We Find Where We Stand in the Space Between Differing Perspectives

September 16, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When you hear an argument on Tuesday and its opposing argument on Thursday, it’s always a challenge to arrange a further date where you can line them up at opposite sides of the room while you sit in the middle to figure out what you think and feel about the issue. Rescheduling your attention like this always seems to get lost in the shuffle.

On the other hand, the opportunity to listen, process and react almost immediately to opposing points of view is what can make live debate and virtual encounters with discordant perspectives both clarifying and satisfying.

They may also be ways to move beyond the polarizing shouting matches that characterize much of American democracy today.

When an issue “gets joined” you can figure out where you stand either on the spot or while continuing the conversation with yourself and others immediately thereafter. All you have to do is build this new information and its subtleties into your own perspective once you’ve had the chance to sleep on it.

When it comes to processlng opposing views, time compression seems critical. Being part of a live audience interacting with live “actors” or encountering real people in a virtual world is too. Another factor is your decision “to make yourself available to their persuasion” by the physical act of showing up, something you rarely do when you’re watching people testify on the other side of a screen. On each of these “live” or “almost alive” occasions, you’ve chosen to immerse yourself in a world of different perspectives where you’re open to changing your mind.

A final factor is also critical. Theater that is built on counterpoint stories and virtual worlds that make us confront our own preconceptions are jarring experiences. Both demand that your thoughts and feelings connect across a broader waterfront than you recognized before. They challenge moral certainties and provide building blocks you can use immediately to construct a more nuanced point of view. Their wake-up calls can often make you behave differently too—impacting the jobs you do as community members or citizens. They offer highy engaging ways to figure out where you stand and what to do next.

All of these dynamics were apparent in a recent theater production in Portland Oregon, where actors playing members of the community and its local police force held the stage in front of an audience from that same community, told their distinctive stories and changed some minds.

Similar changes in perception became evident when people put on the virtual reality (VR) headsets that were recently developed by a California company. VR technology can take you places and put you among people you may think you know about until you are literally walking among them at Rikers Island prison, on the US-Mexico border, or in a Syrian refugee camp.

What used to seem black and white and came cloaked in moral certainties can be shaken into reconsideration by these “live” or “virtually alive” experiences. Abstraction and over-simplification are no longer quite as possible when issues that we thought we understood have faces. Once we’ve learned more and have the experience to know better, we may no longer wish to view ourselves (or be viewed by others) as being so cold in our certainties or so removed from the blood, sweat and tears of most people’s lives.

Do these kinds of experiences offer a way to move past the knee-jerk polarities that undermine our collective purpose?

Are they vehicles for helping at least some of the undecided and disengaged in this country to make up their minds and help build a future that they want instead of leaving their prospects to others?

Finding Shared Human Perspectives While Looking At and Listening To One Another

The chasms between diverse communities and the police who are charged with protecting them yawn widely across America. In Portland, some creatives in the performing arts and forward-thinkers in law enforcement came together to try and reduce them. Their approach: a stage adaptation of the dueling perspectives, only this time with several rarely heard points of view along the stark divide—including the witness provided by minority police officers who, in more ways than one, have come to embody it.

Much of this story about perspective building in the community, and all but one of the quotes here, come from a PBS NewsHour segment that ran on the same day in August that New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo was fired for his involvement in subduing Eric Garner, an arrest that ended in Garner’s death.

Kevin Jones and Lesli Mones founded the August Wilson Red Door Project, a theater company, to provide a platform for addressing issues of importance to the City’s African American residents. The other driving force in this story is Robert Day, the former deputy chief of the Portland Police Bureau. Jones and Mones asked him to gather perspectives from policemen who serve in minority neighborhoods like theirs and he pursued their invitation with relish.

What ultimately came together in one performance were a series of monologues from two different plays. “Hands Up” was written by African Americans about their experiences being racially profiled by police. “Cop Out” tells the stories of individual police officers when they are wearing their uniforms as well as the lingering effects after they take them off.

Jones and Mones each described the intent behind bringing witnesses from both perspectives onto a single stage. Said Jones:

We’re not dividing the story into two sides, right, the good guys and bad guys. On both sides, we have a group of people who feel that their stories are not being told, that they’re being vilified, that they’re being shunned, that — and nobody wants to really hear their story.

