humble ramble vol 8: enchanted by possibility
Firstly, I’m writing this because I’m cultivating more space for enchantment in my life — small things, big things, let's remind each other that our world is indeed enchanting ✨
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Almost a decade ago, while campaigning (& marathoning) for the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, I wrote a short piece entitled, Why Now is Always a good time to start. The article shared my experience jumping into something (marathon running) that I had no idea I could do, and that embracing the unknown first in 2010 opened doors to learning and community that I had never imagined. That adventure began with a sense of possibility and agency — a feeling that I can.
I was reminded of this sentiment by the brilliant writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, in her recent article about why climate despair is a luxury none of us can afford. Despair, Solnit notes, implies certainty — that things will not end up well, particularly in the time of emergencies, certainty doesn’t exist. Written in her characteristically empowering manner, it made me think about how we can cultivate this sense of agency and possibility in our own lives and beyond, including naming the challenges we need to overcome do to so.
Emerge (-ncy):
I think a lot about the polycrisis (aka our converging planetary crises) whether I intend to or not. It is nearly impossible to not be reminded of the impacts of our self-induced climate emergency, through media or our physical surroundings. The title of this piece is possibility and now we are talking about catastrophe? But this is the point. There is nothing certain about times of emergency, they are inherently uncertain, unpredictable, and brimming with extraordinary possibility.
Let’s pause and think about from where ‘emergency’… emerged: “The nouns “emergency” and “emergence,” as well as the verb “emerge,” are ultimately derived from the classical Latin ēmergere (to rise out or up).”
The world that we have come to know is cracking apart, the world of binaries and hierarchies, of stability and linearity. That story (and that's all it is) is coming undone before us, now. That unravelling is the emergency, and the opportunity, into those cracks we must delve and explore together, to create new stories and new lives. From those cracks will emerge a new world, and way of living.
Báyò Akólomáfé, author, philosopher and Chief Curator of the Emergence Network describes this falling apart beautifully,
There are rumours that the cracks are not so foreboding. And that there might be a strange abundance in those ruptured places. Legend has it that stolen people arriving on Brazilian shores centuries ago found a way to weave posthumanist politics of care, a new theology of smelling and eating and tasting and sensing, a treasonable altar of gods and goddesses in their fugitive terreiros. They shut their eyes and danced with hyphenated dieties: they choreographed strange sanctuaries. They stayed with new sites of power.
Perhaps that unsettling counter-imperial strain of failure that reframes the normal, calling for new response-abilities, new dis-abilities and the making of sanctuaries, stirs in our epidemiologically inflected landscapes, in this age of the “hyposubject” and the fugitive. Perhaps there is nowhere else to go but into the cracks. Perhaps our deepest activism is in the dancing that might yet be.
Recognizing ‘neoliberal imaginings’ and our bias toward continuity.
Báyò Akólomáfé’s words are fugitive in our social discourse around the state of the world. In fact, headlines like “As Climate Pledges Fall Short, a Chaotic Future Looks More Like Reality” that simply in its framing usurps agency. This article in New York Times opinion pages: Yes, Greenland’s Ice is Melting. But…. is representative of the desperate and incoherent (though prominent) attempts to paper over the widening cracks. This piece argues that we should trust markets to save us, the same markets that generate ExxonMobile’s highest quarterly profits EVER reported: $17.9Bn, against the backdrop of the ‘supercharged summer of climate extremes.’
The narrative that transformative change is not needed is increasingly at odds with the evidence of the state of emergency around us, and the nonlinearity of the escalating changes already manifesting. But that doesn’t mean we won’t see tactics of climate delay wheeled out in the weeks and months and years to come. The short term is the only terrain to win for those benefiting from incremental changes, the more they can delay, the more money they can make.
So yes there are external forces and framing of issues that challenge our sense of agency, but there are also internal cognitive pre-dispositions to be aware of. One of these is the normalcy bias, which is defined as:
“…a psychological state of denial people enter in the event of a disaster, as a result of which they underestimate the possibility of the disaster actually happening, and its effects on their life and property. Their denial is based on the assumption that if the disaster has not occurred until now, it will never occur.”
Our superpower: we are fractals.
It is easy to feel that the individual work we are doing, either related to climate or other areas needing broad social change, has little effect. So many things seem not to be changing, at least not at the speed necessary. Much of our news is shared with framings that induce anxiety without agency. The form of our news often borne from is a business model that ultimately serves, yep, the interests of those accumulating wealth and power. These stories make us feel like we can’t change things or that it’s too late.
It’s not too late.
Perhaps let this post remind you of the inherent incongruence of anyone saying or framing messages that imply or explicate certainty in the context of a systemic, planetary crisis.
When faced with the thoughts of the intangible nature of social change, of transformation or of revolution, I think of Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit’s unforgettable treatise on the longitudinal, non-linear nature of broad social change, and I am heartened. How our behaviours, individually or collectively, influence the actions of others across time and space, and how the headlines of triumphs are the culmination of countless campaigns and connections. Intrinsic to the notion of hope is its openness to uncertainty and possibility and as adrienne maree brown describes, we are fractals and our behaviors matter:
There are patterns of the world that repeat at scale — look at ferns, crowns of broccoli, look at the way water moves through deltas and the way blood moves through our bodies, look at our brains with their synapses like galaxies. What are the patterns of behavior and belief we need to practice at the smallest scale of relationships in order to create new collective patterns of survival and delight in our miraculous human experience?
In fact, I would argue that there has never been so much possibility residing in our individual actions as does today. At the same time, there have never been so many people from all walks of life and all over the world, working on any given issue as there are humans contributing to a livable future planet related to climate work. And the number grows every day. A fundamental part of this collective work is sharing those stories because we need everyone, and for everyone to see that they are a part of this bigger story we are writing together.
Just last week I connected with a community at All We Can Save that inspires me to dream about what is possible all over again, igniting a new sense of agency and connection that invigorates my soul.
Fellow humans, take heart and start. Start anew, begin again. A revolution is happening right now, if you look you will find the wondrous kaleidoscope of humanity making it so. Let us rally around our possibilities.
Let us be enchanted by what is possible.
✨💜🙏🏼
-Matt
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“We don’t have to wait for anything at all. What we have to do is start.”
— Octavia Butler
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PS. Amar, if you are reading this, perhaps NYC Marathon 2023, sub-3 together? Seems enchanting to me, 10 years after 3:01.37.
