Writing

What you don’t see.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

What you see is not all there is

It’s late on a Saturday night, and I feel a slight pull to go out, to put down my notebooks, to wander outside and do the “going out” thing I sometimes like to do. I feel the tug, the urge to walk down to the local bars, to surround myself with crowds of other people, drinking, dancing, playing.

It’s what everyone else is doing, I think to myself. You don’t have to be writing or working right now. It’s not normal. I shake my head at that thought for a second, struggling with this idea of  “normal.”

What’s normal? What’s typical? How often does it change?

The funny thing is, even when I go out at night, put the dress on, find myself shaking, talking, bars crawling, people laughing, music pounding, dancing, heavy music reverberating… I still wonder. Is this it? Is this what there is? Is the extent of what’s possible? Are my only two options staying in, or going out? Is there something I’m missing, something else I’m not seeing?

The visual is limited, deceptive, yet it strangely beckons me. Everyone is doing this, I think. When I’m out, all I see are all the other people going out; I see the action and the activity. What I don’t see, however, is everything else.

What I don’t see right in front of me are the people at home, preparing for bed, watching movies, slowly unraveling from their days. People surrounding the dinner table, laughing; casual conversations. People at home, working late, start-ups, built over time; writers, pouring over books. Philosophers, musing over ideas. Yogis stretching in and out of another day of activity. Writers spending time behind the books, dreaming. Hustlers working four different jobs, filling their late Saturday nights with the tips from behind a counter, building a freedom fund to travel the world.

People, doing.

As I watch and wander, wondering about what it is that people do, I see the fallacy of vision, the limitations of judging the world merely by what we see: what we see is not all that there is.

Perception is not reality, although it readily distorts it.

What we know and understand to be true comes from our past experiences and from what we’re able to observe about what others do. We clue into Facebook for this reason: to see and be seen, to hear and be heard, to keep tabs on the people around us, to see what they’re doing. But this reality-distortion field, if you will, is based on the collective assumption that we’re each reporting our lives accurately. And we’re not. We can’t possibly be. The act of editing, processing, and determining what to share filters our collective report into the most interesting, unique, or share-worthy status. I’m going to guess that collectively, Facebook posts are more heavily skewed towards the extrovert, towards the person inclined to share, and towards the posts related to exploration, adventure, vacation, food, and friends. In short, everything I want to be doing. That is, Facebook is inherently biased. The system of “liking” creates a slow but consistent classical conditioning that primes each of us to post content that generates feedback, or to be, well, interesting.

The number of pictures I take of myself working, behind a desk, hiding behind my pajamas and thick writer’s glasses? Disproportionately smaller than the amount of time I spend behind my pens, paper and books.

Just like on Saturday night, or any night, or on the collective digital over-share of online social media, there’s a whole world of more, of things we don’t hear about and don’t see. The invisible.

Just because you see something happening one way doesn’t mean you, too, are obligated to do it. Call it the face of peer pressure, but you don’t need to do something–have sex, build a start-up, be successful by thirty–because everyone on television or in your local sphere appears to be doing so. You don’t need to dress fancy, or be extroverted, or drink extensively. You’re allowed to be different. To follow your bliss. To do what matters to you. And just because you don’t see something happening doesn’t mean there aren’t alternatives to what you’ve already seen.

The older I get, the more I learn to unpack and listen to the quiet power of my inner voice coaching me, telling me what to do, guiding me away from the pull of the collective, the pull of “normal.”

What is normal? Who defines it? Isn’t normal an idea defined by the average of what everyone else is doing? I’m not certain that I want to be average, or better yet, do what everyone else is doing.

Some evenings I get home and the bones in my body ache to move, my muscles tell me that despite the cultural normalcy that declares our collective culture sit still behind desks and overeat massive quantities of bread and potatoes, I have to firmly disagree, eating handfuls of lettuce and kale and lose myself in the fluidity of space. I spent years trying to quash this compulsion to move, and I’m tired of it. I can’t. I’m embarrassed only that it took me so long to recover my “essential self,” and be okay with dancing and wandering in streets to the tune of my body, as opposed to the tune of a giant cacophony of internalized social expectations. And so, I put on my tired and worn-thin running clothes and start out on the streets of San Francisco to wander a city in my feet, in my body, lost in my mind, lost in ideas. My words and thoughts tumble over the pavement, reverberating between the building spaces, dancing in the open spaces of our city systems, playing within the loose rule-sets that guide them, challenging each other, challenging me.

Other times, my body craves the warm solitude of being amidst of a crowd of quiet people, a coffee shop reverie with late night candles and the option to be alone, by myself.

And then, still again, some times I find myself craving a great shake-off, a dance, an agglomeration of people and bodies and warm dancing, the crowded room of bodies stinging with sweat, salt appearing on my skin through sweat and exertion, hips shaking in rhythm to the beat of dance music, throbbing, laughing, shaking off the cacophony of thought just to be. And then, I go out. I engage. I dance.

What do you need to do to be you?

Some people work late in the evenings to finish classes, to gain expertise, to chart a new path in a direction tangential to their primary occupation. I remember stories from one of my relatives about the evenings spent getting her teaching credential post-work, and how difficult, yet rewarding, it was to spend the time for a year to make a new opportunity for herself.

It’s true in the social space, too. Our “Facebook world” is designed to share the accomplishments, the awards, and in aggregate you can feel overwhelmed by the sea of information. Sometimes it seems like everyone else is going on magnificent vacations, having babies, getting married, or winning a Pulitzer prize.

What you don’t see, however, in the compression of space that the internet proffers, are the years and years behind each of those plans, the sacrifices made in exchange for the work put forward. The money spent on the time off. The years spent writing the books. The hours spend alone behind a guitar, learning, string by string and chord by chord, how to map the sequence of rhythms and sounds into your fingers until your body knew it so well your mind forgot the need to think about it and it just became a part of who you were.

In an online conversation with a friend about the difference between achievement and doing, he said,

“In general, I’ve found that our minds are trained extremely well by schools, parents and society such that we can develop a mental concept of excellence faster than we can embody it. I can totally see myself in my head acting a scene at Academy-Award winning levels but to actually bring that into my body will take a lifetime of work and improvement. So there is this perpetual gap between what we think is excellent and what we can actually communicate. With not just acting, most other things too. I fear with the Internet and social networking, we will only get further and further away from actually embodying and experiencing and more into discussing, abstracting and conceptualizing.”

