#6 - leading the next era
#6 - leading the next era
on not being trapped by your perspective
POV: I’m Hima - a South Asian, medium brown skin, cis-gender, able-bodied, straight woman living as a settler on the Indigenous lands, T’karonto. I was born in Scarborough, raised Gujarati-Jain, middle-class, with English as my first language. My parents immigrated by choice via London and East Africa and are still together. I have two sisters and no extended family living locally. I experience ADHD symptoms. Much of what I write will be informed by some of these lived experiences.
random thoughts from insomnia so take with a grain of sea salt
I’ve been trying to be really good to my inner child - listening, affirming, reparenting them slowly and gently. I tell them I’m sorry and ask them to breathe with me.
And then it dawned on me, they might have a whole other future in a parallel reality. And then it dawned on me again, their future in a parallel reality could meet my future self in this reality.
I bet someone has experienced this - meeting someone who oddly feels like you. Well maybe, it is you.
contemplation
When the first settlers came to Turtle Island back in the 1600s about 100 years after Christopher Columbus egregiously claimed discovery - they arrived with the residue of living under monarchial governments in Europe, where you were either royalty or lived in subservience to royalty. Turtle Island, lush with green beds, and draped by lodgepole pine, red cedar, and white birch, trailing topography that echoed the ebbs and flows of human life that had been meticulously preserved through the love and devotion for the land by First Nation communities for centuries prior - very quickly became a place where European navigators and eventual colonizers could regain autonomy and agency.
At the time, Indigenous teachings as well as Confucian thought and traditions across India, Egypt, Greece Rome, understood humans as one part of an ecosystem alongside cosmic beings, spiritual forces, and the living world - all of whom were considered state actors and guides in the preservation, encouragement, and experience of life on earth. Instead of drawing from the wisdom of the Indigenous communities on the land - the French colonizers interpreted and enacted the advice of the Enlightenment philosophers and others including Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and John Locke who urged human dominion over nature and promoted human consciousness as separate from nature. Descartes, in particular, believed that the natural culmination of the human ego was rational autonomy and self-mastery. He perceived the natural world as chaotic, and thus similar to the self - something to eventually master and possess.
Just over 400 years later, these ideas are considered at the helm of the catastrophic and potentially irreversible damage humans have performed to the living world. Certainly, there are substantially more intricacies that contributed to the colonial project, notwithstanding navigators identifying schools of thought that mirrored and affirmed their own inner desire for power and control.
About 100 years after the first settlement on Turtle Island, in the 1700s, the now ‘America’ experienced a religious revival, known as the Great Awakening (flanked by the soon after Second Great Awakening), that was materialized from religious sermons given by the minister, Johnathan Edwards. The revival marked the introduction of evangelical traditions and the opening of educational institutions including Princeton, Dartmouth, and Brown, both of which have since had a lasting impact on American culture.
Many will refer to 2020 as The Great Awakening or The Great Reset - a period of spiritual and cultural renewal, of great and horrifying loss that inspired personal and systemic reckoning and recalibration, and a series of events, as divine as were challenging, that will define the foreseeable future. Others somewhat, unfortunately, have simply submitted to 2020 being the worst year ever, of zoom and gloom.
The ideas of this time — the sermons being given every microsecond on radio shows and Instagram captions, Tik Tok for you pages and Twitter storms, on CNN and Spotify playlists, living room couches, voice notes and audiobooks, and immeasurable ways more, are invisibly and visibly shaping our social, cultural, economic and political realities - steadily relocating power, what we care about and how we will piecemeal our 24 hours, 365 days of annual life.
The difference between now and centuries prior is that the ideas are many, not few. And while that is hellishly overwhelming in the midst of a public health crisis, with conflicting perspectives on coronavirus protocols compounded by algorithmic bubbles emboldening polarization, when real lives, health, and livelihoods are at stake - dogma, and single perspectives can be severely dangerous, and almost always will privilege some over others in the long-run.
The tension we are experiencing right now is that while expression has been democratized across digital platforms, creating the space for many ideas and perspectives, and we have more liberty to live values that aren’t religious or state-sanctioned while also realizing the breadth of our identity - these modern freedoms are pushing up against centralized power structures and systems that govern our material reality.
Perhaps what is most shocking and incomprehensible about the colonial project, slavery, and the systemic genocide and cultural erasure of Indigenous communities is that these ideas endured. Jacqueline Novogratz, the CEO of Acumen and author of A Manifesto for a Moral Revolution often talks about the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 - which devastated families and communities across the world and revealed mass complicity in selling junk asset classes - 'how did anyone not have the moral leadership to say this is wrong?’ she questioned.
