midwifing change

I think a lot of people my age and older have--consciously or not--imagined Trump’s success in 2016 as the commencement of a kind of brief chaotic period through which we merely need to survive, until a new period of stability can commence. This is the logic behind billing every election as “the most important of our lives”: We just need to beat

“ The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. ”

— Antonio Gramsci, philosopher, linguist, journalist, writer and politician, in Prison Notebooks

Through our ability to acknowledge the layers of loss, we can truly discover our capacity to respond, to protect, and to restore what has been damaged.

The problem (or at least one of the problems) is that the twin edicts to simultaneously optimize your team and life and to be flexible in light of an uncertain future are in opposition to each other. Optimization presumes a kind of certainty about the circumstances one is optimizing for, but that certainty is, more often than not, illusory.

“While traditional materialism is rooted in the present, Speculative Materialism – from the Latin ‘speculat’ meaning “observed from a vantage point” – looks to the horizon. Rather than designing materials to last for time immemorial, what about redesigning materials to degrade and be regenerated cyclically over time? […]

When we mourn the extreme levels of suffering in the world together as a community, we can be held and hold others as we each go through our own personal cycles of grief, or what the Germans refer to as Weltschmerz (a deep sadness about the imperfection of the world). Such communal solidarity can get us through our darkest moments and ensure we