Doing takes time, effort, repetition, quiet exertion, solitude, and sometimes, invisibility. The space to practice. The space to dream, explore, be, and do. 

It takes years, years, years, and practice, practice, practice to get to the place where you’re doing something in the way that you are shaped and primed to do.

What are you doing that no one else sees?

What other options are there? You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. The world needs you to be weird. Or better yet, to be you.  

Not what you think you ought to be. 

Just… you.

Invisible systems.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I’m staring at the giant salad box in front of me on the airplane, munching down on another pile of cheese and ham, trying to figure out if I’m even hungry. There’s still piles of salad left, and I’m cramped in between the person next to me and the window, navigating my book and my salad in my small allotment of plane space.

I stopped for a second, looking at the box. It was another example of the problem I kept seeing over and over again: 

Invisible systems that control your behavior.

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to eat what’s on the plate. You don’t have to eat any or all of it. But once it’s in front of you, your mind switches to auto-pilot and, for most of us, we consume everything in front of us until it’s gone. The salads I buy from the store come in a box with a fixed amount of ingredients. The size is set: “box” size. It’s the average size and portion determined by someone else to be suitable for every individual, everywhere. The best optimal price point for the business to create a product and move that product off the shelves.

Guess what? You don’t have to eat all the salad in the box.

It’s something small, inconsequential, but it’s huge. Your behavior is being guided by what Ramit Sethi calls an invisible script; the parameters are set forth, and then you operate within them.

Although my mother would kill me for telling you this, you don’t have to finish what’s on your plate, you don’t have to eat the whole hamburger, and you can eat three, ten, or seventy French fries if that’s what you want and how hungry you are. I’ve done all of the above. Sometimes I order an entire order of fries just to eat three of them and throw the rest of them away. I only wanted three–then the salt was too much.

But this post isn’t really about food. So much of what we do is dictated by the invisible systems all around us:

Finish what’s on your plate.
Eat everything in the bag.
Work only during certain hours.
Sleep only during certain hours, only for 8 hours. Less if you want to fit in. Brag about how little sleep you get.
Running involves hard work, sweating, and discomfort.
Work takes a set amount of time.
“They” won’t let me.
Corporate is evil.
I need to quit my job to be happy.
Once I’m an adult, I won’t skip, laugh, jump or play anymore.

Wait, what? 

What systems and thoughts guide your behavior? Are they true? What are the invisible systems that guide your actions? Mindless Eating is a brilliant book that looks at eating with relation to our habits and external cues. While the topic is about food, the subject unravels far more than what we put in our mouths: it’s about the psychology of why we consistently overeat, and what cues (from the size of a plate, to an experiment with a never-ending bowl of soup that caused subjects to eat FOUR TIMES as much as they would have if the bowl emptied normally) confuse and guide us so that we don’t actually have to think about what we’re doing.

When you become aware of these cues, these systems at play, you realize: you don’t have to do what they suggest.

And it’s not about willpower or fighting against yourself. It’s setting up the system in advance–and understand what actually affects your behavior–so that you can encourage the behaviors that you want. Don’t want to eat as much food? The best change you can make is to buy smaller plates. 

It takes a lot of listening, fine-tuning, and habit disruption, but you can condition yourself to see the invisible systems. To challenge what they are asking you to do.

What are the invisible systems that guide your behavior? Do you have to do what they suggest?

Better yet: can you change them?

 

What’s Your Story?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

You. 

On the cover of a magazine.

Big, bold, splashy words. You’re wearing something sharp. Five years down the road from now, you’re doing an exclusive interview, and someone is telling your story to a captive audience.

Just a few questions for you, in this daydream:

First, what magazine would it be?

Second, what would the headline say about you or your project?

And, more importantly, what would the article be about?

In the last trip I took to Costa Rica with a group of women entrepreneurs, Allie Siarto led a series of small-group discussions by posing a question and asking us each to explore the answers.

An entrepreneur who co-founded LoudPixel and works as a photographer on weekends, Allie is one of my peer heroes, someone who I can look to as a model for creating and changing the way work is done and how we think about inventing your career. In asking this question, she asked us to consider what our future story looked like.

What’s your story?

This question looks at three important components of your story. This exercise tells you a lot about your project, career and personal vision.

First, it tells you who your audience is and what the size of your target market is. If you’re looking to be on the cover of a niche specialty magazine, your target market is much smaller than a mainstream publication such as Time or The New Yorker. That’s fine. It’s your community or market, and it’s not going to be the same for everyone. Inc Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fast Company are some of my favorites–and yet these are still specialized, target groups that not everyone is interested in.

Second, it tells you what arena you want to play in; who your peers are, and what sort of work you’d be doing. In one of the magazines I regularly read, Landscape Architecture Magazine gives me a good idea of who my peer group is. Flipping to the table of contents, checking out the authors, and taking a look at the credits (from editors to the national group), tells me the people I’m looking to learn from, compete against, work with, and share professional accreditation and acknowledgement with.

And third, this exercise prompts you to paint the story of yourselves after success. Akin to creating a vision map for where you want to go, you get to create your story backwards by understanding what your future success looks like.

Take a minute to dream…

What would your headline be? What would they say about you? Put your dreamer’s hat on, and picture yourself in five  years’ time. The projects you are working on currently, invisibly, are noticed. You’ve put them in the world, you’ve constructed something long-term that has added up to something. Maybe your recipes are featured on a local cooking magazine. Or your crochet projects are a photographic spread in a crafts magazine. Or your teaching is covered in the regional papers.

Maybe you’re a hero, and you’ve saved someone’s life on the street, rescuing them from the dangers on an oncoming car, and you get 15 minutes showcasing your brilliance.

What would they say about you?

What do you want to be known for?

Write your story in advance. Picture yourself in 5 or 10 years’ time, and write the article. I’m doing it now; I’ve actually just finished a 5000-word outline and draft of a feature article that I’d love to have put on the cover of one of my favorite magazines.

What would the story be about?

How would the story change the lives of other people? What would you have done that makes a difference?

The act of visualizing this storyline is one powerful exercise. Knowing what you want to achieve, and what’s important to you, and what excites you can give you cause to work hard during the days beforehand. It helps you prioritize what you do and don’t do. It gives you a way to layer each piece of your life together towards a goal.

If you’re daring enough, write the article. Don’t be intimidated about the awkwardness of writing about yourself, or the weirdness of it–get over that. Take a piece of paper, cast off the shadows of doubt, and indulge in your fantasy for a few minutes. Write the best version of yourself, tell the story of what beautiful things you’ve done, and really be proud of yourself for the accomplishments that you’ve achieved.

