Cities and Citizens are Perpetually Unfinished
I was greeted with calm and care when I went for my first haircut after lockdown. It started with the phone call to make the appointment when the voice on the other end of the line asked if it was my first time back (yes) and told me what to expect: “Here are the changes we’ve made, and here’s what you need to do when you arrive.”
As our first lockdown lingered, I started to cut my hair because I had no option. Then I cut my hair because I was anxious about going to a salon where the COVID-19 virus could be lurking. Even though our Chief Medical Officer said it would be safe for salons to operate with prescribed safety protocols, it felt too risky. I felt anxious, and I had to warm up to the idea. (And I had the comfort of knowing I was capable of doing a “good enough” job of cutting my own hair. Everything I could see in a mirror was the same as people would see on a video call.)
A good enough haircut by Beth, April 2020. Photo credit: Beth Sanders.
My stylist friend and his team enabled me to arrive feeling a degree of calm because they were taking safety precautions seriously. My anxiety subsided throughout the appointment as they explained what they were doing and why and that it was working. There were no cases of COVID-19 having been passed from one person to another in the salon.
When I arrived for my first appointment, they had weeks to settle into a new cleaning and mask routine and have us wait outside until they were ready. But that extra touch, to have taken additional steps to ensure that those of us not yet familiar with the new salon reality knew what to expect, went a long way. They helped us help them serve us well because they told us how we needed to behave differently.
As I crossed the threshold from isolation and lockdown to close contact with someone outside my household bubble, I was hosted well. I continued to have my friend cut my hair despite the rising number of cases in my part of the world because they take action to ensure their safety, mine and their customers and friends’ too, is a priority.
An initiation of humanity
That first haircut I performed on myself was a small threshold to cross that was nerve-wracking and had no life or death implications. That first trip back to the salon was a more significant threshold, one full of fear and anxiety for everyone involved because we could be exposing ourselves to the virus that could harm or kill one of us or other people to whom we are close. All it takes is one wrong move, conscious or not.
This wee initiation of me into a new normal is a small version of what is happening within humans everywhere, at scale. My transition from one way of being to another is a fractal of many larger transitions. As a result, I always ponder two questions:
How do I choose to handle this transition I am making?
How do we choose to handle this transition we are making?
The keeners and the angries
I spend a lot of time with people in conflict about the improvements needed in the world around us. There are four general types of participants:
The keeners love to learn from anyone, anywhere
The willing participants are game to learn and explore
The venters need to let some steam off, after which they are willing to explore their ideas and others’ ideas
The angries are mad, before, during and after venting
These are not clean categories, rather the kind of energy we bring to community conversations. We experience any or all of these energies that affect how we make our way through the world. At times, we are keen to know and understand new things, and we also have those moments when we are just mad and angry. We all have those times when we need space to vent, get something off our chest so we can move on to what we want to give our attention to, and when we are purely angry.
In the latter two ways we show up in conversations about our cities, there is a degree of “fight energy.” Some of us live with brief moments of fight energy; others live with constant fight energy, others always on the cusp of fight energy, never knowing what will set us off into fight mode. It is essential to acknowledge that this fight energy is infectious and shields us from insight and awareness.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, “anxiety is a normal reaction to stress and can be beneficial in some situations. It can alert us to dangers and help us prepare and pay attention.” Anxiety has a time and place in our lives—a bit of anxiety went a long way in my hair stylist’s salon to ensure that a COVID case does not spread. When I feel quite anxious, when I might normally feel a need to vent about and then move forward, I can get stuck in angry mode.
Fear is another factor, and for the American Psychiatric Association, “fear is an emotional response to an immediate threat and is more associated with a fight or flight reaction—either staying to fight or leaving to escape danger.” Much like when I feel overly anxious, I worry about basic needs: safety and security when fear kicks in. Fear can kick in when I perceive a threat, not necessarily when there is a threat.
I have to choose to disable anxiety and fear responses and save them for when they are warranted. I have to choose to create the conditions and not let anxiety and fear run “the Beth show.”
Standing at thresholds
When standing at a threshold of choosing or being compelled to think differently or take new action, we feel unease and tension. Moreover, we may or may not be aware of the unease we are experiencing. We may or may not be aware of the fear coursing through us, with concerns for our safety and security when things are changing.
We are always standing at some threshold because, as I wrote in Nest City, our cities are perpetually unfinished:
Cities are perpetually unfinished because evolution is ongoing. We are always learning; we are always improving our lives around us, and this changes our cities, leaving us with more improvements to realize. The tension we feel between what we have and what we could have—improvement—is hard to live with, yet essential to our evolution.
Beth Sanders, Nest City
The world we make for ourselves always asks for improvement, requiring us to be uneasy and uncomfortable. The moment we work to improve the world around us, we create the conditions for another round of improvement.
9 practices to see, acknowledge and respond to our uneasy world
In Climate: A New Story, author Charles Eisenstein writes that civilization is in the midst of a phase transition, and “climate change and ecological limits provide the initiatory catalyst.” We stand, at this time, at innumerable thresholds, small and huge, yet being angry and fighting our way through these thresholds of initiation are not the only ways through uncertainty.
In Nest City, I identify nine practices to see, acknowledge and respond to our uncertain world:
1. Notice our response to the unknown. No matter how hard and smart we work, we cannon shake the unknown. The more conscious we are of our inner worlds, the better we can serve ourselves, others, and our cities.
2. Use “not knowing” purposefully. Curiosity can deepen our understanding of ourselves and our city habitats. As David Whyte writes in The Three Marriages, “If you think you know where you are, you stop looking.”
3. Recognize if it’s time for change. Changes resolve tension in our cities and come when conditions are right. If the right conditions are not present, be patient. If they are present, seek ways to enact the change.
4. Perform with purpose. We benefit when we choose to work with purpose—and with feedback loops that reveal when we are on or off track. When are the wheels spinning, and when is there traction? Take a risk and ask for feedback.
5. Stop and listen—to self and city. Breaking the performance momentum of busyness, we learn to stop and listen to ourselves. Check in to see if our work moves us, if it’s aligned with our changing habitat.
6. Organize for emergence. At every scale, from self to planet, we can choose to organize well by choosing our destination, embracing our learning journey, and allowing the city we need to emerge.
7. Choose where to pay attention. When we pay attention to problems, we get more problems. When we put attention to where we want to go, we move in a new direction.
8. Create feedback loops. City infrastructure is slow to change, but we can be wonderfully adaptable within that infrastructure. The customized feedback loops emerging with social media open opportunities to see cities more fully.
9. Adjust rules as purposes change. Rules are most useful when aligned with the purpose they are meant to serve. As purposes shift in response to our changing world, rules should shift, too.
When the time is right, it is ok to be angry and fight, and in the right circumstances, a forceful vent is also appropriate. And any other time, we have work to do to be willing and keen to explore and learn. Either of these approaches, fighting and venting, or a willingness to learn and grow, are infectious. We just need to choose the infection we wish to spread.
Our capacity to learn and grow allows us to improve our world. The upshot: we also create new challenges that will ask us, once again, to learn and grow and improve. We, along with our cities, are perpetually unfinished.
Reflection
What do I notice in myself right now—how am I experiencing calm and unease in my relationship with the world around me?
What am I itching to improve?
What tensions do I experience in the city, and how are they asking me to grow?