yes person for all things community, connection, & storytelling
Entrepreneur Phil Levin on the importance of neighborhoods:
"You are going to spend 1000x more time in your surrounding 5 blocks than you will in any other neighborhood in your city. Thinking about all the things that New York City has—or the next city has—is a lot less important than thinking about the things within the five blocks where you live.
This planet is tended by innumerable invisible hands. When progress feels undetectable, I remind myself that much of life plays out on unseen stages. We must all tend to our inner gardens, as well as the gardens that we are but one small part of. To be human today is to exist at many scales at once, stories we can grasp and ones much larger than us... See more
One lesson to learn from his death is that if we are to live well to the end, we need to be able to freely discuss when a life is complete, without shame or taboo. Such a discussion may help people to know what they really want. We may regret their decisions, but we should respect their choices and allow them to end their lives with dignity.
Allowances — for grief, for pain, for childbirth, for illness — have been so hard to come by, I think, because we discount the body. Worse, we hold it in contempt compared to the mind, a proxy for religious spirit, so that the reality and risk of cruelty and brutalization are minimized and ignored.
I don’t think that humans can really move forward into whatever’s coming for us next without facing what we’ve done to our home and each other. Such a reckoning includes the beauty, joy, and community found in crisis, as well as the pain. The sociologist Donna Haraway calls this “staying with the trouble.”