Taking the time to dream is powerful. Taking the time to carve out your thoughts about who you are and what you want to become is one of the first tools you can engage in on the way to getting there.

What’s your headline?

April Miscellaneous: Updates, Link Love and Thoughts on Burning the Midnight Oil

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Updates: I’m bursting at the seems with about a hundred posts I want to write, and they are all currently buried in my notebooks, brain, and on half-finished word documents on my laptop. I just took a peek at the unpublished drafts in my queue (110) and the number of essays I’ve hit “publish” on (173) and I realized that I have a lot I need to hurry up and ship— to not be afraid of doing, as Seth Godin says. For the moment, though, I’m caught in the spin-cycle of travel (see below!) and I don’t have the time to sit down and write as much as I want to, since it’s been back-to-back weekends of traveling and engagements. Before my next scheduled post goes up, here are a few updates and miscellaneous notes from the last of March and early April. And before I get even further, Happy Spring! 

Welcome to all the new faces!

It’s been a busy few weeks with this website, and I want to say thank you (and hello!) to all the new faces who have stopped by or who have crossed paths with me lately. If you haven’t yet, send me a message or a tweet to say hello. So many of you have emailed and I’m overwhelmed with gratitude at the thoughts and conversations happening offline. You are all brave, marvelous, and stunning people: I hope you all know that. I am so inspired by the stories I get to read, by what you share and by how much each of you are doing to make things happen. When I get tired, stressed out or worn out like the best of them, I get to read your stories happening around the web and world, and I get re-energized.

Seen and Heard: Recent Posts

In the writing world, there’s been quite a few posts going around that I’m delighted to be a part of (and I’ve got some more in the works, coming out soon, so stay tuned!) If you missed it, here are some of the latest:

  • Chris Guillebeau and I chat about how to figure out whether you’re happy in your job — and what to do about it if you’re not. In the interview, Chris and I discuss how change can happen if you’re unhappy. My answer? We need to take responsibility for our own happiness. It’s no one else’s job or responsibility to help you feel satisfied, happy, or inspired:  it’s yours. Read the full interview here. (Don’t believe me? See the recent post on The Atlantic about how changing your personality can make you happier).
  • Lifehacker liked the post and the cheat-sheet so much that Melanie Pinola picked it up and shared it, making my twitter and internet stream go quite crazy for a few days. (Whoo! Exciting! I’m famous in the internet world!) The fame has worn off, but I definitely saved the re-tweet from The 99 Percent in my keeper file. Yes, I do stuff like that.
  • A huge thank-you to Get Rich Slowly and my friend J.D. for sparking the conversation about pursuing your passion. With thoughtful commentary by Marie Forleo, Knot Theory, and others about finding the right balance of work you love, or a life you love (or both), there’s good arguments to be had for why several options might work–there isn’t a “right” way to getting to your dreams.

March & April Presentations

In the speaking arena, I’ve been involved in several presentations lately and I’m thrilled with the outcome (and amazed, again, by the amount of energy it takes to prepare and conduct these events. A huge round of applause for the teams that put each of these events together). After I unpack a bunch of this work, I hope to put together some guidelines for what I’ve learned so far. More to come.

  • At UC Berkeley, I moderated a panel on Landscapes of Uncertainty in conjunction with the new Ground Up Journal being launched this May. Check out the image from the presentation (above!). I was fortunate to be on stage with Ila Berman, the Director of Architecture at CCA, Douglas Burnham, Principal of envelope A+D, Scott Cataffa, Principal at CMG, and Sha Hwang, Design Technologist at Movity-Trulia. Our conversations meandered through the uncertain terrains of technology, landscape, economics, and professional practice. (My notebooks are filling up faster than I can empty them out into the blog-o-sphere!)
  • Two days later, I went to the University of Pennsylvania to talk about the work that I do with SWA Group and saw a lot of familiar faces at my Alma Mater. It reminded me how much changes, so quickly, in the space after being a student to becoming an alumni and an employer. It seems that not so long ago I was just on the other side of the table, handing my resume and portfolio over to be perused by prospective employers.

And there’s more coming up:

Sheesh, I’ll stop talking about me:

There are other things in the web besides what I’m doing! Here are some of my favorite posts and events I’ve seen lately:

  • GetAround’s curation of the top ten TED Talks to give you the power to change the world. I just re-watched Simon Sinek’s and Seth Godin’s and was re-energized by the power of ideas and the power of figuring out your WHY. One day’s homework? Watch these two TED Talks.
  • Gutsy? Paul Graham’s blog post “Frightengly Ambitious StartUp Ideas,“ is a free list of ideas that (“just”) need to be implemented. If you have the guts, the time, the ambition, and the belief in a way to figure out these problems, go get ’em. The world needs you.
  • Brene Brown on the Power of Vulnerability. You don’t have to be rock solid all the time. (Cue forthcoming post: “Things That Make Me Cry.”)
  • Your Clothes? Maybe they actually are important: they affect your self-perception. Turns out image does matter — at least in that it influences our confidence and how we feel. Maybe it’s time to go shopping after all?
  • Your Brain On Fiction: Turns out, story time is important after all because it re-wires and changes our brain. Maybe next the science will tell us that recess is important, too, and naptime is essential for creativity. (I don’t know about you, but I’m going to read stories, play on swings and take sunny naps and long runs whenever I can during the day and not wait for someone else to tell me it’s good for me. I believe in trusting the soul and the body. Our bodies are pretty smart, if we’ll let them be.)
  • And lastly, the story of someone who emails back. (And this is why I try, even as I’m sitting behind my computer eating late-night dinner and I should probably be sleeping–to always send at least a reply back. I can’t always do a full conversation, but sometimes it means something to realize that on the other side of the internet, there’s a person, and we get it. We’ve been there. It’ll be okay).

Health, Sanity and Balance

I’m not sure I believe in the old axiom of “work-life balance,” but I’ll definitely be the first to admit that my schedule lately has been a little… askew. I’m excited and grateful for these opportunities, and also wary of burning the midnight oil too often. Cue a good question: why don’t I take a break from this blog? The answer, to me, is simple: Because I can’t not. My notebooks are full to the brim, and the more things I do, the more I learn, the more ideas I have, the more I want to write.

In a recent rant I enjoyed, John Carlton summed it up well:

“I am reminded of the constant possibility for adventure and plot changes in our lives.

