from its King Street experiment and its citizens’ sensitivity to human concerns (like privacy) over efficiency concerns (like convenience), there is room for optimism that the City will strike a livable balance with its high tech partner. Moreover, Sidewalk Labs has a significant incentive to get it right in Quayside. There is an adjacent and currently available 800-acre lot known as Port Lands, “a swath of problem space big enough to become home to a dozen new neighborhoods in a growing metropolis.”

To me, Toronto’s Quayside experiment seems to have little downside, with more serious issues arising in Sidewalk’s future smart city projects. Sidewalk may not be selling its Toronto data to advertisers, but it will be vastly more knowledgeable than other cities that lack either the rich pools of behavioral data it has accumulated in Toronto or the in-house expertise to interpret it. Among other things, this creates a power imbalance between a well-funded private contractor and underfunded cities that lack the knowledge to understand what they stand to gain or to forge a working partnership they can actually benefit from. Simone Brody, who runs the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ “What Works Cities” project, says: “When it comes to future negotiations, its frightening that Google will have the data and [other] cities won’t.”

But these are longer-range concerns, and there is reason today for cautious optimism that American regulators (for example) will eventually begin to treat powerful tech companies that are amassing and utilizing public data more like “utilities” that must serve the public as well as their own profit-driven interests. That kind of intervention could help to level the public-private playing field, but it’s also a discussion for another day.

In the meantime, Toronto’s boldness in experimenting its way to a future that champions its priorities through the latest innovations is truly inspiring. The cities and towns where the rest of us live and work have much to learn from Toronto’s willingness to claim the future it wants by the seat of its pants.

This post was adapted from my March 17, 2019 newsletter.

How Can We Hold Our Common Ground?

February 17, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Our relationships at work are harmed when we disagree with others and experience their convictions as an assault on what we believe is right and true.

Without basic trust—along with at least some beliefs and convictions that we hold in common—it becomes almost impossible to move forward with our co-workers productively, but:

– How can I be confident in somebody’s judgments at work when their judgments in politics are so offensive?

– How could I ever collaborate with, even be friends with, somebody I disagree with so fundamentally?

– If, as has been repeatedly demonstrated, the most productive meetings and collaborations are comprised of people with divergent opinions who are both willing and able to declare them, then how can the right people ever come together and accomplish anything worthwhile when (deep down) they distrust and often loathe what those who disagree with them stand for?

– What must members of a group share with one another in order to disagree deeply yet not fall into disarray while doing so?

– How can those who fall on different sides of the most divisive issues still be friends, collaborators, co-workers, or citizens who remain able to fight for the same future together?

– How small can their common ground be and still be enough?

These are the questions that two prominent teachers, who happen to stand on opposite ends of the political divide, have been asking when they come together.

A Conversation with Cornel West and Robert George on Friendship and Faith Across Political Differences – February 8, 2019

And it wasn’t just this joint appearance. Cornel West and Robert George have been on a road show talking about their friendship, their profound differences, and their common ground for several years now.

I overheard one of their conversations for the first time in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year. In it, they made a radical suggestion. In order to gain an ethical perspective on any issue, try to imagine (and then follow through on) whatever Martin Luther King would have done under the same circumstances. I was moved enough by it that it became the subject of a newsletter I called “Trying on a Hero’s Perspective.”

Well they were at it again at Duke a couple of Fridays ago, and a video of their hour-long talk (with another half-hour of follow-up questions) came on-line last week. If you’re interested in spending a fascinating hour, you can safely start the recording at the half hour-mark following their voluminous greetings—but make sure and stay tuned through the questions at the end.

I hope the following summary of their remarks peaks your interest in listening to what West and George actually said that night as they gestured towards the “thin” foundation of commonality we all share and need to preserve; the kind of person you’ll need to be in order to champion it; and some additional ways that you can go about doing so.

1. A Thin Foundation of Commonality

At the beginning of their conversation, George wonders:

How thin a basic set of shared values can you have and still share enough to have a relationship where you can disagree and still have a friendship?

Of course, his first answer was reflected in his longstanding friendship with Cornel West.

