1. We come from somewhere. So do our problems, and so must our solutions. To paraphrase Walter Brueggemann, keeping us imprisoned in the eternal now is one of the oldest tricks in the book for teaching learned helplessness. The loss of history and myth — the stories that tell us who we are, where we come from, and how to live — cuts deeply indeed.
2. Another consolation of history is perspective. We can put our problems in context without surrendering to relativism or apathy. Rather than arguing about whose challenges are biggest or most urgent, we can put our own challenges in order and set to work on them.
3. From perspective and prioritization come agency. When we know how things got this way, how they relate to other challenges across time, and how they relate to each other, we can begin working to make them better. Just as productivity isn’t always effectiveness, flailing isn’t the same as agency.

Earlier this week, I was on a call in which an organization announced a change in structure and leadership.

The person who’s stepping up to lead this evolution has been involved in the work for years but has not been a widely-recognized face or out-front leader.

Broadly speaking, there’s only one chance to make a first impression; even in a context and culture with very high trust, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one eagerly watching and listening to see how this person would step up to define and inhabit the new role.

From my perspective, he nailed it. Here’s how:

• He was honest and humble, acknowledging right up front that he’s a little-known insider with big shoes to fill.
• At the same time, he had his own voice — and used it. He took questions as if he were in charge (which, of course, he is).
• Most of all, he projected calm, he talked about calm, and he shared some of his personal practices to cultivate calm. Some cultures are trained to expect rock-’em sock-’em leaders for one reason or another, and some need a sudden shot of energy — but this isn’t one of those cultures, and he isn’t one of those leaders.

Seeing how this person stepped up has already shifted my attention and changed my practice. It’s hard enough to keep oneself calm, and it takes still more work and practice to cultivate the kind of calm that can radiate throughout an organization (especially over Zoom).

Calm might not be an obvious metric for leadership or work, but it’s one we might want to look for more intentionally.

To everything there is a season, but I, for one, am not looking for more frenetic leadership right now.

It’s now officially autumn — and, in the United States, we’re more than six months and 200,000 deaths into our ongoing experience with Covid. Sadly, it looks like we could be in for a very difficult fall and winter; before we go there, it’s worth a moment to look back on the first six months.

Five noticings and reflections thus far:

1. Like most slogs, this one is longer and harder than anticipated at the beginning. Like so many people, I thought in March that Covid would be the shock that awakened us to the error of our old ways and finally led to real change — at work, in politics, and in our culture. Obviously, we’re not all the way there yet, and we can’t even agree on where “there” might be.
2. “Uncertainty” and related words (volatility, complexity, and ambiguity spring to mind) are still treated as epithets in our culture — obstacles to be overcome rather than basic realities of life. Of course, these are the basic realities of so much historical and contemporary human existence, and even this relatively tiny peek beyond the thick curtains of our own culture has unsettled all of us and completely undone all too many of us.
3. The status quo is a ridiculously powerful force, and change happens incredibly fast. What do you consider “normal?” And how much has that changed since Bush v. Gore, since Facebook, since the iPhone, since 2016, or since March?
4. As Steve Pressfield points out, Resistance gets stronger as we go through a dip — even though we all wish it were the other way around. This is like swimming, not skiing.
5. The hard part is that we can’t go back, we can’t stay here, and we can’t really move forward yet, either. It’s tempting to give up hope or resign all agency, but that certainly won’t help. We can make progress even if we cannot move forward.

Stay safe out there.

The tension we’re all being forced to live with is this:

On the one hand, no one wants to “go gentle into that good night.” (There’s a separate conversation to be had about whether “resistance” is working; the point is that so many people feel such a strong urge to “resist” in the first place.)

On the other hand, we must — must — be gentle on ourselves and each other. (This is, of course, easier said than done: but desolation and desperation truly do not help.)

If you’re reading this, you probably haven’t been preparing for this situation your whole life. It’s likely you have some expendable time and income. You might speak of uncertainty or complexity as if they are obstacles to be overcome, rather than the baseline qualities of human existence.

It’s also likely that all of this — the tension, the felt lack of preparation, the overall context — keeps needling you just where you’re most vulnerable, which only makes the tension harder to bear.

Paradoxes like this are tough. Which is exactly why we need to be gentle.

[HT to Em for sharing the gift of Aldous Huxley]

It seems to me there’s an opportunity here. A chance to look more critically at our exceptionalism narrative, and at the broader array and evidence of human experience.

“It couldn’t happen here,” “it can’t happen now,” and “it won’t happen to me” are flimsy articles of faith — especially when you consider that the American experience is the selective recording of a particular 200-year slice of history.

What are the chances that, starting with the same human essence as everyone else, on the same planet as everyone else, we’re subject to the same vicissitudes as everyone else?

If we’re going to “build back better,” perhaps there’s a chance to lay stronger foundations. And we could start by acknowledging our similarities and fragility, rather than asserting our difference.

I read a lot this past week. But I stumbled across one phrase that won’t leave my mind: “cancer of the wallet.”

This is an evocative term for the diseases and deaths of despair: the ill effects of existential stress that pile up in people who can’t see a way to maintain a livelihood or way of living.

