Why Is This Relevant? (The Tsunami is So Last Year)

When the landscape is constantly changing, how can we really rely on experts of anything? By the time anyone can proclaim they’re an expert nowadays, the field of knowledge has become obsolete. - Glenn Mandelkern

Rarely does anyone come straight out and tell me that the tsunami is so, like, last year. But I know it was in most minds ever since Brad and Jen's split hit newstands January 7th.

So you'd think I'd have a tough job. With this relevance thing. But I ask you to consider: What does Web 2.0 rising from the rubble of dot-com bust and folks resurrecting a year later from a major international disaster and Bob Dylan have in common?

We live in a global society of accelerating change. Futurists call it the Age of Anxiety.

Yet we go into change kicking and screaming. We buffet ourselves from the unknown that lurks just five seconds ahead. Hopefully and with luck we can extrapolate this moment into five seconds ahead. One fine afternoon Stephen King is taking a walk and "planning to pick some berries in a field that overlooks Lake Kezar. I wouldn't pick for long, though; I'd have to be home by five-thirty because we were all going to the movies." And the next he is struck by a blue van.

I entered the hospital on June nineteenth. Around the twenty-fifth I got up for the first time, staggering three steps to a commode, where I sat with my hospital johnny in my lap and my head down, trying not to weep and failing. You try to tell yourself that you've been lucky, most incredibly lucky, and usually that works because it's true. Sometimes it doesn't work, that's all. Then you cry. - Stephen King, On Writing

It's one thing to talk about how cool creative destruction is and quite another to witness displaced engineers struggling with acceptance: retraining was supposed to be for their blue-collared brethen in Detroit or another abstract frozen place.

Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. - Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

There is a myth that's told. A myth that if we turn away and close our eyes hard enough - from change, loss, grief, and the whole gamut of all the little deaths - we can create a dam powerful enough to withstand the tide.

But.

Life isn't dammable.

The stories of the tsunami survivors may be like any other story of upheaval. They are stories of descent and emergence. Of a butterfly's DNA being completely different from the caterpillar it was. Reminders that Joseph Campbell never said that the initiation to the hero's journey would necessarily come bidden. Only in the past month could I even write this: "Volcanic ash is some of richest soil in the world. But absolutely nothing grows there while it is still smoldering."

And we come back to why tell these stories?

"Throughout my life as a journalist," writes Igal Sarna in his preface to his literary journalism collection, The Man Who Fell Into a Puddle, "I have written about Israeli traumas and have seen how new lives are built on the ruins. How a new land sprouts out from a charred ground zero."

"I also felt there might be a small chance that other people would listen to my story or maybe even benefit from hearing my story - the symptoms, the side effects of the treatment, and post-treatment life. Sharing my story was therapeutic," shares Lance Armstrong, "but I also had hopes that my experience could help somebody else. My work with the LAF shows me daily that sharing our stories and learning from one another's experiences helps us cancer survivors continue to survive."

"This book is the voice of cancer survivors, living strong," he concludes his introduction to the collection, Live Strong : Inspirational Stories from Cancer Survivors-from Diagnosis to Treatment and Beyond.

If I weren't so lazy, I'd scour through my old journals or the January post entries to find exactly when I read Lance Armstrong's autobiography It's Not About the Bike. All that's intact in my memory is that I was laying in bed midday, bandaged knee straight up on a pillow, and devouring it soon after I returned home from Thailand. Reading it was a brush with grace:

I wanted to live, but whether I would or not was a mystery, and in the midst of confronting that fact, even at that moment, I was beginning to sense that to stare into the heart of such a fearful mystery wasn't a bad thing. To be afraid is a priceless education. Once you have been that scared, you know more about your frailty than most people, and I think that changes a man. I was brought low, and there was nothing to take refuge in but the philosophical: this disease would force me to ask more of myself as a person than I ever had before, and to seek out a different ethic.

A couple of days earlier, I had received an e-mail from a military guy stationed in Asia. He was a fellow cancer patient, and he wanted to tell me something. "You don't know it yet," he wrote, "but we're the lucky ones."

I'd said aloud, "This guy's a nut."

What on earth could he mean?

Those that have come out the other side of this unnamed alchemical vessel know what he means. And the survivors of one of the worst natural disasters in the past hundred years the world over are a rare specimen of guides. So I want to know: What has a year wrought? And what can you share with the world?

I'd been harping on a theme of resiliency. Resiliency's out: sounds like weathering through something intact. Armstrong wasn't merely resilient. He was transmuted, transformed, and enriched. Invincible at his essence, from the brink of succumbing to testicular cancer, he went on to win seven Tour de Frances and create the successful Lance Armstrong Foundation.

It's no accident that Armstrong's book subtitle is My Journey Back to Life.

That's regeneration. Perhaps I was prescient when I named my consulting practice the Koru Group. Koru is a Maori name for the fern frond which unfurls into the fern leaf. It's their symbol for new life, new beginnings, creation, growth, movement.

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning. - Ivy Baker Priest

p.s. Now you understand one reason it's citizen journalism anew.

Comments

[Jill]

Evelyn

We are all experiencing dizziness with the accelerating change all around us. Much is made of the rapidity of informational technological change in the field which may soon be matched by increasing accelerating and intermingling changes in genetic, robotic, and nano technologies. Ray Kurzweil says the Singularity is Near. Joel Garreau in Radical Evolution looks at all this and writes that the Web is mediating a collective thought process that has feedback effects.

What's missing in the speed of all this change is the cultivation and deepening of wisdom and the better qualities of our higher natures.

The virtues cherished in every culture are
1. wisdom and knowledge
2. courage
3. love and humanity
4. justice
5. temperance and moderation
6. spirituality and transcendence

What matters one year on is WHAT THEY LEARNED. Every lesson learned at such a painful cost is a seed of wisdom emerging from the soil and suffering of existence, Samsara

When recorded it becomes part of the huge, collective thought process, what de Chardin called the noosphere. That seed of wisdom will flower to console and support another sufferer in another place in another time, maybe many others.

What I seen happening with Mayan Indian photographers in Chiapas, what's happening with bloggers in Iran, Iraq is a precise rendering of their perspective on the world we experience every day. (It's what could happen on your next year's African blogging safari - I'd love to do that).

We are seeing how people around the world deal with loss, anxiety, grief, fear and despair. What is happening is the self-organization of how to do, think, react better from this chaos of experience. It's evolution in process and We are mediating our own evolution.

It is ONLY by these sowing these seeds of experience, by millions of ordinary people can we get wiser faster.

[zzczcz]

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