I’m appalled when I meet folks who are bored with life. Are you fucking kidding me? Bored? We’re a race of brainy, built-to-endure loonies on a spinning orb in the middle of a vast universe…

… with absolutely nothing or no one holding the power to control what you do next. Sure, there are laws, steel bars, fences and scowling mates (plus your own sense of decency and fear) abounding everywhere…”

I laughed out loud at this. YES. If you’re bored, go do something: there’s too much going on to sit behind your screen and spend any more time thinking when you could be DOING.

Above all, I’m filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and wonder. As Jill says, happiness is an attitude, a framework we can develop — but even people with a positive outlook sometimes have bad days. :) On those grumpy days, you can bet I’ll be curled up in my bed, pillow over head, hiding and recovering. I’m fairly certain that will be happening very soon for this blogger.

With love, wonder and gratitude.

You Gotta Slow Down to Speed Up

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

But with all this speed, we start wobbling. Making mistakes. Not seeing where we’re actually going.

And too often, I see entrepreneurs and business owners prioritize speed over depth. Is it better to go fast, or to go far?

Speed and consistency are two separate things, and one more often than not is indicative of success. To be successful, you have show up.

The irony of going far is that it’s not done by going fast, not necessarily.

Sometimes you have to slow down in order to truly speed up.

And sometimes, you need to rest.

Sometimes you gotta slow down to speed up.

It’s not about going fast.

Think about in sports, or running training. Your actual time spent running isn’t the bulk of your training. Equally important is your recovery time, how you fuel yourself, stretching, preparing, mental work, etc.

You don’t prepare for a marathon by running non-stop for two weeks and then racing.

Preparation takes time, consistency, and adequate and ample rest. Without rest, recovery, and repair, we drive our muscles into damage and injury.

Take that analogy to your project, your brain, your work. Do you get enough rest?

We need rest to go fast.
We need time off between our work sessions.
We need to recover.

Because to go fast or far, you also need to know how to control the speed.

Systems Need to Change: The Future of Work, College, Education — and the Future of YOU?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

What is the future of work? How about the future of education? Across the news, education reform and the way we learn seem to be undergoing a slow overhaul–or it still desperately needs one.  The future of work is constantly shifting as we untangle ourselves from the traces of our industrial past and figure out the implications of a mobile, wired, location-free global society. People are debating whether or not going to college is worth it; especially since the work landscape post-college looks fairly bleak.

Many of the systems and structures we’re using are broken. Not all of them are broken, and not everything needs to be redone, but I agree with the sentiment that innovation is desperately needed.

Innovation doesn’t come from a specific age, place, or group of people. We like to glamorize the entrepreneur as a college-dorm-room drop out, and Inc’s 30-under-30 lists sometimes make it seem as if you’re 31 or older; you’re toast. I disagree, and I think there is good news: innovation is popping up all over the place–New Orleans, Silicon Prairie, Start Up Weekends, etc. and Under 30 CEO’s recent (unofficial) reader rankings listed places like New Orleans, Kansas City, and Austin, Texas as great for entrepreneurship.

As TIME Magazine wrote in the 2009 special, The Way We’ll Work: “Who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25-year high, work will return eventually.” How it returns, however, has yet to be seen. In the report, Time suggests that managers and management will have to be rethought, women will rule the workforce, baby boomers won’t quit, and sustainability won’t be a fad–it’s here to stay. The topics of education and employer reform are too long for this post, however–and I’ve got some thinking on this topic that I’m expanding for other publications–but I’m not going to go into detail in this post. Beyond the aggregate, I wanted to share projects local and broad from friends and people I admire as a way to inspire you and as a way to get involved.

Want to get intimately entrenched in understanding how the landscape of work is changing? Want to change the world yourself? The best way to make something happen is to do something. It doesn’t just matter what’s written in Time. It matters what you do, both for your own career, as well as in changing work and education for everyone. Here are some of my favorite projects happening right now, by people all around us:

The Bold Academy – Amber Rae

Want to change the world, but not sure how to get started? Amber Rae is shaking things up by creating a new experience for college grads brimming with talent but confused “about what to do with their lives and how to contribute something meaningful.”  Rather than do the traditional coursework lined up in college semesters, the team aims to focus on skill sets like Self-Awareness, Integrity, Confidence, Risk-Taking, Resourcefulness, and Strategy. To apply, head over here. Applications for the first installment are now closed, (update: Applications are open until April 5.) and I’m excited to see what shakes out with the inaugural class. As they say in their opening line:

“The landscape of higher education is about to change.”

Encouraging Entrepreneurship: StartUp Weekend, Fix Young America and the YEC

Entrepreneurship is a buzzword these days, and new organizations such as Start Up Weekend, Three Day Startup and more are capitalizing on creating new companies, products, and executing ideas within a limited time frame. People travel from all over to join a small group of people interested in creating something new (I did it last August–StartUp Weekend, Los Angeles. I highly recommend it). In addition, the new campaign to Fix Young America by Scott Gerber and the YEC team looks to use youth entrepreneurship to tackle unemployment. In a recent article by Mashable, the#FixYoungAmerica campaign explains their mission to turn around the “twin epidemics of youth unemployment and underemployment.” Fitzpatrick writes:

“With youth unemployment at a 60-year high and student-loan debt nearing the $1 trillion mark, can anything be done by the technology sector to help young Americans struggling to find work?” 

The Future of Work – Lane Becker and Thor Muller

Lane Becker and Thor Muller are on a quest to document the “the stories of the obsessive makers, innovators and entrepreneurs that are leading the way to a new wave of business.” They launched a campaign just a few weeks ago to raise money for their cross-country RVIP trip to scavenge the country in search of people with the following character traits: “irreverent, adaptable, purpose-driven, and unattached to conventional categories.”

Part documentary, part exploration-adventure, and part innovation in itself, the pair will “bring together these doers in every town through the one-of-a-kind RVIP Lounge & Karaoke Cabaret [to] capture the larger movement, still in its early stages, that is transforming our fading industrial economy into something vibrant and more human.”

The project has 6 days left to raise funding, and they’re nearly there – two thirds of the way! Yes, I’m telling you to put your dollars behind this cause. 

Best of New Books

I’m really excited about a few books coming out very, very soon (stay tuned for book reviews!!). Each of the following books is related to the idea of entrepreneurship, the future of work, and developing your best self.