For her part, Mones addressed early criticism she’d heard from the African-American community in an earlier interview with the Portland Mercury:

From a social power perspective, you can’t compare the experiences of the two groups of people. But from a shared human perspective, the feeling of being unseen, depersonalized, and stereotyped is something both groups can relate to. It’s in the DNA of Red Door to honor a multiplicity of viewpoints, because we know it’s imperative in producing a healthy racial ecology for the community.

Four excerpts from the monologues suggest the power of this “shared” and “deeply human” approach.

– Community member: ‘They slammed me to the ground. One of the officers had his foot on the back of my neck. Another officer pointed a gun to the back of my head and said, ‘Move one inch and I will blow your head off.’ Oh, I went into survival mode. I tried to convince them I was one of the good ones.’

` Policeman: ‘I used to think nothing about being a cop would shake me up. But when you arrive on scene and watch your partner pull an infant out of a microwave because his meth head father couldn’t stop the kid from crying, your lens gets colored.’

– [A community member asks everyone in the audience to raise their arms in the air]:

A voice representing the police: ‘Hands up.’

Members of the community: ‘Don’t shoot.’

A voice representing the police: ‘Hands up.’

Members of the community: ‘Don’t shoot.’

-Policewoman: ‘The only reason I carry a gun if for protection, primarily mine, sometimes yours, sometimes, in highly specific circumstances, like an active shooter, or –no, that’s about it.’

The theater company is hoping to take performances of these combined monologues across the country, starting later this year. However, the fundraising and logistical hurdles that need to be surmounted before the show can hit the road are daunting. But no one provides a better reason for persevering than former deputy police chief Day:

We’re touching on sort of the third rail conversations of race and policing. And I think they are conversations that are happening in African-American families in homes and communities, and I know they’re happening in police communities, because I have heard them, been a part of them, I have seen them.

But they’re not happening publicly, and they’re not happening generally across from each other, because of the sort of high-voltage nature of them. So, the theater allows us to put it all out there. We can speak what has been left unsaid.

Only when “it’s all out there” and being processed by the folks in the audience who are most impacted by it can there be any hope of actually “seeing the other,” identifying shared objectives, and pursing them together.

The Issues Are No Longer Vague. They Feel Like Lived Experiences

With VR or virtual reality, the divides aren’t personified on a stage and the processing doesn’t begin when you’re seated in front of it. Everything you need for your views to be jarred into a broader perspective is brought into the perceptual space “between your ears” by this advanced technology.

Emblematic is a VR studio that was founded by Nonny de la Pena and is based in Santa Monica. De la Pena was profiled as one of 2018’s top innovators by the Wall Street Journal, both for developing groundbreaking VR technology that enables you to feel like you’re moving through a real space (instead of just standing in it) and for the rationale behind her inventiveness.

The author of the profile explained her intentions this way:

The idea is to put people in places they wouldn’t normally find themselves, experiencing situations they would not normally experience. Often, these are related to urgent issues, issues that are, in their sprawling complexity, seemingly difficult to grasp or even care about. But suddenly, there you are, standing in a cell in solitary confinement, or at the foot of a melting glacier, or before a protest line outside an abortion clinic. When you are in these places—hearing the anguish of a prisoner, the calving of a glacier, the vitriol of the protesters—the issues no longer seem like issues, with vague names attached, like prison reform or global warming or women’s health. Rather, they seem like lived experience, like people you’ve met and places you’ve been—like memory.

Within Emblematic’s VR headsets, the perspective you’ve brought with you is jarred by the unfamiliar in “real” time and you’re invited to start responding immediately to the flood of new information that’s washing over you. Particularly when you enter environments with other people in them, it feels like you are entering a reality as it’s being lived by someone else, providing unprecedented opportunities for connection and empathy.

Before you put the headset on, you also know where you’re going and have made yourself available to broaden and deepen your point of view. You find a new place to stand in the neurological mindspace between your thoughts and feelings about this issue before and the virtual experience that you’re having now. As long as it’s programmed as an exercise of free will, this technology can help you to make up your mind or intensify your most important commitments.

Unlike the challenges of putting the “Hands Up/Cop Out” show on the road, the financial and logistical challenges for de la Pena and Emblematic are likely making their technology cheap enough and portable enough that it can someday travel on its own to wherever people are undecided or simply want to know more. They (and other monitors) will also need to mind the gap between its use for illuminating an increasingly complex world and simply manipulating our reactions to it.

