Institutional Kindness

I was thinking about this already. But then

this morning, in this moment of, what I have set aside as

vacation, this thing happened. I opened a library book, a

physical paper library book, that I've been working my way

through in a kind of eccentric, inconsistent way. It's called

the Sabbath World. And the author's name is Shulevitz. And

in this book, she's talking about this kind of contrast

between the modern world and the very concept, the very idea of a

Sabbath, of a set aside, non working time, that's not just

individual but communal. And as part of her work around this, as

part of her conversation around this, she talks about the way

that time became standardized over time, it didn't, it didn't

become standardized right away, it became standardized in chunks

and bits, until finally, we had a global sense of time. And with

that global sense of time came a global sense of immediacy, a

global sense of something happening everywhere all the

time at once. And with that sense of everything happening

everywhere at once comes this sense of overwhelm, which is

what I was just saying, yesterday. I made an Instagram

reel. And I talked about how I need my I need my information in

buckets. And I was also talking to a client. And I was saying, I

don't think we need as much completeness as we expect

ourselves to have. I think, this internet, global reach, where we

have access to pretty much everything that has been written

down, and everything that has been spoken into a microphone or

recorded in some way. And access to so many people and so many

experts in so many opinions and so many ideas, I think we have

this idea that we have to first go and collect all of the

information, like we're all PhD students of everything. And

while I think that there are times and places where it's

useful to have as much information as humanly possible,

I'm not sure that this much information about everything is

humanly possible. In fact, I think it is not. It's okay to

read three or four opinions and then formulate your own and then

share it with five or six people. And that's the end of

it. It's okay to have human scale interactions, not just

with other people, but with data, with information. With

transformative experiences. We don't have to have all of the

peak optimized things happening all at once. It's okay to

operate on a human scale. And in fact, it may be better if we

operate on a human scale, because when we try to operate

on anything that isn't a human scale, often we amplify our

mistakes before we know that they're happening. If I say an

unkind or unwise thing to one person, sitting at a cafe table,

or over breakfast, that unkind thing reaches that one person

and that one person, if they are a kind and wise member of my

community may reflect back to me that I have said, an unkind

thing. And then that unkind thing goes no further, it has no

larger impact than that. I said this to this person, it will

ripple outward for that person in some way it may ripple into

our relationship. But it's not everywhere, all at once with

that mistake magnified. I have an opportunity to correct myself

in small community, I have an opportunity to grow unobserved,

almost unobserved, I have an opportunity to become, on a

human scale, in a human way, at a human pace. Broadcast is a

very complicated way to learn about yourself. And right now,

social media, the internet, everything, is kind of forcing

us into that. But we have choices. In most cases, we have

choices. We don't have to allow that to be the thing. We don't

have to allow that to be the model. In some ways, we're all

prototyping all the time. We're prototyping ourselves, we're

exploring ourselves. It's not... it's like those sketches that an

artist does before they decide how they're gonna do the big

painting, they just kind of, you know, put little sketches in the

corners of their notebooks, they experiment with poses, they

experiment with lighting, they experiment with color palettes

that don't actually have any figure in them. They're just

trying to get the skin color, right, or the color of the

light, right, or those flowers in the background, or this

really weird color of yellow, and they can't figure out how to

make it. So they're doing all these test swatches and test

sketches and experiments, how will this work? How, what if I

put this body three inches to the left? What will that do for

the composition? And we're doing that with ourselves, too: test

sketching. We say something out loud to three friends. And they

reflect back to us what that looks like, when you stand back

from the easel. Then we can make adjustments before we're

invested in hundreds of thousands of dollars of

materials and time and energy and, and before our soul is

really invested in that thing so deeply. We just test it. And

that's why community is so important. Because when someone

test... balloons? When someone test... pilots? When someone

tests something in front of a small audience, and you're part

of that small audience, you are the place where that thing

becomes encouraged or it doesn't, where it grows, or it

doesn't, where it emerges or doesn't. And you are part of the

possibility that it could emerge in a different way that there's

a gem of truth, but there's also a thorn, and we need to work out

how to have less thorn and more gem, or just less thorn, maybe

the gem is perfect as it is. Or maybe the thorn is important,

maybe it needs two thorns. But that's what we do in community,

in small community, in unamplified voices in

unmagnified spaces. So if I think about this concept of

immediacy, of everything everywhere all at once, all the

time, it's overwhelming. And if I think about adding my voice to

that, that morass, it can be terrifying. What if I do it

wrong? What if I get this thing wrong? And it's amplified and

magnified? And it does massive amounts of harm? On the other

hand, what if I have a really good idea, and I don't share it,

because I'm afraid that it's going to do harm? How do we

resolve this? We resolve this in small community, we resolve this

in intimacy, we resolve this in trusting relationships, I don't

expect everyone to have a trust relationship with me. But the

people I do have a trust relationship with and who do

trust me, those are the people. Those are the people that I rely

on. To help me do less harm. I don't expect to do no harm. But

those are the people I rely on to help me do less harm, to help

me do more good, to figure out which things are advancing just

my own curious energy and which things are advancing some larger

agenda. Some things aren't interesting beyond the confines

of my own head or my own pad of paper; other things, anything is

possible. Other things are liberating. Other things are

transformative. Other things. Other things have an effect that

I have no way of predicting. In which respect, I'm a lot like

some of the tech mega giants. I don't think Google predicted

where they would be. I don't think Facebook predicted where

they would be. I certainly don't think Twitter predicted where

they are at this point. But you start with an idea that might be

transformative. You start with a thought, you start with a

noticing of something, a place where the shoe rubs against

everyone's foot. Maybe not everyone, maybe just a lot of

feet. And you're like, Hey, I'm pretty sure I can avoid that

blistering problem here. Let me see if I stick this moleskin in

there, if that helps. Let me see if I can get that rock out of

there completely.

But to figure this out, and to figure out how to focus, how to

how to make it smaller, how to find our communities, our small

spaces, where we can test things before we bring them to the

arena, before we bring them to the stage, before we bring them

to the globe. We have to forget for a moment that everything is

happening at once. We have to set down for a moment, the mind

blowing, comprehensive immediacy of mutual time. And instead we

look at when the sun rose in my window, we look at when the

flowers bloomed in my neighborhood. I look at my

neighborhood with my people and my neighbors. You look at your

neighborhood with your people and your neighbors. There are

people beyond our spaces, that's important to know. But we don't

start there. We start wrestling with our own group of two or

five or twelve. We start wrestling with ourselves, with a

book, on a quiet morning.

Or when we just can't do the laundry anymore.

Or when someone asks us for help. We start the wrestling

with ourselves, with our own communities. With our small

groups. It's important to have a small space, and a place where

time stops for a moment. Whether that's a Sabbath or whether

that's a room where you close the door and there are no

clocks. I sometimes try to imagine what it would be like to

live in a world before motorized transportation. Where everything

is circumscribed by the amount of land you can cover by

yourself or with the help of another animal. And this is not

that different than how much time can you cover

by yourself? By the rising and setting of the sun? By the

changing of the temperature of the day or of the season? How

much time can you let go of, to find the rhythm, to find the

space where you can just be yourself? Thanks for tuning in.