  • The $100 Start Up — by Chris Guillebeau, coming out May 18th. In it, Chris identifies 1,500 individuals “who have built business earning $50,000 or more rom a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less),” focusing on 50 case studies. As Pam Slim wrote in her review, the book “delivers exactly what a new entrepreneur needs: road-tested, effective and exceptionally pragmatic advice for starting a new business on a shoestring.”
  • Need, Speed, and Greed — by Vijay Vaitheeswaran.  I heard about this on NPR earlier this morning, in a conversation about globalization, Googlization and the new innovation revolution that is “more powerful than any economic force since the arrival of Europeans on North American shores half a millennium ago.”
  • The Fire Starter Sessions — Danielle LaPorte’s book comes out in just a few weeks, a collection of “soulful wisdom” to inspire and shake you up, helping you re-frame the way you approach your career, your life. As Martha Beck writes: “Danielle LaPorte is scary smart, yet so kind and practical that she kindles the fire in you without causing you to feel consumed by the flames. She has the knowledge you need to succeed. Lean in and listen close. What she has to say is what our spirits need to hear.”
  • Get Lucky — the precursor to their kickstarter campaign (tagline: “Go Luck Yourself”), Becker and Muller co-authored the book, “Get Lucky: How To Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business.” Can’t wait to read it.
  • Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos – by Sarah Lacy. I’m a few pages into it at the moment; it’s about “that top 1% of people who do more to change their worlds through greed and ambition than politicians, NGOs and nonprofits ever can.”
  • Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet — by William Davidow. What are the luxuries and pitfalls of the connected age? And, are smartphones and mobile internets making us smarter–or dumber?
  • The Work Revolution — Julie Clow’s first book comes out in three weeks, and I’m excitedly awaiting my copy for review to show up here in a few days. So far, I completely agree with the premise: “The Work Revolution is about changing the way the world sees work. By making simple changes to improve our relationships with work and each other, we can systematically ignite a work revolution everywhere.”

So What’s Next?

I don’t know about you, but I’m excited and inspired by all of the changes happening. There are a lot of systems that we’ve built over centuries that need to evolve; things that are outmoded, outdated, shifting. The pressures of an uncertain economy and the need for creative destruction can be difficult on an individual and community level, but it’s through hardship that true genius and innovation are often created.

Take a cue from these people above, who’ve created campaigns, ideas, books, essays: they’re just people like you and I, who have worked towards building something important. If you feel strongly that things need to change, then change is up to you. It’s not other people who are going to do something. It’s you.

What are YOU going to do?

You Don’t Get it Back: Thoughts From a Swimming Alumni

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

It’s been a long few weeks–I’m traveling back and forth for lectures, office visits and events and find myself staring out the plane window more often than not. This morning, on the plane ride across the country from San Francisco to Philadelphia, I remembered that this weekend is also a big weekend in college swimming. I couldn’t help but remember my days in Ohio as I crossed over the state, high above hovering around 30,000 feet. The upside of being on a plane so much is that I’m left with my own thoughts, internet-free (mostly), able to write for as long as I can stay awake or until the battery on my computer runs out. Today, a huge rally cry for my teammates past and present, and the current National Championships in swimming. While I talk about swimming a lot, this is about more than swimming: this is about the fact that you only get so many chances in life, so take them. Use them well. Once they’re gone, you don’t get to go back. 

Swimming: The love of competition.

Alumni meet, Fall 2010.

I sat on the bleachers of our rickety old Natatorium, hard concrete rows crammed into the upper edge of the 1925 Gregory Pool. A handful of us arrived early that Saturday morning, watching the young swimmers practice. Outside, the early morning chill of a brisk fall permeated the small college campus. Inside, the smell of chlorine echoed off the linoleum walls, stinging my eyes and nostrils in an all-too familiar way. All-American plaques lined the hallways, stacked in tens, wrapping around the pool deck, an homage to all the great swimmers of our colleges’ past.

Parents and alumni trickled in, coffee in hand, watching. The upper bleachers were poorly lit. Shouts and whistles from practice reverberated in the room; the sounds of thirty-six hands splashing rhythmically slapped back and forth against the water.

My body tensed in my abs, stretched in the shoulders, my fingers itching to extend and pull the water again, even after too many years gone by.  The memory of being a swimmer sticks in your blood, in your muscles, despite the aging weariness of work. I could feel the past, knowing that years ago, I wasn’t sitting here; I was there. There was a time when it was me that was walking, feet cold against the tile floor, bare and ready, suit straps taught against my thighs, limbering up, a sea of bodies intermingling behind the diving boards, waiting for the cue to start. Tired, exhausted, exhilarated. Ready to perform. Every single day.

Back then, we were an army of swimmers, a mess of bodies in motion, a collective bigger than an individual, a set of minds that worked interchangeably. We didn’t necessarily all like each other all the time—and so goes the social peculiarities of teams, groups, and people—these dynamics magnified as seniors and freshmen battled it out on the lateral playing field.

Outside of the pool I was awkward. I was gangly, shy, strange, insecure, a mess of emotions and flighty hands, unable to string words together in sentences. The men were men, or boys; the women also alternating between mature women and ridiculous girls: all of us were, for the most part, naked and hormonal and tired and hungry. Half the time someone in lane two was dating someone in lane six. You could usually tell by which girls still bothered to put make up on before practice.

Yet in the pool, in the water, cold streaming past your face, each gasp of breath taken and flip-turn turned, you weren’t a mess of social norms. You were just you: you and yourself, your brain, your competition, your ability. The pool was freezing; every day the bitter bite of the water hit my face, the routine of lining up and jumping in with the sweep of the second hand ‘round the clock,  indicating our instructions, our commands. Beep. Go.

That’s the old pool! My life for four years; it’s being torn down and a new, larger pool is going up. 

And we moved, we jumped, we jostled, we argued for place in the lane, silently, fingers grabbing toes and passing one another if the timing wasn’t right; I wrestled against someone slower than me, someone insistent that I take the spot, someone who wanted me to be third. Weeks later I would gravitate towards leading the lane; towards pulling the tide, towards starting the drafting sequences. I would battle with the boys, egos on line, competition fierce. Some days I’d spend two hours side by side in a drawn out test of strength that lasted over hundreds of laps. Our fingers would sting at the end, our egos possibly bruised by the fierceness of wanting to win, but our spirits championing the fact that neither one of us gave in, neither one of us caved.

And we would battle good-naturedly with each other, knowing that this micro-competition would prep us for invisible competitors training is faraway pools; for purple suits and brazen stories of our true adversaries getting ready for the challenge.