George then reminds us that America never became a nation because we had the same ethnicity or religion but because we shared “a political set of values,” as both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King reminded us during two of the most divisive periods in our history. George believes that we do share enough “to flourish in our pluralism,” but that there are serious dangers too, and we are seeing many of the warning signs today. We always “wrap emotions around our convictions to get things done”—and wouldn’t accomplish anything if we didn’t—but when those emotions are “wrapped too tightly” we become dogmatic, identifying too closely with our beliefs. We experience any challenge to our convictions “as a personal assault” which separates us from one another while creating hostility. Because of these tendencies, every pluralistic society rests on very thin ice.

It is not just America. George talks about the Hutus and Tutsis living together peacefully in Rwanda for many years until leaders enflamed local rivalries and friendly co-existence devolved into mass murder. George has a Syrian parent and visited his family’s home village in Syria a decade ago when Christians and Muslims were living and working together peacefully until it too turned into “a genocidal nightmare.” He reminds us that in democracies in particular, “civic friendship is very fragile,” and that whenever that friendship is lost, democracy tends to be replaced by tyranny.

Cornel West picked up the theme by rejecting both Plato’s and Dostoevsky’s views on society in favor of a vision that was championed by America’s Founding Fathers. Plato argued that the public was too emotional and ignorant to sustain a more inclusive form of governance, while Dostoevsky was convinced that most individuals don’t want to be free, preferring “pied pipers” to lead them and “magic” to amuse them. Instead, America’s founders believed that citizens could rise to the occasion and govern themselves because of basic principles they shared, memorializing this common ground in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine also knew that “If you don’t renew the democratic possibilities, you are going to lose them.”

In their conversation at Duke, neither George nor West describe the foundation that needs continuous renewal beyond their reference to America’s founding, but they do address key aspects of it elsewhere. “Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression-A Statement by Robert P. George and Cornel West” is a statement of principles which they published (and asked other concerned Americans to sign onto) in March of 2017. It is a key part of their joint effort to renew our democratic possibilities so that there continues to be “enough” of a foundation to support our civic friendship. This is a link if you wish to add your signature to it. (Please drop me a line if you do!) And here is their statement in full:

The pursuit of knowledge and the maintenance of a free and democratic society require the cultivation and practice of the virtues of intellectual humility, openness of mind, and, above all, love of truth. These virtues will manifest themselves and be strengthened by one’s willingness to listen attentively and respectfully to intelligent people who challenge one’s beliefs and who represent causes one disagrees with and points of view one does not share.

That’s why all of us should seek respectfully to engage with people who challenge our views. And we should oppose efforts to silence those with whom we disagree—“especially on college and university campuses. As John Stuart Mill taught, a recognition of the possibility that we may be in error is a good reason to listen to and honestly consider—and not merely to tolerate grudgingly—points of view that we do not share, and even perspectives that we find shocking or scandalous. What’s more, as Mill noted, even if one happens to be right about this or that disputed matter, seriously and respectfully engaging people who disagree will deepen one’s understanding of the truth and sharpen one’s ability to defend it.

None of us is infallible. Whether you are a person of the left, the right, or the center, there are reasonable people of goodwill who do not share your fundamental convictions. This does not mean that all opinions are equally valid or that all speakers are equally worth listening to. It certainly does not mean that there is no truth to be discovered. Nor does it mean that you are necessarily wrong. But they are not necessarily wrong either. So someone who has not fallen into the idolatry of worshiping his or her own opinions and loving them above truth itself will want to listen to people who see things differently in order to learn what considerations—evidence, reasons, arguments—led them to a place different from where one happens, at least for now, to find oneself.

All of us should be willing—even eager—to engage with anyone who is prepared to do business in the currency of truth-seeking discourse by offering reasons, marshaling evidence, and making arguments. The more important the subject under discussion, the more willing we should be to listen and engage—especially if the person with whom we are in conversation will challenge our deeply held—even our most cherished and identity-forming—beliefs.

It is all-too-common these days for people to try to immunize from criticism opinions that happen to be dominant in their particular communities. Sometimes this is done by questioning the motives and thus stigmatizing those who dissent from prevailing opinions; or by disrupting their presentations; or by demanding that they be excluded from campus or, if they have already been invited, disinvited. Sometimes students and faculty members turn their backs on speakers whose opinions they don’t like or simply walk out and refuse to listen to those whose convictions offend their values. Of course, the right to peacefully protest, including on campuses, is sacrosanct. But before exercising that right, each of us should ask: Might it not be better to listen respectfully and try to learn from a speaker with whom I disagree? Might it better serve the cause of truth-seeking to engage the speaker in frank civil discussion?