Sometimes, groundbreaking innovations like de la Pena’s have their roots in childhood, and so it is with the story of how she first learned the value of differing perspectives–even when one of them is hers. The Journal’s profile of her actually begins with it:

When Nonny de la Peña was in junior high, in West Los Angeles, her math teacher wrote a note home to her parents. ‘It was about something I’d rebelliously done,’ she says. ‘It was something minor, like speaking up, or speaking too loudly.’ Her father read the note, then turned the paper over and looked at her. ‘This is what she says you do, he said to me,’ de la Peña recalls. ‘Tell me about her. What does she do?’ De la Peña listed some of her own unflattering observations about the teacher, and her father wrote them down on the back of the note, so that now the piece of paper contained two notes, two different perspectives. Then her father signed it. ‘So what does that make you do? Of course [says de la Pena], it makes you think about the structure of things…. Of how situations are multidimensional.’

Her father knew, and early on it seems that she came to know too, that the truth can usually be found somewhere in the space between perspectives.

+ + +

I’ve written before about the space “where we can make up our reasonable minds” because I’m concerned (and sometimes alarmed) about how our demonizing of those we disagree with has disabled us from building anything of consequence in America today. It also comes from how others’ “not caring enough to have points of view” further undermines “what those who do care enough” hold in common. These sentiments were behind my post on the remarkable public exchange between two academic friends, the left-leaning Cornel West and the right-leaning Robert George, and what we all gain (but seldom enjoy today) from politically charged conversations, as well as another about the clarifying nature of dissent.

These arguments (and the one today) feel personal to me.

When I abandon my reasoned points of view, or don’t bother to come up with them anymore, I cede control of my future and my family’s future to somebody who may know less and care less. As long as I hold this right and it has not been taken away from me by those who want to control my mind, I’d be a fool not to exercise it.

Where I decide to stand and what I decide to do about it in the work I do and the way I live are among the most valuable contributions that I can make to myself and others. As long as it’s mine, I’ll continue to find the space for evolving my perspectives because it’s part of feeling alive.

This post was adapted from my September 15, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

LA Claims the Future While the Rest of Us Argue About It

June 17, 2019 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I’ve been re-writing quite a bit since I got back from LA, mostly stories for the book and, in particular, the heart of a central story that I‘d never managed to find before. One of the wonders of “getting away” is the space you reclaim to tackle the problems that were resisting you before you left.

It’s not unlike breaking out of “group-think” by bringing in new energy and perspective to challenge the limitations that were holding you back. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In thinking about this post, I remembered an observation I’d written down before I left but also didn’t know what to do with. It was made by physicist Geoffrey West in a book he wrote a couple of years back called Scale. Among many extraordinary observations, West noted that one of the reasons cities tend to outperform companies is because cities have more weirdos in them, that is, more people who challenge the prevailing norms or group-think.

Since I’m also still digesting my time in LA, I wondered whether some of the vitality in that city (and maybe in California generally) comes from the fact that there are more contrary voices–more weirdos–participating in the conversation that defines them. After mulling this over for the past couple of days, I’ve concluded that there may be something to it.

A year ago, I wrote two posts: Why Voice Your Dissent? and Dissent That Elevates the Group. In the first, I summarized some of the findings in Charlan Nemeth’s book In Defense of Troublemakers by noting how hard it is to find yourself outside of the mainstream and then to persist, despite your seeming disagreement with everybody else. Summarizing Nemeth’s research, I wrote:

People automatically follow the majority as much as 70% of the time, even when the majority is wrong. People do so because the group ‘works on you’ to conform in blatant as well as subtle ways. Moreover, the remaining 30% are not unscathed by group pressure. In one study, even though the minority disagreed with the group, many reported that the majority was ‘probably correct’ because the group must know something that they didn’t know.

This pull towards conformity is powerful, but there are individual as well as group rewards when dissenters refuse to keep their contrariness to themselves. The courage to persist has three parts:

In addition to your knowledge and experience and what you believe to be true about them, the most productive dissent also contains at least a piece of the future that you are convinced everyone in the group should want. A dissenter’s convictions engage our convictions about what we know and believe, but perhaps neither engage us as much as her hopeful vision about the future we are here to create together.

Cities more than companies listen to its dissenters more, and LA may listen harder than most. It stands on the frontlines of the future because it recognizes the outsized role that its idealists and oddballs have played in getting it there. I also think it’s because dissenting voices are raised less loudly and vindictively on the West Coast than they are on the East. People are more relaxed, or as Emily would say (now that she’s moved there from Brooklyn) they’re way more chill dad. The tenor of LA’s conversation leaves more cooperative energy for when the debate is done. It leaves more space to imagine something better together.