Looking down at the swimmers moving rhythmically back and forth in well-spaces sequences, I marveled at the physicality of it all: the bodies were gorgeous; their sleek physiques and lean torsos glistening water droplets across their chiseled bodies. Swimmer’s hair shines like a Greek goddess; these muscular animals galloping across the surface without seeming to have a care in the world.  The best of them have a singular focus on their mind, day in, day out: to perform; to win. To achieve. The definition of success is marked; the ideas concrete, the measurement the clearest feedback you might ever get in your life.

And so they engage, patterns and hierarchies emerging, testosterone raging and hormones drumming, the ultimate test of performance shining from the lights of a red-numbered display:

Lane 4: 1st Place, 51.09. 

To perform. To be the best. Singularly.

Will the hard work be worth it?

It’s not sugar-coated, it’s not magic, it’s certainly not easy. Memory tricks us, at times, into painting it as a picture of glory days, of facility over time. We forget the pain of exertion the farther we are from it, and our minds weight unequally the glory of achievement in memory reconstructions. Yet etched in my mind are also the times spent tearfully worrying behind the closed doors of the coaches offices—of the panic ripping through my body each time I had to anchor a relay, of my insecurities and weaknesses, both physical and mental. Adding pressure to the task was the mounting challenge that it seemed I would never be able to accomplish: to focus on both academics and swimming, and do both successfully. I have notebooks lined with illegible scribbling as I fell asleep in class after class. I was worked. It was hard, in the truest sense of the word.

Sometimes we forget what the brain thinks in that moment, the worry painted across my forehead, the thoughts that consumed me: Will I be able to perform? Will what I do matter? Will I be fast enough? Will I be successful?

Will the hard work be worth it?

And you can’t know, because you’re not there yet. Some people will fall to mental struggles; other people will have physical ailments; some won’t be capable of imagining what they look like when they break every record possible; when they burst through their limitations; when they escape the chains holding them back and dare to dream, to perform, and to enjoy the process.

Rare moments of beautiful performance dance across my mind; personal achievements that still startle me to this day. Moments spent flyingthrough the water, hands curved in perfect precision, energy and effort coordinated in a seamless release, a mental precision uncatchable.

Sometimes, unbeknownst to even me, I would break into the surface of the water, glide forward, and watch in astonishment as my body danced and darted forward, laughing, skipping, bursting through the waves and dropping seconds off of all of my times. To limit what I was capable of to the beliefs in my brain was silly. I could do far more than I knew.

This is all you get. 

And at the Alumni meet, my hands are folded across my lap, my comparatively lethargic 28-year-old self catching hold of the memory of my former collegiate days, my fleshy feet padding across the surface, the years patterned in my brain as episodic memories. I re-fashion those endless four years in emotions and standout moments, and I can see my freshman self, teary and weary, climb out of the slow lane, move towards the middle lane, challenge the senior lane, and move upwards; I can see when we welcomed in new crops of talent each year, when I began winning events for the first time, how all of us built our bodies from a weakling to a structured, strong upper physique.

I cannot thank swimming enough for changing me into the person I am today; for the endless iterations testing my mental and physical prowess; for carving out of all of the possibilities of who I could be to become something absolutely great. In the short time I spent at school, I finally felt like I became someone, something, and then, before I could really match my mind to reality, my school pushed me out the door, depositing me on the doorstep of a new city with a piece of paper and not much more than a set of memories.

On the bleachers, sitting, jeans pinching my belly, soft thighs no longer brusquely shaped to perfect; I am not there anymore. I am no longer a college student—even though once, I was. It was; but I am no longer a part of it. My body, the cells, the pieces, the fragments; it was as if the water within each small cell leaned forward, thirsty for synchronicity with the pool’s rhythms, and I could feel the tingle in every inch of my muscle fibers, longing to jump in.

You’re all done; that’s all you get. Goodbye.

I return almost every year, sweeping my eyes across the campus trees, noting the huddled buildings tucked along the hillside, watching students stream in and out of the classrooms giggling. Notebooks tucked underarm, the clock bell chiming each hour, denoting the river-like passage of time; always moving; never staying still.

Everything changes. We hold onto a strange idea that life is fixed and permanent; that what happens today will be similar to what happens tomorrow, or a year from tomorrow. In reality our selves change every few years. Life is a constant re-invention; in the pool, each swim is a chance to do what you’ve already done or carve out a new print in your abilities by shaving seconds off of each performance.

The bodies in front of me, below, beneath the bleachers: they don’t know the shape of the future, of life after college, all you know is what you currently have. Jobs and families and careers are vague, fuzzy shapes. More pressing on the psyche for them is the feelings of the day, of the moment: They think, today I am tired. Today, my muscles ache from double practices. Today, I’m mentally and physically fatigued, worn out from hurling medicine balls across the tennis courts at 5 in the morning, from racing against the machine with the ominous swim benches, from stepping up to do test set after test set as the coaches glare angrily down at my inability to perform.

But you have a chance.

I cannot go back, except in my mind.

You’re still on the other side of the future. You have the possibility, the opportunity, the chance.

Will you take it?

While there, I know what it feels like: it feels like eternity. When you leave, it’s over. You don’t get to go back.

Last year, at the close of the 2011 championship, I watched as the men’s 400-free relay team captured the national title by half of a point, snatching victory from the ever-ominous rival team. I stared at the computer screen, refreshing the live-stream over and over, watching the commentary from all of my current and former teammates rapidly pop up on the screen. In those moments, I catch a glimmer and my heart races and pounds and aches, because I know what it’s like to be a swimmer. I know what it’s like to be there.

This weekend, swimmers from all over the world collect to match up in the great performance show-down of the nation. While no rival for March Madness or the media buzz of the Olympics, these events are still special, wonderful, spectacular.

You don’t get these moments back again – you live them once.

You have once chance.  

And then my mind turns sharply from the linked associations and neuron firings pulling me deep into the memories of a time when I almost conquered the pool, when I dared to dream larger than myself and let my body take over, when I faced my coaches and teammates and said Yes, yes, I will do this. I will take this challenge.

Slowly, my mind unravels the history of the pool and I’m back in the sweaty chlorine of the upper bleachers of the old pool. I shake loose the memories and look forward to the possibilities for tomorrow, seeing the pavement of an uncharted idea rolling out under my footsteps, as though each foot prints a mark on hot asphalt, leaving a track and trace.

Do not let it go by without giving it every inch of what you’ve got.