Our willingness to listen to and respectfully engage those with whom we disagree (especially about matters of profound importance) contributes vitally to the maintenance of a milieu in which people feel free to speak their minds, consider unpopular positions, and explore lines of argument that may undercut established ways of thinking. Such an ethos protects us against dogmatism and groupthink, both of which are toxic to the health of academic communities and to the functioning of democracies.

Once again, by regularly appearing together George and West are actually demonstrating the same civic friendship that they are championing in this statement.

2. The qualities we’ ll all need more of to help renew our democratic possibilities

Several of these qualities can be inferred from the statement above (such as intellectual modesty), but at Duke, George and West made several additional observations, particularly in the Q&A.

George begins with the importance of cultivating friendships with those who have different perspectives. But he also reminds us that when you do, you are leaving the conformity of those who are “most like you,” meaning that you will also need the courage of your free will to speak the truth as you see it. When you leave the comfort of your fellow travelers, it helps to have role models, including those whose courage has carried them to the point of martyrdom. He also acknowledges that you’ll need “a few others to hold you up” when you champion what you believe and encounter the hostility that is the most likely response.

For his part, West characterizes those with the necessary courage as being “more revolutionary,” noting that you must be “willing to bear your cross” which “signifies your quest to unarm truth and unapologetically love” those who vehemently disagree with you. He continues: “to be a polished professional usually means don’t get too close to that cross” because what is most important to you is wanting to conform to those who are most like you. But when you are willing to bear that cross and become a revolutionary, you need to know that you are also on your way to character assassination or (like Lincoln and King) literal assassination.

Embodying the courage, loneliness and pain that George and West were describing, one of the night’s three questioners was a Christian Palestinian woman from Israel whose involvement in the peace movement there has been regularly vilified by Christians, Muslims, Jews, Israelis and Palestinians. While George and West were embodying civic friendship, she embodied the pain that goes into finding it.

3. How to find a patch of green where civic friendship can grow

George and West give several examples, including these:

– When pursuing civic friendship with those who vehemently disagree with you, it is essential to decide which truths are negotiable for you and which are non-negotiable. For the Palestinian-Israeli peace activist, one non-negotiable truth is that every Palestinian baby deserves to live. When the ice is this thin, nothing is too basic to be left unsaid.

– Within Christianity, it is possible to harbor an intense hatred for a person’s sin while, at the same time, recognizing that his or her sins do not exhaust that sinner’s humanity. To similar effect, however odious a person’s convictions, they never rob that person of his or her essential dignity and integrity. Hate the sin but not the sinner. As West observed: we “must recognize the limitations but always hold out the possibility of transcending them” in the course of our civic conversations.

– To follow those possibilities even further, a person’s conviction always “lives” within a broader context or set of circumstances and is rarely either good or bad in spite of those circumstances. When you take the time to understand the context where another’s convictions arise, it is often possible to recognize how differences between you arose, agree to disagree, and step down from your mutual hostility. West illustrates this point by reference to our current divisions over “black face,” recalling that its original context suggests a kind of appropriation of black power by white slaveholders who wanted to have some of that power for themselves. In other words, “black face” was about attraction and not merely ridicule and oppression. Where there might be some “overlap” between positions within a particular context—that is, a more hopeful ground between those who are for and against a particular issue—there exists the possibility for civic conversation and even friendship.

I think you’ll enjoy the Robert George-Cornel West conversation at Duke when you get to hear it. I’d also recommend that you follow their road show as it winds its way across an America that is likely to grow even more divided as another presidential election approaches.

The unfortunate truth is that our divisions are never confined to the realm of politics. As hostility intensifies, it infects our work and leaches into our home lives.

The best way to champion common ground is by acting with the courageous belief that common ground is possible, that democracy is worth renewing, and that its renewal won’t begin with somebody else.

This post is adapted from my February 17, 2019 newsletter.

Facing Risks, Finding Control

November 12, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Introducing some risk into your life and work can remind you what it’s like to feel alive. Not that we’re sleepwalking exactly, but if “personal comfort” trumps most other considerations, you have probably insulated yourself from anything more serious than inconvenience—and there’s a price for that.