To the hard, gritty realities Los Angelinos confront every day (their tides of homelessness, miles of aging infrastructure, the domination of their cars and roads), they seem to have made room for softness too. They seem to have smoothed the grittier edges but not forgotten them, daring to relax enough to dream with their best dreamers about how to reach a more livable future. They seem to have found ways to remain optimistic in spite of their many challenges. Really, is there any existing option that’s better for the rest of us to follow today?

Here are a few recent experiences in LA that may have caused this question to linger.

1. Grand Central Market

It’s always dicey extrapolating what people are like from their built environments, but how they’ve created new homes and workplaces, shopping centers and entertainment venues (or re-inhabited abandoned ones) always provide clues.

When Emily was younger, we visited the zoo in every place where we traveled. It gave me a lot of anecdotal evidence about how locals thought about wildlife, nature, education, family outings and relaxation. For example, the zoos in London and Barcelona are very different, as you might imagine.

In these and other trips over the years, I’ve also managed to find the central food market wherever am. A benchmark for thinking about these marketplaces has been Reading Terminal Market in my hometown. It may be the most bustling and thriving institution in Philadelphia, regulating the flow of produce, seafood and meat coming in and going out while providing arrays of prepared food in an environment that balances the traditional with the up-to-the-minute. It also looks and feels both effortless and authentic given its time and place.

I could disparage many other cities’ tourist-oriented farmers markets, but I’d rather celebrate LA’s Grand Central Market located in a cavernous old building in the heart of its high-rise downtown. It was where I first started considering the combination of “gritty and soft” in the city.

The cavernous space was dark instead of bright from above. Its inner volumes cascaded down three or four partial levels from one elevation at the Bunker Hill entrance to the Market’s final landing on South Broadway. The building had been hollowed out, with its spine, service lines and ductwork visible, if you looked for them in the dim recesses on walls, ceilings and snaking through lower levels. Inside, it felt like what it was: the shadowy hulk of a re-purposed building.

All of the Market’s establishments—featuring far more prepared food than take-home-and cook—were lit at ground level, glowing like so many individual oases, each inviting exploration while you digested their descending panorama. Food is prepared or assembled in front of you, with seating right there or at tables scattered both inside and out. I made for my recommended breakfast at Egg Slut, whose name and menu perfectly embodied the customer indulgence that seemed to be the goal of every purveyor. Maybe I was too hungry or jet-lagged when I reached the Market, but it seemed like islands of hospitality and surprisingly inventive fare, all of them floating in a multi-tiered, post-industrial space. More friendly and warm than street-level in Blade Runner, but also not unlike it. Gritty and soft.

In succeeding days, I kept detecting this balance. LA is not a beautiful city. Much of it seems yellowed by the sun and little of it has been prettied-up. But everywhere, Los Angelinos seem to have burrowed into their mid-20^thcentury sprawl of storefronts and strip malls to create environments that are comfortable, nourishing and full of character. It’s a way that all of us might ride our present into our future if we chose to live within our means while being calmer and less frantic about it.

2. Brunch in Silver Lake

Atmosphere like this invites perspective about what should come next as well as advice for living better right now.

We were at a thoughtfully calibrated outdoor café in Silver Lake when a woman at the next table, who claimed to be 70 but looked 50, volunteered that Emily had beautiful skin and slender, powerful legs. (“I drink water all the time,” Emily said by way of response.) Apparently finding nothing about me to comment on directly, she spent the better part of our meal describing her odyssey as wife, mother, business owner, inventor, personal trainer, author, motivational speaker and yoga instructor and that if she hadn’t changed her life 20 years ago, she wouldn’t be here now. I must have seemed in imminent jeopardy to have aroused her like this.

She then outlined a punishing six-month program of bikram yoga and improved nutrition that made her energetic, hopeful and feeling younger than she had since she was in her twenties. I thought to ask her about her book, whether I could get a motivational tape on-line or see her TED talk but instead I asked her if that was the type of yoga where you sweat your toxins out. Of course it was and based on her apparent diagnosis, of course I said I’d look into it.

This stranger at the next table didn’t complement Emily’s skin and legs because “they looked good” but because of what both of them told her about Emily’s wellbeing. As for me, she didn’t want to sell me anything other than “a choice for me to consider” because taking it had already helped her so much.