This, according to Yale historian Timothy Snyder, is “What Ails America.” His diagnosis is more academic than “cancer of the wallet,” but it’s just as damning:

We would like to think we have health care that incidentally involves some wealth transfer; what we actually have is wealth transfer that incidentally involves some health care. If birth is not safe, and is less safe for some than for others, then something is wrong. If more money is extracted from young adults for health care, but they are less well than older generations, something is wrong. If the people who used to believe in the country are killing themselves, something is wrong. The purpose of medicine is not to squeeze maximum profits from sick bodies during short lives but to enable health and freedom during long ones.

Can anything be done? In the Atlantic, Adam Serwer cautiously hopes that it might. Considering what the ascendence of the movement for Black lives might mean for our politics, he wonders if we might be on the verge of “A New Reconstruction.”

At more and more levels of society, the dots are starting to connect: the United States might be a great country, but it also has a mean streak — a historic and present reality of systems that are actively injurious to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Learning to live with this tension — America is an ideal, and it is deeply sick — is the political challenge of our times. And the reality hits hard: a white male history professor at Yale is the epitome of a certain kind of privilege, yet the hospital system was thoroughly unimpressed.

As the financial crisis unfolded, Warren Buffett famously compared the rescue of the banking system to resuscitating a patient on the operating table. Now, as the Covid crisis drags on, it’s the citizenry at large that’s on the table.

I’m not holding my breath for a competent or compassionate response from the thousandaire embodiment of what ails America. Cancer of the ego is an evil malady indeed.

Simple, but not easy:

1. What are you going to do differently this year?
2. What are you going to do differently next year?

In the short run, everything hangs on winning.

In the long run, everything hangs on how winning is handled.

If you’re tired of all the “winning” of the past four years (now costing about 1,000 lives each day in the United States alone), what are you prepared to say, do, or not do in order that fellow citizens might be won over rather than defeated?

A tale of two political philosophies — and two business models.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a “news” piece with the scintillating headline, “Does Biden Need a Higher Gear? Some Democrats Think So.”

The subtitle continues the non-specific handwringing: “… [S]ome Democratic officials in battleground states are warning that Joe Biden may not be doing enough to excite voters.”

As a headline, this is a total nothingburger worthy of the Weather Channel. (Will disaster strike? Some meteorologists think so. / Some forecasters warn of potentially apocalyptic rains, while others anticipate merely a deluge.)

This raises at least two questions that sound crotchety but might turn out to matter.

The first is whether we want to keep rewarding the paper of record for shape-shifting into a text-heavy version of CNN. The reason people fish with worms is because fish reliably bite them; when we reward a newspaper for such a wriggly headline, we can and should expect to see more.

The second is whether we can break our addition to “excitement” in politics. The rest of the world moves at the speed of TikTok, but the presidency is a four-to-eight-year custody of the nuclear codes and national mores. And it’s now undeniable that rabidity is the logical extension of excitement — especially in the context of our media culture.

The problem was neatly summed up in the Financial Times the day before, by the columnist Janan Ganesh. His column was titled, “The Welcome Lack of Enthusiasm for Joe Biden” and the subtitle truly says it all: “As the U.S. has found, worshipping political leaders is weird and pernicious.”

I’ve had about all the excitement I need from the celebrity apprentice. Color me enthusiastic for an effective politician.

“Every time I skydive, I land safely.”

That’s an easy worldview to default to. After all, every time I overeat I still live. Every time I invest it eventually pays off. Every time I drive somewhere I get there safely.

And every time I’ve voted, I’ve woken up in a more-or-less functional republic the next day.

The tension, simply, is this: we can’t walk around constantly worried about pianos falling on our heads. Life isn’t a cartoon, and that level of fear is no life at all. But we also can’t afford to completely ignore the fact that a falling piano can be extremely hazardous to life and limb.

“In all of my 20/30/40/50/60/70 years, I’ve never seen ___________.”

Right. But this is 2020.

I’m heartsick over the fate of the West — not just what’s happening now, but what’s likely to happen in the coming years and decades.

A couple of days ago, a friend sent me a picture of the town where I used to live. People are standing on one side of the river, watching huge plumes of smoke over the other side of town. (It’s worth noting that the side that’s burning is, generally speaking, home to more lower-income and Native people. This is the big story of climate change demonstrated in the experience of one small town.)

Yesterday, the New York Times and ProPublica released a large, detailed survey of how climate change is already affecting the United States and what kind of changes we might expect over the coming decades.

In short words, we should expect to be living in a vastly different country within five presidential terms. And if that sounds abstract or far away, consider how much things have changed since the year 2000.

People are really, really bad at accurately assessing long-term risks and effects. We eat the potato chip. We fail to prepare for the pandemic. We assume all mortgages only go up in value.

Sadly, it’s clear that exponential change is upon us. Of course the details will be vigorously debated and the history will differ from the forecasts, but it’s (past) time to acknowledge that leaders’ biggest job going forward will be to assess, communicate, and mitigate the risks of global warming atmosphere cancer — and respond to the inevitable effects.

Look at those maps. Look at some photos. Look at your house [the investment that only goes up; home].

Any questions?