‘The thing about systems is they are remarkably good at reinventing themselves,’ Cheryl Dorsey, the Executive Director of Echoing Green shared on a panel I attended. When you overwhelm a system - not the 1st time, 10th time, 100th, or even 1000th time, but perhaps the 10,000th - you start to weaken the infrastructure, until the house can no longer stand on itself, she continued. The system is being overwhelmed by new ideas and perspectives, and it is crumbling from the volume. Finally.
Through 2020, we saw the full spectrum of leadership in response to the crisis - from Jacinda Arden and Erna Solberg holding press conferences with children in the early days of the pandemic to Donald Trump suggesting Clorox as a treatment and Justin Trudeau aging a decade over his series of national addresses. In Canada/Ontario, the weakness in leadership perhaps was not taking a stance on protocols (though they were flimsy), but rather decrying and admonishing other perspectives, without seeing, acknowledging, or understanding the root causes.
The sacred geometries of our inner worlds are all looking for form, voice, and healing in the external world; they can be hard to pattern, but all the data is there. We no longer live in a world where people silence themselves in service of dominant, single perspectives; we live in a world of multitudinous perspective that is accessible and can have an influential platform. To be a leader today is to learn how to hold complexity, tension, and perspective, and see a path forward in the thick of multiple living truths, while continuously acknowledging and checking in on blindspots. It is to be firm, and compassionate. To unapologetically advocate for the rights and liberation of your community, and listen to deep-seated fears, and acknowledge intergenerational trauma that you may not fully understand.
I suspect we will closely study and learn from the leadership responses to the pandemic as we shape this next era, this new normal, this world that is an assemblage of millions of micro-worlds within a world, straddling the material, digital, spiritual, and cosmic realms - each with its own consciousness and possible future - that is demanding new shapes of leadership. Perhaps this leadership will be embodied, a conscious integration of masculine and feminine energies, a more-than-human centric point of view. Maybe it will be fluid, distributed, and grounded in community power. Hopefully, it will always design for the most vulnerable. Or even more, we may do away with the word leader altogether; recognizing the leadership and personal power innate to each human life.
For Aldo Leopold, a conservationist in the early 1900s, it wasn’t until he saw a dying fire in the eyes of a wolf that he killed that he realized the devastation the colonial and capitalist project was wreaking on the land and the continent. Unfortunately, for far too long, he was trapped by his own perspective.
References:
Spiritual Ecology, The Cry of The Earth by Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee
Masters and Possessors of Nature, Thomas W. Merrill
Great Awakening
tools to human
I came across these meditations by Reality Revolution* on TikTok, and wow they are legit. They took me places. Far out. The name is awful, the website is questionable and it is hard to find the content amidst the ads, but I have learned that is the code for really good in the spiritual world. There is a pukey air of the western bro, ‘get spiritual to be a millionaire,’ vibe, but the meditation experience exceeded my skepti. So, if you miss traveling then seriously, why are you not astral traveling?
*Also available on Spotify
liberation now
My muse these days as I dream about the next decade of creation and service is the Infinity Playbook by ForFreedoms, an artist-run platform dedicated to civic joy, healing, justice, and listening in the US. YES. EVERYTHING YES.
Hank Willis Thomas, one of the co-founders, is a really important and thoughtful artist, who created ‘The Truth Is I See You’ series - a public art project of large-scale speech bubbles with the word Truth on it, that invited people into mobile recording video booth, and invited them to finish the sentence, ‘the truth is…’
I sat in a workshop with him last weekend, and his question, ‘how do you insert play into politics?’ is sitting with me. ‘There is a lot of room for seriousness in play, but not a lot of room for play in seriousness,’ he closed.
obsessed with
Rah is a video and performance artist who identifies as Iranian-Canadian. Her work, Xenofuturist Manifesto, describes a set of tools for ‘hybrid and liminal beings’ who desire space and being outside of diasporic feelings of displacement and in-betweenness. The manifesto was translated into a 5-course dinner, where each course was conceived to describe the five themes of the manifesto: liminal melancholy, disidentification, expanding geographical imagination, new language, and limbo logic.
The food fused Iranian influences (e.g. rosewater, pomegranate) with fungal and fermented foods to signify deconstruction and transfiguration, creating a menu from the future that proposes a third way of being as the undefinable and uncategorizable other, beyond nationalism and essentialism.
It is beautifully rich in layers of self-inquiry, desire, imagination, and political constructs.