You only get this chance. Let go of the fear. Of the uncertainty. Of the demons. Of the doubts. You’re the best you ever will be, and you’re more capable than you’ll ever know.

Good luck, Big Red.

You all mean the world to me.

 

Boldness is Genius. Do it. Decide.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

– J. W. von Goethe

Decisions are hard. Very hard.

The word “decision” is based on the Latin “decisio,” which means a cutting off. The verb is decidere, to cut off, (“de” is off; “caedere” is to cut). You can see the root repeated in other familiar words: scissors, incision, caesarean section.  Michael Ellsberg, in his book, The Education of Millionaires, recounts the work of Randy Komisar and his thoughts on playing it safe versus taking risks.

“The words “decision,” and “decide” stem from the roots “cise” and “cide,” to cut off and to kill, also the roots of manhy other words related to cutting and killing.”

“People feel like, unless they’re affirmatively making a decision, they’re not making a decision.”

We think that we’re safer, less risky, when we don’t cut off any possibilities. And so many of us sit, waifish, reluctant to decide because we are afraid of killing one of our options. We are afraid of the bloody battle that making a decision requires. We think that the alternative–not deciding–is safer, more secure. If we don’t decide to quit, to act, to disagree with someone, then we’ll be happier, somehow.

Yet there is a huge risk in not deciding:

Not making a decision is making a decision. 

As time winds its way past you, your indecisiveness kills both of the options you once had, leaving you sitting on the site of the path, empty-handed. Not deciding is deciding. Not deciding is the death of both options. It’s not saving the life of both options.

Sure, there are risks of taking action. But there are also huge risks of inaction. To quote Ellsberg, these risks include:

“The risk of working with people you don’t respect; the risk of working for a company whose values are incosistent with your own; the risk of compromising what’s important; the risk of doing something that fails to express-or even contradicts–who you are. And then there is the most dangerous risk of all–the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet that you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.”

It’s not easy. You need to cut off part of yourself, close doors, and eliminate options. It’s painful. It’s hard. It’s why so many people opt to avoid making decisions. It’s why, when we’re presented with an incredible number of options, we’ll often choose to leave and “come back later,” because we don’t want to make the wrong decision. It’s why marketers and salespeople are realizing the genius of offering fewer options.

Because people are terrible at making decisions. 

What are you risking by being afraid of not deciding?

We stand there, wistfully, at the fork in the path and dwell on the option we’re leaving behind, the places and spaces that could have been. But unless we decide to act, to make a decision, to cut one path and choose the other, then we’re not gaining from either option in front of us. No: we’re just sitting there, hands tied in the grassy meadow, staring at unfinished possibilities.

Deciding is powerful. It is terrifying. It is beautiful. Kill something today. Cut it out. Drop it. Remove it. Make clarity in choosing, by saying No to the part you don’t want.  Say Yes to the things you want to keep. Do something.

“Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” 

“Begin now.”

With love,

 

Why Do Cars Have Brakes?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

“The more sure we are, the more likely we are to suffer an illusion.” – Jerry Weinberg

Why do automobiles have brakes?

To stop, right?

To stop. That’s one answer.

Is there another answer? I heard this on the radio recently, and I jotted it down in my mental notebook.

Cars have brakes so they can go fast.

It’s the ability to stop quickly that allows us to travel at speeds much faster than if we didn’t have brakes.

Without brakes, we’d all drive very, very slowly. Brakes give us flexibility in stopping when you want, where you want, and how you want.

Analogously, in your life it’s the very presence of boundaries that create new freedoms. Freedom isn’t free. (Similarly paradoxical, having choice isn’t what helps us in decision-making.) Having a gas pedal isn’t what enables you to go fast. It’s having a gas pedal AND a brake pedal.

Sometimes the short-term sacrifices in our lives are actually enabling us to achieve long-term goals. Your brakes are helping you go faster, even if it’s frustrating to stop at the stop sign.

Also to note: how you answered this question clues you into how your brain operates when thinking about actions, functions, and relationships among systems. Thinking that brakes brake; and that’s all, is a limited view on the capability of a function in a system. Often, each action or movement has multiple effects in the system.

How can you train your brain to look again and see if you can find other answers? It’s very Jerry Weinberg (author of An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.)

The next time you do something, ask yourself how it works. And ask yourself, is that the only thing happening here?

Probably not.

So, why do cars have brakes?

“The boundary of one thing is often the beginning of another” – Leonardo

Rain Puddles, Big Splashes, and the Land Beneath Your Feet.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Photograph of the rain reflections by Courtney Warren.

Will it stop raining?

It’s raining in San Francisco and I’m so happy that it finally is. The rain has been following me across the country a bit–Dallas, Austin, here in San Francisco again–and while it makes a few of the plane exchanges a bit difficult, I don’t mind the rain.

The twitter feeds and facebook notes are full of grumpy notes telling the rain to go away, but I can’t help but think how much we needed all this rain. The snow’s been down in Tahoe, the water reservoirs are drying up, and the soil in the ground has been parched. We need to make up for months of missed rain. A week of non-stop rain?

Perfect.

I remember when we were little, four kids cooped up in a small house and on the rainy days our parents would scoop us up, put us in boots and jackets and take us outside just to get our crazy energy out of the house. At the time, it seemed our mission and obligation was to destroy the entire house in the name of fort building, dress-up parties, epic game days, modeling dinosaurs, and never cleaning up after ourselves. With the advent of rain, our disasters ravaged the house. And so, outside we went–rain or shine.

Strapped into red rainslickers, plastic ties holding down over-sized boots on our feet, donations and hand-me-downs from older cousins littered across our little bodies, we were walked down the street in the pouring rain to watch the water move across the streets, down the gutters, into the creeks and streams. Our job, our mission, was to find all of the rain gutters that had overflowed. Sometimes piles of leaves would collect in patterns at the drain point, and we’d kick and sweep and splash them out, reveling in the power of water and our ability to clear a roadway. During the heavy rains, we’d go over to the creeks and the city-built channels and drainage ditches and peer our little heads over the barrier, watching the water level climb below us. Brown, churning, moving quickly, the concrete edges pushed the water down in efficiency, speed, roughness. My mom pointed out the measuring marks on the side of the channels, noting how high the rain was.

“Can we come back, mom?” I pleaded. “I want to see if it gets up to eight feet! That will be a lot, right!?”  

Yes, she laughed, that would be an extreme storm event.