LA has been criticized as a shallow and superficial place. I always think of stars or starlets congratulating everyone, thanking God, thanking the orphans of Mogadishu for their award when I hear that. We did see one Academy award-winning actor while we were in a sporting goods store there, but Mahershala Ali is anything but shallow and superficial and neither were most of the locals I met. Admittedly, it was a small random-sample.  But those I encountered seemed to have put their health and wellbeing in the present moment closer to the center of their lives and choices than many Americans in other parts of the country.

Being centered like this influences not only how people view the future course of their lives but also the long-term future they tend as custodians for their children and children’s children.  When you feel better, get your body and mind under control, there’s more room for optimism and broader responsibility (isn’t there?)

3. The Getty

The Getty Museum sits on heights that overlook Santa Monica Bay and much of the rest of the sprawling city. Locals as well as out-of-towners seemed to dress up to go there. The Persian girls were flamboyant, the Japanese men causally tailored to an extent I’d never seen before and the Japanese women and girls wore complex layers that all seemed part wedding gown and spring raincoat. Everyone at the Getty seemed to understand that they were visiting someplace special to consider treasures from the past. And it was special.

The works of art on display were often as spectacular as the surroundings and visitors. I was particularly dazzled by the collection of marble portrait busts by the West’s greatest carvers, including Bernini and Houdon. Their arrangement was also playful, with curators positioning them so they could interact with nearby paintings or other sculptures. For example, the busts above of Belesarius (a Byzantine general by Jean Baptiste Stouf) and a Vestal virgin (by Antonio Canova) were at opposite corners of a sun-soaked gallery, the goat gazing (longingly and hilariously) into the dove’s eyes.

Like the La Brea Tar Pit Museum chronicled LA’s pre-history (in last week’s post), the Getty seems to serve as a temple to the more recent history of Western art and culture.

It’s where LA says: this is the best of where we have been.

Being at the Getty also reminded me that Philadelphia’s largest foundation (the Pew Charitable Trusts) moved to LA not long ago to support a burgeoning contemporary art scene that has seen major new museums being built (the Broad) and existing ones expanded (LACMA) to celebrate new, experimental artists. LA is championing artistic expression in ways that rival New York, Paris and London.

It’s another way that LA is saying: the future is being envisioned and inhabited here. This is where we are going.

+ + +

The LA I saw offers a perspective that respects the past, striving to live with our history and pre-history and to understand what it is saying to us.

It provides some of the optimism that enables LA to step forward and say to other capitals: we’re not caught in your group-think and grid-lock. Instead, we’re already deciding where we should be going next.

We’re looking back in time for its lessons and encouragements as well as ahead from a center in the present that aims for health and wellbeing.

We’re repurposing our aging, urban sprawl into islands of comfort and hospitality.

We’ve made gritty soft, maybe because we’re more aware than others of what we have left to work with and are simply making the most of it.

Yes, LA was an eye-opener.

This post was adapted from my June 16, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

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

We Are Making a Difference

January 20, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When we set out to make a difference with our work, we usually are. It empowers us by doing it and empowers others who are trying to change the same things. It’s the belief in possibility that makes a new year, well…doable.

I came upon a guy last week who begins his day reading these phrases:

This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will.

“What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.

“When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever. In its place is something you have left behind…let it be something good.

However “make the most of it” that sounds, it’s about whether we dare to face forward and declare ourselves because none of us has an unlimited number of days ahead of us when we can.

Historian David McCullough has written a dozen or so highly acclaimed biographies about Americans like Teddy Roosevelt, the Wright Brothers and John Adams. (You may also know him as the sonorous voice behind some of Ken Burn’s public television documentaries.) When he was interviewed about Truman, McCullough discussed this same quandary: whether to bother standing up for what’s important when it’s so easy to give up before you’ve even started.

The interviewer began by noting that “your writing makes readers feel like they are there,” and McCullough replying that his writing this way is deliberate.

What I’m trying to do is show readers—especially young readers—that things didn’t have to turn out as well as they did. I want them to know that life felt every bit as uncertain to people back then as it does to us today.

There were these moments when they had to be thinking, there is no way we can get this bridge built, or get this canal dug. But things worked out—because individuals behaved in certain ways, with integrity and resilience. They figured out how to work with other people, and they tried to do the right thing.

And my hope is that these stories will inspire some readers to behave the same way in the face of the uncertainty in their lives.

