sometimes people wonder how i am so well connected. they ask me how it’s possible that i know so many people in so many different places and contexts. i think the reason is because i try really hard not to write anyone off. i fundamentally believe in the possibility for each person i meet to be an awesome person. even if, by certain metrics, they aren’t one right now.
now, why do i believe that? because i believe in the possibility that all people can transform. i’ve seen it before (in friends, in guys i’ve mentored, in stories across history) and now this section is resilience is adding a little more fuel to my belief.
so there was this amazing study done (in boston, of course) about how different types of meditation affect the brain. i think an analogy might be helpful to explain the gist.
imagine a cart that is being pulled along by horses on a dirt road. the horses and cart come down this road 100 times a day. the road splits into two directions: let’s call them hate street and acceptance street. when the dirt road is new, it’s just as easy for the horses to pull the cart onto either street. however, if the horses go down acceptance street repeatedly, grooves begin to form in the road. these grooves make it easier over time for the cart to wind up on acceptance street.
basically, this is what happens in your brain with neural pathways as you meditate for hundreds of hours. in the book, they explain the science of this in a very precise way. the results from this study have definitely confirmed my belief in the ability for people to transform themselves.
and for that reason, i think everyone deserves to be seen not as who they are now, but as who they have the potential to be. second chances all around.
a few weeks ago, one of my closest friends, jonathan krones, got married. at his wedding reception, i met his aunt, gail. a few times a month she gives art & architecture history tours of the main branch of the boston public library, a place my co-founder and i often work out of. not only did i learn a ton about the bpl, i also learned how symbolic working there is for us. as always, this could be more elegant, but as i always say, better done than perfect.
at the opening ceremony for library back in the 1880s, poet oliver wendell holmes read a poem that included a line calling the library “a palace for the people.”
the two front statues are art and science.Â
the artist/craftsperson who designed the 7 tiled ceilings in the library wanted to use his work in the library as his calling card; it was his first piece in america.
there are a set of murals at the top of the stairs on the 2nd floor. the artist was parisian and never stepped foot in the building. the architect made a scale model of the building and sent it to the artist along with samples of the marble of which the room the murals would go in was made. the artist then painted the murals and sent them across the ocean where they were installed. aka - they were a virtual #thereisnothingnewunderthesun.
sometime recently on a tour, a 10-year old tour participant thought that two characters were on a digital tablet and cell phone when one was just looking at a stone tablet and the other just had their hand to their temple in contemplation. ha.
the library was funded mostly by the city government (first municipally funded library in the u.s.), but there was also state and private money to take it up a notch. #publicprivatepartnership?
the murals in the abbey room are that artists first murals. he was known as a portraitist. he tried a new thing when someone gave him a chance to stretch himself (which we believe in). ironically, the mural is of the search for the holy grail…
the more i move through the world, the more i value my facilitation training. in the last three years i’ve been trained by the interaction institute as a facilitator in many different ways. i’ve attended two facilitation trainings (facilitative leadership for social change & the masterful trainer) in addition to being context trained. most of the context training was through working with my amazing director, danielle coates-connor, but there have been moments where watching a situation and then debriefing it with a group of skilled facilitators has added to my facilitation capacity as well.
i’ve taken on a facilitative role in several contexts since leaving the institute. it continues to astound me how critical those skills have been to moving through the world effectively. the skills are even more important when trying to help groups of people make progress.
one thing that i’ve started to notice that i took for granted was the value of backseat facilitation.
now, in some, maybe most, contexts (like driving, lol), having a backseat contributor can be annoying or even undermining. in facilitation, having a backseat facilitator is amazing. sometimes, they’re even my favorite people in a meeting.
because the role of a facilitator is to help the group move forward, the more eyes analyzing the situation the better. as the facilitator at the front of the room, you can only see so much. a participant who is watching the situation from another vantage point is great. and then if that person is also trained with methods and tools to help the group move forward, sometimes they can make a skilled intervention that the lead facilitator wouldn’t have ever made. and sometimes, an effective intervention made by a skilled facilitator is the best way to keep a meeting on track.
anyway, three cheers for the backseat facilitators!
one of the guests on a recent obsessed with design surfaced a really good question. the guest was stephan ango, co-founder of lumi, and his thought-provoking question went something like this.
design is really good at problem solving. we teach designers to understand a context and constraints, and then they design (create) solutions.
so we (design schools and the design profession) teach students to be designers and to solve problems, but why don’t we teach problem finding? in fact, in many studio/project classes we teach students to redesign chairs and toasters (over and over and over), but that leaves the nagging question… do we really need a better chair?
now, from an episode of on being (which i can’t quite recall), i remember a woman talking about how and why we create. and, like she said, i believe that a fundamental part of human nature is to make things better, more beautiful than necessary, and in increasingly efficient ways.
but that said, design teaches and heralds people who are great problems solvers (think the eames’ and the eames chair)… but the problems those people solve don’t necessarily need solving. ango wonders why we don’t teach people to be better problem finders, and not just problem solvers. it’s easy to remake chairs over and over again.Â
why not ask bigger, harder questions, and see what design has to offer? sure, it may not “solve” the worlds greatest problems, but it’s sure to net the world more positive than making another goddamn chair.
in a parallel way (i think), academia does the same thing. in the process of writing my thesis, i was forced to narrow my topic so much that the question i ended up researching almost wasn’t even worth answering. this is a common phenomenon (ask anyone who has gone to graduate school where an output was a paper). and, in the scheme of my program, my thesis constraints were very liberal.
the phd process is that same problem narrowing process, but to the nth degree. the process creates people who are experts about a very specific slice of the world. often it’s debatable (as several of my current phd earning friends will attest) if their work and research is or will ever be meaningful.
so how do we train people to be better problem solvers and problem finders?
in his book, religion for atheists, he describes his own pathway through and around religion. he grew up in an staunchly secular household and was therefore never really exposed to religious spaces. but over time, he began to notice that despite his secularity, he really enjoyed some parts of religious contexts. he gave examples like collective rituals and incredible architecture. this inspired him to dig, from a research standpoint, into the history of those things that he enjoyed.
what he discovered was the religions tend to absorb things from the culture in which they are situated. in fact, in his opinion, some of the best parts (ideas, practices, rituals) of religions were incorporated into religious practices from non-religious people.
this sort of blew my mind even though conceptually it’s not that strange of an idea. all groups are situated in a context. in a very natural way, being relevant is important and about survival. if part of your job is to make sure other people have access to the thing (religion) you think is so great, you’ll do what it takes to share it. and that means maybe adopting some of the practices of your local culture in order to get people in the door.
alain says he goes in detail on this in his book, but even without reading it i understand his thought that one of the reasons many people find solace in religion, in spite of their own acknowledged dislike of the religion itself, is that the things they like aren’t actually religious at their root. they have been framed as religious practices, but they’re really not.
i’m not quite sure of the implications of this, but it’s definitely a cool thing to know and think about.