The next day, on the way to school, I’d take a detour to the creek  and peer over the edge to see if the water was moving quicker or slower that day. I’d keep track and at the end of the day, announce importantly to the family:

“Water level’s down to four feet! It’s running out!” 

“Where does it come from? Where’s the water from?” I would ask.

She would point up the stream, up towards the hills of the Palo Alto Foothills, and talk about the watersheds sliding down the hillside, collecting over time. I tried to wrap my little brain around it: water falling on the hillsides, building up, rushing down, sheeting sideways over the streets, into the storm drains. Why did it move so fast? Why was there so much of it, right now, and not any later? And did they oceans keep it, or did it just make everything get higher and faster? How did the water get back up to the top?

Such puzzles for such a little brain.

Beyond the visible

Beyond the visible, there’s the invisible: the hidden tunnels and pipes below the ground, the only clue of their existence the small gap in the rain gutter on the side of the street, the water slipping away from the surface into the unknown. How do you know what goes on beneath the streets if no one ever shows you? Around the corner from our house, one of the storm pipes was notoriously poorly made, as it seemed the engineers must have arrived at the final connection, looked at each other and said, “Screw it, this one will run uphill,” and left it for dry. Every rainstorm would promote a giant watery backlog: and for us, then, in the child’s mind, it was the best adventure of all to see the street fill with water.  We stomped and splashed our feet through the giant, dirty puddles.

It takes a nudge, a spark to see what’s not seen, to think about what’s hidden beneath the surface. This rings true in psychology, in imaging, in branding, in marketing, in the people around us. It’s a question about peeling back the layers of what you see to figure out what’s actually going on.  The more you discover, the more you realize how much is happening beneath the surface, where only your imagination and investigation can take you.

Sometimes you need someone–like your mom–to watch you play and skip and invent new worlds inside of giant temporary street puddles, to gently point out to you the gutter and prompt the question to your 5-year old self: “Susan, Sarah, do you know where that goes?”

Incredulously, we’d think about it, stopped in the middle of a giant-puddle-SPLASH-event of our little feet’s superpowers. The water that was slowly disappearing—where DID it go?

“Well, mom, I don’t KNOW! Where does it go?” My wide-eyed little face said.

It was certainly confusing.

New Orleans, Lower Ninth Ward, 2007.

The invisibility of landscape

The invisibility of landscape, the way that it works, where the water goes, how we create worlds that work–these are the systems at play, often highly complex and largely invisible to the untrained (and even trained) eye. This is what I’ve been working on with the landscape urbanism project: telling the stories of landscape and architecture in ways that make sense. Understanding how the world works, how we got there, and what we can do differently and better with the resources and cities around us.

For the past few months two dear friends Nicholas Pevzner and Stephanie Carlisle have been putting together the third issue of the landscape urbanism journal.

Nicholas is a designer with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates in Brooklyn, the firm that is building the new Brooklyn Bridge Park. In his spare time, he teaches at Penn Design, and in his extra-spare time, we write together for Landscape Urbanism. Stephanie, a co-editor of this meaty, dense, critical and pertinent third installment, is a researcher at KieranTimberlake in Philadelphia and previously a graduate of Yale’s school of Architecture and Forestry. I’m amazed and inspired by their brilliance. In putting together our third issue, their collection of essays looks critically at how this world works, and whether or not what we’re doing—designing the land that we live on, working with the earth, creating new patterns for cities—matters.

It’s funny–long before this writing adventure together, it was actually yet another water-based adventure that made us cross paths.  The flooding and hurricanes of New Orleans in 2005 brought the three of us together where I first them on a trip to New Orleans to help build, re-build, and clean up. From painting churches to building compost bins to helping repair damaged pianos, our time and labor was used to rebuild after Katrina. One day I found myself elbow-deep in dishing out free food to people who had lost everything, and in the heat of the south, Nicholas and Stepahine and I stood on the back porches of the community shelter, cleaning dishes, scrubbing, cooking, and talking.

Seeing the hurricane-ridden landscape first-hand impressed upon me again the need for both systemic change as well as better long-term planning that includes disaster preparedness and values resources appropriately. We need to build cities and places to live that work, not just during the good times, but during stress events. Many of our cities and homes are built upon highly fragile systems that won’t withstand large social, economic, political, or environmental upheaval. It brings me back to this idea of the hidden, the invisible, the unseen that we still need to pay attention to, to recognize, to think about.

This is what planners and designers do.

They say that the things most prevalent and obvious in our lives are the things we overlook the most: people, ideas, health, jobs. What we already have. It’s only through dissonance, through tension, through uncertainty that we find out what we’re grateful for already having.

Landscape is so prevalent in our everyday, regular lives that it’s become invisible: something we all walk on top of, live within, and take from–and yet our culture seems to have no concept or appreciation for the value of the land, save for the economic pricing of development and the business opportunities in real estate. I fear, at times, that our concept of “design” and “planning” have strayed so far from meaning that we’ve found ourselves drawing fancy circles and triangles and talking in jargony-architecture-jibberish just because we’re afraid we might be found out: that maybe what we’re doing isn’t really doing anything. Yes. I’ll say it.

They say that the way people talk about you conveys their knowledge of a subject. Culturally, publicly, the way we see landscape is as small, isolated boxes and gardens, as green shrubbery tacked onto strangely-clustered office buildings, as oceans and villas and vistas. Is that a problem of public misperception or a problem of miscommunication? I’m starting to think it’s the latter: we desperately need designers who can write, who can tell stories, and who can describe what’s going on in the world in a way that makes sense. If you can’t explain yourself to someone else, it’s usually not because the person you’re talking to is an idiot. It’s because you’re not doing a good job telling the story.

I’m not done writing about this, and I’m not done thinking about this. I would love to be wrong: what I’m more afraid of is being indifferent. What’s the famous quote? “I’d rather struggle and try and fail, than live all of life with the timid, never having even tried.” Something like that.

And so, I’m standing outside in the weather, breathing it, living it, thankful for the rain and doing my own version of a rain dance, grateful for the weather that soaks us. My hands up and out, my boots are soaking in the rain, I’m watching new friends get drenched by torrential downpours, and I’m hoping that everywhere people are laughing, dreaming, and thinking about the beauty of the watery substance that makes our earth melt, fold, shift and shape.

I’m thankful for a blog that lets me explore ideas, ramble, talk. I’m grateful for writing, for storytelling, for a never-edning desire to learn. Let’s look for things unseen.

Laugh in the rain, stop, and stomp a puddle.

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