reflection : Page 3 : mackenzian

July 23, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Building from the ground up

Octavia Estelle Butler signing a copy of Fledgling after speaking and answering questions from the audience. The event was part of a promotional tour for the book. — Photo by Nikolas Coukouma (CC BY-SA-2.5)

“Build from the ground up,” she said. “Don’t try to retro-fit.”

I’d been watching too many shed design and refurbishment shows on cable, and mentioned a longstanding daydream about building a shed/reading room/art space/introvert cave to a friend who’s been a realtor for years.

“Having to run A/C through those old houses in D.C.? Changing all the windows? Oh, no. Build it right the first time.”

I love this principle. And if societies were more like sheds, this is exactly what we’d do.

The problem is that what’s considered “right” in both shed- and society-building changes with each generation. Engineering and ethical standards evolve. And in so many spheres, from technical design to human rights, yesterday’s good is barely today’s average.

Retrofitting two-hundred-year-old national value systems provokes so much backlash, so much violence. That violence isn’t just the frustration of the long-unheard, as King said of rioters during the 20th Century’s civil rights movement. The violence is also and largely the dominant culture rejecting what it perceives as outsiders attempting to change the rules under its nose.

The rules, the status quo says, are fine.

But all is not well. The insulation is shot; the windows are draughty; the AC keeps breaking down; people are killed fast and killed slow. The root of the status quo keeps producing rotten outcomes because everything, everything, bears after its kind.

So how do we proceed? Reformists and radicals have disagreed on this in every historical movement and still do today.

Reformists imagine that less energy is needed to tweak, twist, or redirect what already exists than to create from scratch. I get it. Radicals look at the root, recognize it’s got to go, and want to dig it out: for them it seems less trouble to build from scratch than to manage the resistance of everyone who’s already attached to the present. I get it.

Our writers and prophets tell us we can build new worlds while still in the midst of old ones. It must be possible: there’s no way to live in a house we’re tearing down. Whatever the appearance, though, we have to keep molding the world we have so it can become the world we want. And whatever the outcomes―we aren’t promised anything―we have to keep pressing. Octavia Butler put it thus:

The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist.” ―Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

July 18, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Wisdom requires action

At the Justice Conference in Chicago last month, local minister Rev. Harvey Carey provoked peals of laughter from attendees when he talked about people going from conference to conference, writing great ideas in their notebooks, going home mountain-top high, and then never applying those insights to their lives or work.

I laughed too, in the key of “What do you know about my life”?

In December last year, as part of my year-end audit, I banned myself from conference travel and business training—books, webinars, and web-courses—until I had recovered from FY 2015 and was practicing principles I’d already learned.

So I tracked Creating Change 2016 from a distance, sent goodwill to my peers at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, kept busy working locally, and bought nothing.

My bank account loved me for it. And I created room to rest, digest, and build/rebuild in ways that make sense for me.

Graphic and web branding specialist Brittany Melton (@xobritdear) advises early-stage freelancers and professional bloggers to do likewise: let aggressive marketing pass them by, and not over-invest in supplemental training during any period when they need to focus instead on implementing core practices. It’s core practices that will sustain us long term.

When we instead over-consume resources, we risk talking about doing, talking about planning, planning to do, planning to plan, and building up an amazing stockpile of planners; we meet with world-changers and are so inspired by their speech and example, but somehow we close the book, course, or conference, and routine life never changes.

This is such a waste of good resources, and there are better ways to operate. In an article on expressive and other regular forms of writing, Gregory Ciotti shares the psychological case for consistent action:

In both emotional intelligence and in hard sciences like mathematics, writing has been shown to help people communicate highly complex ideas more effectively. Writing helps eliminate ‘it sounded good in my head’ by forcing your hand; brains forgive fuzzy abstractions, prose does not. —Gregory Ciotti, July 15, 2016

So

Audit yourself. We’re in the third quarter of the year now. More importantly for me, whatever your schedule is, I’m in the third quarter of my year. I still have projects open that I thought I’d have completed in April. I have two proposals hanging in the ether. And there are eight books in various states of partly-read on my desk right now.

Regaining balance in the midst of a non-stop schedule has two equally essential parts: (1) insisting on stops and pauses and Sabbaths and weekends, so that life is no longer non-stop; and (2) committing to steady action that can clear commitments in a reasonable time.

Learn to force your own hand. I organized and took classes at a week-long intensive this time last month, and wrote my insights down immediately. I didn’t want to wait a month or more; I wanted to receive, evaluate, digest, and implement.

Because I know what it can be like. “So excited” becomes “Woah, look at all these emails I missed” and “Let me catch up with that” becomes “Remember that class? Great, distant memory.”

Wisdom requires more of us. Honor what you’re learning by doing something with it.

July 17, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Checking your lenses

Close-up of brown-rimmed eye-glasses with light brown tinted lenses. — Photo credit: Jean Scheijen

I had an eye exam today, my first in too long.

I’ve had my current glasses for nearly a decade and no substantial changes to my vision. But there was a surprise.