I found the immediacy and uncertainty before what happens next to be most compelling in McCullough’s 1776. But for tiny acts of imagination and courage all coming together 250 years ago, America would never have happened. And I can be a part of the same miracle today—if I choose to.

In a strange twist of fate several years later, McCullough found himself talking with his new internist about the Truman interview, about how today is no different than it was in the past, and the amazing things we might accomplish by acting despite today’s uncertainties.

I try to make that point in every interview. It’s really the main reason I do the work I do.

McCullough’s rationale for his lifetime of work is sharing this knowledge. Everyone who went on to accomplish something important could just as easily have sat it out, yielding to fear or inertia It’s not just a perspective for the young but for those at every stage of life who have a limited time ahead to leave behind something that they can be proud of. And finally, It’s not only advice for opinion writers or biographers, but for everyone who employs their skills on the gamble that they just might achieve a good result.

Writing this morning, it is easy to see 2019 as a gathering mess. No wonder people are looking for “unicorns” like Beto O’Rourke “to save the coming day for us” so we don’t have to get down into the trenches and do the hard work ourselves. But why not be a part of it, putting the faith in our own judgments instead of in a savior’s, particularly when so much that’s good has already been achieved in our lifetimes?

I can’t be reminded enough about the positive side of the ledger that’s laid out in Steven Pinker’s books like Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) (according to the data: life, health, prosperity, safety, knowledge, and happiness are all on the rise, and not just in the West, but worldwide), which builds on his earlier The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) (that we’re living today in the most peaceful era in history). Like David McCullough, the perspective of time helps me to overcome my excuses and failures of nerve.

In the last couple of days, there was also Greg Ip’s helpful column looking both back at the past year and forward into the new one in the Wall Street Journal. Ip called it “The World is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better,” and he begins it with a promise:

If you spent 2018 mainlining misery about global warming, inequality, toxic politics or other anxieties, I’m here to break your addiction with some good news: The world got better last year, and it is going to get even better this year.

But what I liked the most about the column was his conclusion after reviewing the data about rising incomes and global progress.

Perhaps it…feels irresponsible to celebrate the many ways the world is quietly getting better because it distracts from the fight against things that are loudly getting worse: polarized and authoritarian politics, deadly opioids, nuclear proliferation, and most of all, a warming climate—a consequence of all those new middle-class entrants burning fossil fuels.

Yet obsessing over [these remaining] perils is how we’ll likely solve them.

Ip is saying that with focus and forward momentum—we can do this, and I happen to believe he’s right. We still have the hard work of planting the seeds that are there, but the ground is also in better shape than our sky-is-falling fears like to admit.

I wrote several posts last year about the threat of technology that arrives and is widely embraced before its downsides are known or anyone has had a chance to put reasonable safeguards in place. Social networks and smart phones today, with drone deliveries and autonomous vehicles soon to follow. The ethicist in me kept asking: “Just because we can do it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should, at least before we understand more of the implications than we do now.” So last year felt like frantically catching up with the aggregators who are selling our personal data and the too-big-for-our-own-good companies that no one worried about soon enough. Much of the time, it felt like not having enough fingers for the holes in the dike.

But still I railed against the privacy profiteers like Facebook and Google (for the sake of our ability to make decisions without manipulation) and monopolists like Amazon (because the free flow of goods and labor really is important). And all the while, others with similar sensibilities were jumping into these trenches too, with no certainty that anything would come of it. Well, this past week saw several news stories about progress that is being made where I doubted it ever would.

A story on January 11 announced that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile would no longer be sharing their users’ location data with those who are selling it to trackers because of privacy concerns that had been raised. Yesterday, Sprint followed up with the same decision. It was a victory (for now) over some of the tech giants with a brand new cohort of privacy advocates behind it.

Last Friday, there was a news report that customers, investors and employees are challenging Amazon’s facial recognition software because of similar privacy concerns. A group of nuns who are also investors have submitted a resolution for a vote at Amazon’s annual shareholders meeting. The company has refused thus far to halt the sales of personal data generated by its software, but it has been forced into a dialogue it would never have had without widespread pushback.

My favorite marker from last week also speaks to the critical mass of individual voices that have been building, one by one, against Facebook even when the odds against them seemed most daunting. Roger McNamee, an early investor in the company, was one of them. Despite becoming rich, having a personal relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, sitting on Facebook’s board for a time, and being a prominent member of the insider’s club in Silicon Valley, McNamee was one of the first to challenge Facebook’s excesses that nobody could ignore. It took his early critical statements along with the past 9 months of populist backlash to culminate in Time’s cover story this week—a testament to how voices both big and small can coalesce into a wave.

