Lessons Learned, lessons to be learned

THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH

Many years ago in the Chilcotin District of British Columbia I came to a small cluster of buildings - having passed over a number of Texas Gates to get there. Texas Gates, or cattle grids, are on-the-ground fencing to keep cattle and horses from ranging across bridges. And if you’ve never been to the Chilcotin I recommend a visit when time and conditions allow. It’s a big broad place - the wild west - a plateau region on the inland lee of the Coast Mountains on the west side of the Fraser River: forested mountains and grasslands, alpine rivers and fjord-like lakes. It has few roads and few people but it is spectacularly beautiful. Small communities run along the main road - Riske Creek, Chilanko Forks, Kleena Kleene, all the way over to the ocean inlet village of Bella Coola. It’s cattle and horse country - a place where people pretty much settle what needs to get settled by themselves.

Where I stopped that early spring morning was on a road off a road in a rustic place that sat about sixty miles from sixty miles. It had a log building for a general store, a single regular gas pump, and three cabins nearby. A horse was tied off at a hitching post and she was chewing on something - a bald eagle lazily soared in the blue sky high above the valley. I stepped up onto the porch of the store and saw an old-timer, maybe seventy or eighty, hard to tell, sitting on a bench down at the end. He wore a ballcap, sunglasses, blue jeans, jean jacket, an unlit roll-your-own sat at the corner of his mouth. His large hands flattened from work rested on his knees. I’m not sure exactly where he was looking but it wasn’t at me – it was off in the direction of the mountains. Without looking over he asked: what can you get used to? I’d never thought about that before. What could I get used to? I guess I’d have to go through something to know if I could get used to it or not – I had no answer. He launched into a bizarre tale that involved bears and honey from the mountains and driving off a cliff with another guy in a pickup truck because the driver’s long hair had blown into his face because of the wind and how they’d dropped over the edge – and how he was declared dead – twice - and brought back to life twice - then spent a year in a hospital recovering before coming home. That’s what I got used to one time, he said.

I thought about that exchange today – and his question: what can you get used to? And wondered what is it we are getting used to right now – and how are we changing because of it. What are we learning that’s useful knowledge for the road ahead?

“It is a secret both in nature and state, that it is safer to change many things than one.” Francis Bacon said that. Right now many things are changing at a rate we haven’t seen before – well not in my lifetime anyway. People are coming out of their silos working together to come up with solutions to our immediate situation, and looking ahead to what a post-pandemic world could look like. Decisions are being made in a dizzying time zone and there are mistakes and some things are being walked-back, but it hasn’t stopped the need for immediate action nor the decisions that go along with it. I read today that back in March the head of a national worker’s union, the CEO of a national business organization, and the Prime Minister were on a call discussing a plan for labour, business, and how the government could assist the challenges. This meeting wouldn’t have happened in February – the mistrust, the anger, I’m too busy, would have stopped it from happening. The government would have struck a committee to look at it and maybe in four years if they’d survived the next election something might happen. Or it might not. But February 2020 is not March 2020 - two different time zones, two different worlds. This time is bringing us together in ways very few imagined. Can we keep this up? Not necessarily the dizzying pace - but the collaboration between those not used to collaborating outside their herd?

Are we able to change for the better - always considering our one and only home?

I grew up in the land of four seasons. My awareness of change was initially connected to my wardrobe – how the heavy winter skidoo-boots would be replaced by rubbers for my trudges through the swamp, and down into the puddles and culverts, during April showers. The rubbers then replaced by my white PF Flyers come May. They’d be worn off and on in concert with my green, red or blue flip-flops - or thongs as we used to call them - before they became the name for scant underwear. After Labour Day it was black Oxfords at the start of school - and then I returned to the skidoo-boots, or mukluks, following the first blizzard of the new winter. And the cycle repeated itself year in, year out.

I travelled from ice, to mud, to dry and hot, to warm and cool and back to cold every year. And as I grew, body and mind shooting off in all directions, I became aware of other changes going on around me. The geese - flying in their vee high in the spring sky, the raccoons and skunks, black bears, coming out of hibernation, the bees returning, the mosquitos and blackflies annoying in clusters. Worms underground turning dirt, and the bushes filling out and the trees turning buds to leaves. It was happening independently and in concert and it wasn’t one change going on and then another, it was all happening at once evolving into a glorious full bloomed version of itself. And it didn’t stop there – all the time it was climbing to perfection, it’s own decline was woven into the growth. The leaves becoming heavy, turning from green to red, and orange, and falling, the trees naked again – skeletal. The hibernating critters would waddle back to their dens, the insects dry to dust between the windows – and the ice came back, and the blanket of snow put everything to sleep.

Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic, wrote, the universe is change and he asks us if we are frightened of change - what can exist without it? What’s closer to nature’s heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed?

What can you get used to?

So here we are in a change, in changes, that very few anticipated and yet changes that involve us all.

Arundhati Roy said this recently about our current state: "what is this thing that has happened to us? It's a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus… it has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality,’ trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us - or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

There is an opinion by Rosabeth Moss Kanter that says we are in the ‘miserable 

middle of change - that everything looks like failure in the miserable middle. While everyone loves inspiring beginnings and happy endings; it is the middle that involves the hard work.” Lao Tzu from the back of his water-buffalo centuries ago said: new beginnings are often disguised as painful endings – he doesn’t get into the miserable middle, perhaps figures the painful endings include the misery of the middle – dunno.

We have an opportunity here to change and in that change do something healthy for where we live – to leave the campsite in much better shape for the next generation. “The needs of a happy life are very few.” Marcus Aurelius said. I do think we need a lot less to be happy and we can do a lot more to make that happen.

I’m going to close with a spoken word poem by Buffy Sainte-Marie that is in itself a reminder and a roadmap. In it is hope, and challenge, and inclusivity and the many changes, and there’s also lots of love…

Feels like we’re all in detention

For not having paid attention,

done our homework…

Hold your head up

Lift the top of your mind

Put your highs in the earth

Lift your heart to your own home planet

What do you see?

What is your attitude?

Are you hear to improve or damn it

Look right now and you see we’re only here by the skin of our teeth as it is

So take heart and take care of your link with life

It ain’t money that makes the world go ‘round

that’s only temporary confusion

It ain’t governments that make the people strong

It’s the opposite illusion

Look right now and you’ll see they’re only here by the skin of their teeth as it is

So take heart and take care of your link with life as beautiful 

(if you got sense to take care of your source of perfection)

Mother Nature she’s the daughter of god and the source of all protection

look right now and you’ll see she’s only here by the skin of her teeth as it is

so take heart and take care of your link with life

and carry it on we’re sayin

and carry it on and keep playin’ 

and carry it on and keep prayin’

and carry it on…

What can we get used to? We’re learning that each and every day – toss out what doesn’t work, build on what does, consider where we live, love more, and let’s put our imaginations to work and be a participant in the many other changes that are going on around us. Respect.

Pete Smith

Executive&Creative Director

Canadian Centre for Rural Creativity

Blyth, Ontario

June, 2020.

“In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

Bertrand Russell