What we do everyday can easily fall into grooves of predictability where there are few occasions to be confronted with anything surprising, let alone alarming. But if we deprive ourselves of occasions where we need to find some courage and “fall back on” ourselves to overcome our fears, what used to be called “one’s constitution” begins to slip away.

Ask yourself: “What would I do if all I had to rely upon were my wits, if I suddenly had to decide between two uncertain outcomes, if none of my insulations were there to protect me—and my only choices were either to crumble or persevere?” I’d argue that it’s good to put ourselves “on the line” from time to time and find out. It gives us a chance to get in touch with “our elemental selves,” to store up some fortitude for the next time, and to recall our bravery and resourcefulness when we could use some inspiration.

Taking some risks, facing your fears and learning something new about yourself and others have been newsletter themes before. As you know, I’m an off-the-beaten track traveler who encountered some sketchy characters in Rome (“What’s Best Is Never Free”) and a genuinely menacing one in New Orleans (“Risk Taking, Opportunity Seeking”). The reward each time was to discover something about these cities and their people that I could not have found out any other way. On the spot, I felt more alive. And where I could have responded better, I thought about how I‘d do things differently the next time I leave my comfort zone.

The upside of taking risks also drove the migration from Asia that settled the Western Hemisphere 15,000 years ago. These new Americans didn’t stop in the first fertile valley they discovered. Instead, they pushed to the edges of nearly every corner of North, Latin and South America with astonishing speed. It was insatiable curiosity and the thrill of conquest that drove them on, despite their having to confront megafauna (really big animals with razor-sharp claws and teeth), the challenges of wilderness travel with children and elders, and a total absence of convenience stores. In his book about it, Craig Childs cited the research for the proposition that an appetite for risk is hardwired into our DNA, giving rise to human progress and the rush of adventure that quickly follow.

Two new stories this week provide additional food-for-thought about our psychological risk profiles and a literally “ground-breaking” documentary delves into the motivations behind Alex Honnold’s “ free solo” climb up the rock face of El Capitan. I hope they’ll contribute to your thinking about staying confident, willful and alive.

Two recent pieces in the Wall Street Journal consider fear-inducing situations from opposite directions. One, called “Using Fear to Break Out of a Funk” argues that you can raise your spirits by confronting something that scares you and building a record for bravery. The other, “Travel Mistakes That Hurt,” is about foolishly throwing caution to the wind when you’re in a vacation state of mind. Taken together, they provide something of a template for healthy risk taking.

It’s amazing what fools we can sometimes be when we’re traveling. Incapacity from drinking too much alcohol or not enough water, injuries from mopeds and other unfamiliar vehicles, assuming wild animals are “cute,” hiking or climbing beyond your physical limits, and falling off cliffs or into traffic while taking pictures of yourself. The “Travel Mistakes” article features an interview with Tim Daniel with International SOS, an organization whose travel coverage includes rescuing people from every kind of harm. Daniel says travel is disorienting for almost everyone and that when we’re inundated with all that new information we can end up focusing on the wrong things and making poor choices.

Some of us go with the first thing we’re told instead of testing its reliability. Other times we’re susceptible to “the bandwagon effect”: if others are jumping off a cliff and into the water then it must be safe for us to jump in too. We may cling to our preconceptions (this neighborhood was safe 20 years ago) whatever evidence there is to the contrary today. Daniel argues that our blind spots always become more pronounced when we travel.

They are one reason it’s helpful to travel with companions who know you well enough to warn you about yours before it’s too late. Or if you’re traveling alone, it helps to think about your worst inclinations in advance and to keep them in mind before they get you in trouble. Navigating the unfamiliar (including its risks) makes travel exhilarating, but to maximize the potential gains and minimize the possible losses, it helps to know the baggage that you’ve brought along with you.

On a more positive note, it turns out that “amping up the adrenaline to get out of an emotional rut” is also a prescription with some science behind it. This is the kind of “funk” we’re often trying to leave behind when we seek a break from our daily routines. Sociologist Margee Kerr has written about what happens when we face our fears about loss of control in challenging situations.

When we’re terrified, our sympathetic nervous system, which is in charge of that flight or flight response, floods the body with adrenaline and the brain with neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine. Our blood vessels constrict, to preserve blood for muscles and organs that might need it if we decide to run. And our mind focuses on the present. The physical response lasts a few hours, but the memory is what we draw strength from.