I want to mention something else too. I’m hardly a frontline tech commentator, but Roger McNamee signaled me through Twitter yesterday after I profiled his essay in Time. I’m not telling you this because it’s cool that he did but because taking a stand in your work, however you can, often puts you in the company of those you can be proud to be associated with. The experience of this kind of solidarity also helps me to forsake the safety of my fence and dive into the fray even when I’m reluctant to do so in the work that stares back at me every day.

It’s not just pushing the same rock up the hill, only to have it roll back down to its same old place. There is progress when I look for it, and I’m almost never alone.

There’s a wooden arch at our backyard entrance. It’s heavy with wisteria branches that are hung (as if for the holidays) with seedpods.

A few years ago, when Brendan Ryan’s painting crew was here gentrifying the place, I was outside, by this archway, talking to one of his painters when a prior generation of seedpods started popping like firecrackers, propelling their seeds loudly and with amazing velocity in all directions. It happened in March, with some change in temperature or water pressure that neither of us could feel triggering the explosion. We laughed when we realized what was happening, and eventually fell into quiet to absorb the miracle of it.

The wisteria was thrusting itself into the future.

Of course, we need more than nature’s rhythms to motivate us to get up and keep doing good work for another day or year. Plants also don’t make excuses, or have the luxury of feeling hopeless when their time has come.

But there are markers that bolster optimism when I bother to look, that help me to believe that I’m neither Sisyphus nor going it alone. Perspective. A record of progress. Occasions of solidarity. It’s about winning the game in my head so I have another day’s worth of fortitude to win it outside.

This post was adapted from my January 20, 2019 newsletter.

An Awesome Table

January 7, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Awe can be expected, but never planned because there’s always an element of surprise—before being floored.

You can set the table for surprise, but never serve it to yourself.

For me, Rome is one of the world’s most splendid tables—and once again, it didn’t disappoint.

Work Life Rewards

When you’re open enough to be surprised by a human touch or the meaning below the surface, the relief of them is like water on dry ground. They enable the next effort and opportunity. They’re how what’s brown becomes green.

But however much we try to sustain ourselves and resist the tug of preoccupation, these recognitions about life tend to slip away, and the doors that let in the fresh or even fragrant air are opened less frequently.

Life and work begin to seem petty, predictable and ungrateful; the political discourse nothing more than coarse, small and insulting, with nary a grace note. Of course, you shut yourself in, but it’s barren and unrelieved with too little life.

Making yourself available to awe flings open the doors and windows.

Aren’t vacations for letting the amazing pull you out of your rut and catapult you towards heaven?

Looking up into the dome of Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

“Beam Me Up, Scottie”

Even the best trans-Atlantic flights leave you disoriented on arrival. Little did I know that my imbalance was about to enter the spin cycle on the cab ride from Fiumicino to my hotel.

The mom of a high-school son and college daughter who drove me immediately talked about her 12 shifts on/2 off, back and forth at 48E, for those arriving in Rome or departing at very high speeds through its swirl of traffic. I asked: “So what do you do when you’re not working?” and she said matter-of-factly: “Defensive shooting.” As it was dawning on me that this was “using a gun to protect yourself” she was fastening her iPhone to a dashboard mount and launching videos of her darting through an obstacle course, firing at random shapes as they emerged from behind trees or around corners. Something like the FBI training center at Quantico.

“Who took these?” I asked. “Oh, my coach gets a keek out of me,” she said (which I rapidly translated from the Italian) “so he is always taking them.” He must have had a crush on her, and I could certainly see why as she whipped through an intersection at an impossible speed and I gave myself over to the ride. “Do Italian men like their women to use guns?” I couldn’t translate what she said in response, but some of it was “there are not too many of us,” and the rest of it was something other than “No.” Doors that had been closed were already opening, and I’d barely just gotten there.

We talked about ancient pissoirs we were passing, the easiest way to get an audience with the pope, the visiting time with the best weather and fewest tourists (before Easter), hand gun regulations in the EU, a particularly egregious assault on a woman she seemed to know, something about “immigrants from the south,” how guns are treated unfairly and knives are not, what was most exceptional about her son, and where she liked to travel most (the Middle East). Like Bernini’s David whom I met a few days later, I was fully locked and loaded by the time I got out of her cab and dove into my first afternoon.