There’s a defect in my lenses.

It’s a small thing, a little whorl in the glass that warps light as it passes through UV-responsive film. The light is warped before it hits my eyes because of that defect.

I had gotten so used to it, to cleaning the lenses despite it, that I didn’t even remember it until in the big chair next to a tray of other lenses and an opthalmologist raising her eyebrow at me.

“It must have been the heat,” I mumbled. It could have been heat weakening the glass over a decade. My lenses could have been poorly manufactured to begin with. The “why” of the defect now didn’t matter as much as the fact that I had gotten used to it and I was making up excuses for it.

How much like life that was.

In a room devoted to nothing but getting me the best lenses possible based on what I need today, I sat acclimated to old, scratched, and dodgy lenses and explaining why they weren’t so bad.

I walked away with a much more current prescription and yet I’m still wearing my old glasses. I have plans to replace them, just not today. I tested out alternatives with my pupils dilated so much I couldn’t read the labels on the display or the price tags, and I didn’t buy. I needed change, and I have not changed.

The lenses that we use to perceive and understand the world can serve us for many, many years without obvious problems. And yet, because being human means being in motion, a constant locus of change, that consistency can become a disservice.

Whether you’re leading others or working with teammates, keep an eye on your lenses. Take the time to inspect the frameworks you use to perceive, interpret, and evaluate people, arguments, and events. Challenge yourself to make sure that your lenses match where you are in life today, not merely where you once were.

And when you have the opportunity to adopt better-fitting lenses, take it.

July 12, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Simplify: Heart First

Photo: Elaine Casap — Photo credit: Elaine Casap

“Just look through the microscope.”

It’s a phrase based on now-mythic stories about Galileo’s unsuccessful debates with the religious leaders and church-governed philosophers of his time who, he said, refused to look at the natural world’s evidence because of their presuppositions about it.

Particularly in times of stress and conflict, one of a leader’s most important skills is the ability to simplify, to strip down premises conventionally taken for granted and so make room for observation.

By being aware of what is happening, I begin to sense how it is happening…To become aware of what is happening, I must pay attention with an open mind. I must set aside my personal prejudices or bias. Prejudiced people see only what fits those prejudices.” —John Heider

The challenge is that we’re all prejudiced in some regard. Implicit bias isn’t just something that influences how Those People Elsewhere read the world and engage us; it’s also something that influences how we read the world and engage them.

I find meditation helpful, but not because it is as Heider supposes a way for me to “set aside” my biases. Instead I find it simply gives me a little more room to recover from stings and slung barbs, to keep walking through life heart-first rather than junk-first.

Especially these days when the world is wearying and people are presumptuous, I need that. Perhaps we all do.

July 1, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Ending Well

Life is as much endings as it is beginnings and maintenance.

But I never got taught how to close things down, and entrepreneurs don’t easily tell the stories of the business ideas that failed or the companies that folded. We talk about startups, not shutdowns. We teach whole courses about how to get new jobs, and none about how to leave old ones.

There’s a bias toward Genesis and origin stories, and it won’t always serve me.

As the wild animals in my yard taught me recently, every process has two ends and a middle: birds that ingest seed will also digest it and egest it. I can’t contribute to the ingestion stage and expect to escape its outputs!

So too with writing, and projects, and relationships of all kinds: I can’t build a life on beginnings alone and also need to learn to end things well.

Please share your how-to-handle-endings wisdom with me on Twitter.

June 2, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Our Greatest Power

Photo credit: (c) Keisha E. McKenzie. All rights reserved.

I recently spent a week around the desert and red rocks of Central and Northern Arizona, and ended up at the Grand Canyon, an incredible example of what stone and water can do if given enough time. From the lip of compressed rocks, high above a river that’s carved dirt for millennia, my decades are a blip.

We can’t reclaim life as it was when the Canyon was wet and forested. We can imagine what it might become if we don’t get industrial emissions under control, and the National Park Service has begun warning visitors about the impacts of climate change on sites like the Grand Canyon. But not all of those impacts have arrived yet. That’s a good thing.

Where we actually live our lives is in the present. Here is where we get to choose how we interact with each other and how we manage the resources we’ve found around us and have developed to suit our needs, wants, and dreams.

One of the reasons that deeply transformative change seems so distant sometimes is because we projected it out into the future. We know we’ve never achieved the balance we want, and we rightly recognize that manifesting it now is a huge task, so it seems safer and a lot less drastic to say, “The next generation will change the world. Not ours.”

“When the next President is elected, we’ll be able to get more done.”
“Can’t wait for heaven; there’ll be no injustice there.”
“We can only hope.”

These are all statements that function as an escape valve: they release the tension of living in a world that doesn’t work for all. If we’re not on the frontlines of impacts, we can call for moderation and patience. And we can defer our own responsibility to act today because someone, somewhere, at some other time, will take care of it.

No.
Concentrate your energy, attentiveness, and creativity on today.

Be here now. Our greatest power is in the here and now.