The woman who wrote “Using Fear to Break Out of a Funk” is also a scuba diver. She explored the theory’s immediate and long-term benefits by choosing a particularly demanding dive in Iceland, between the continental plates that separate North America from Eurasia. During the dive, she confronted her fears multiple times “but pushed through by refusing to acknowledge that quitting was an option.” As soon as she did so, she felt “strong, brave and happy.” Moreover, the memory of that experience was even stronger. Whenever she’s struggling to get through a bad day she says: “I go back to that place where I can do anything.”

Finding your control when risks give rise to fear is exhilarating at the time and empowering for as long as you can relive your resourcefulness.

This photo, along with the shot that tops this post, are of Alex Honnold climbing the sheer, rock face of El Capitain in Yosemite National Park without ropes or safety gear. 3000 feet of sheer granite, thousands of hand and foot holds, it took him 3 hours and 56 minutes. What’s known as “Free Solo,” his climb was a first in the annals of rock climbing, and is the subject of a documentary that’s in theaters today.

I’m not good with heights and so far have been afraid to see it. But somebody named John Baylies was brave enough, and he described his experience this way in an on-line forum:

I judge this the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. Impossible not to get personally involved. Two big questions loom. What disease does this man suffer, that he has no fear and what the hell were the guys in animal costumes doing 1000 feet into the climb? If this were fiction it was a perfect comic relief for was the tensest 20 minutes on film.

However curious I am about the animal costumes I may just have to read about it, but the buzz around his climb got me interested in Honnold so I tracked down a TED talk he gave along with an extended interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast since the documentary came out. I think you’ll enjoy them too.

The highly informal Honnold-Rogan exchange provides several glimpses into the type of person who would train for 20 years with the goal of finding control while facing a succession of nearly overwhelming risks to his personal safety. Watching and listening to Honnold talk was fascinating. Humble. Direct. Thoughtful. Articulate. The farthest thing from a daredevil, much of what drives him was revealed by Rogan’s question about all those people he must have inspired to follow in his footsteps. Honnold says simply that he guesses he would be pleased to inspire people if it were “to live an intentional life” like he has: knowing what he wants and working to achieve it.

Honnold’s TED talk elaborates on what living that way means for him. In it, he contrasts a free solo climb he completed at Half Dome (also in Yosemite) which proved unsatisfying with his encore at El Capitan, which he describes as “quite simply the best day of my life.”

At Half Dome in 2012, he never practiced beforehand and had the cocky over-confidence that he would somehow “rise to the occasion” and make it to the summit. Then he reached a point in his climb, almost 2000 feet up, where he could not find his next hand or toe-hold. Honnold knew what he had to do (a tricky maneuver) but was overcome with fear that he’d execute the move incorrectly and would likely die. After much deliberation, he did manage the move successfully and reached the top safely—but vowed that he’d never be that reckless again.

Five years later at El Capitan, Honnold worked for months on its rock face finding and memorizing every hand and foothold so there would be no surprises on the day of his climb. He removed loose rocks along his path, carrying them down in a backpack. He anticipated everything that was likely to happen and how he would respond to it in what became a highly choreographed dance.

The way that Honnold managed his fear was to leave “no room for doubt to creep in.” Always knowing his next move, his mental and physical preparation made the actual climb feel “as comfortable and natural as taking a walk in the park.” Why did he succeed at El Capitan when he felt so much less successful at Half Dome? “I didn’t want to be a lucky climber, I wanted to be a great climber,” he said.

+ + +

Finding the calm and mastery of control in the face of risks—as big as Honnold’s or as small as any of ours might be—is always a function of preparation. To extend yourself and overcome a new challenge takes planning and visualizing what you’re likely to encounter along with understanding yourself, the mistakes you are prone to make, and the strategies you’ll employ to avoid them. In Honnold’s words, “it takes intentionality” beforehand. You have to want to do it in the right way.

The upside in taking risks and pushing your envelope isn’t found in the speculation that you’ll be able to handle whatever comes your way. You may end up being lucky, but just as likely, a group like International SOS may be coming to your rescue. On the other hand, when you’re ready to assume the risks, the rewards are becoming fully and completely alive in the moment that you face them and the recollection of your bravery and resourcefulness whenever your confidence flags.

This post is adapted from my November 11, 2018 newsletter.