Ciao Roma!

Santa Prassede

Between the jet lag and the cab ride, I was primed for awe but never realized how much until afterwards.

Rome’s seven hills make it anything but flat, so it was down to Barberini Plaza from the hotel and up to the intersection of two narrow streets where, in each direction, there’s a clear view of the obelisks and monuments of four distant plazas (“a masterpiece of Baroque city planning”) if you can brave looking amidst the racing traffic.

I was headed towards Santa Maria Majore, a 4^th Century basilica that was another down-then-up walk away. It felt good to get the blood flowing.

The basilica was vast, golden and humming with a life that included stand-up confessions being heard from open windows in the side aisles and the murmurs of afternoon mass from a hidden chapel. The pictures I’d seen in art class now had a context. I could appreciate the distinctiveness of the church’s soaring, rectangular space and spiraling, cosmatesque floors. I’d finally stopped for long enough to realize that this wasn’t Kansas anymore.

I knew there was another ancient church nearby and got directions. As I approached Santa Prassede, I might have seen the chance of being thunderstruck if I’d been thinking about anything other than finding my way to its simple doorway in the suddenly fading light. The place announces itself so softly, you barely know that it’s there.

You cross into St. Prassede from the side, expecting a similarly modest vestibule within. At first, it is hard to tell. There is more light from its candles than its electricity and it takes time for my eyes to realize how much it soars. There are mosaics on every surface of the apse that looms to the right behind the main altar, their tiny squares of gold and glaze not quite resolving into pictures in the half-light.

This space is also a hive of visitors, but here they’re more hushed and reverential as they cluster in groups or wander into alcoves. Their reserve tells me to approach more gingerly this time, and I sit in a pew to figure out how. An organ below the altar begins to trumpet through the gorgeous fragments of an unfamiliar hymn. He’s practicing I realize, and his repetitions and variations cushion us all with sound as the shadows lengthen and the sun sets. The dusk is rarely as hopeful as the dawn, and more mysterious.

Roman churches are often dark when you enter them, particularly on late fall afternoons, but a euro in a light box can usually be counted on to illuminate the Caravaggio painting or Bernini sculpture that you’ve come to see. You pay as you go when lighting candles as well. I had noticed such a box with its 1E sign in the front as I looked around but didn’t know what it would light.

A young man and woman came in just after me. As I watched them, she seemed tentative and stood off to the side, but he was more purposeful, kneeling and crossing himself at various stations before lying prostrate on the floor before the main altar for 30 seconds or maybe a minute. My own reasons for being there seemed inadequate in the face of his, but then he walked to the light box.

I took in a breath the way you do when the water suddenly goes over your head. The room had changed that much. Everyone looked towards the light with hungry eyes including the young man, his arms stretched out in an embrace. The volume of space, the envelope of music, and how we shared them were so ravishing as to be unnerving. This picture only gestures towards its suddenness and three-dimensionality.

Awe overtakes and sometimes overwhelms you. You feel you know something bigger and truer without being sure of exactly what it is. It engages your head but also your heart. You might also call it delight, amazement or wonder. It’s a channel that suddenly opens and disrupts you with a sense of deeper possibilities.

And I’d found it on my first day away.

The Bonus Round

As I’m writing this post, there’s a knock at my door and it’s a neighbor with cookies. Our friendship goes back decades to when her marketing company designed a logo for a company I was starting. Our work together made her friend as well as colleague.

She said this will be her happiest Christmas in years. She’d had a child 40 years ago as a college freshman, gave him up for adoption, had gone on to marry and have a family, and in September this son had found her, after searching for more than five years.

He is “amazing, successful, handsome, writes beautifully, is insightful, has his own beautiful children” and now has returned to her, a gift she’d never expected. He became a surgeon but could never have known that he came from a long line of doctors and surgeons, including her father and his grandfather.

The wonder of it was all over her face. She didn’t know she could still be this surprised. She was lit from inside with awe, and it had changed everything.

The Shortest Day of the Year

Last Thursday was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. From here on, every day until the summer solstice (6 months from now) is longer and a little brighter. It’s the backstory of the season’s holidays. These are the days for new beginnings and for miracles like Christmas.

The authors of our calendars knew what they were doing when they began each year with a measure of awe.

Note to readers: in a different form, this content was included in my December 24, 2017 Newsletter, the second of what turned into three posts about awe.