This week, it happened again. It happens so rarely that I assume it will never happen but it’s always delightful when it does. The last time was a couple of years ago but it happened again this week. I was walking in the area where I go for my rain walks. For years, I have roamed all over that area, both on trails and cross-country. It’s where we take Chrysalis kids for “Staying Found.”
So I was following a trail and became confused. I wasn’t sure where I was. I wasn’t panicked; I knew I could follow my path back to the car but I didn’t recognize the area. I was even more confused when I finally came to a place I recognized because I came to it from a direction that made no sense.
Intrigued, I went back two days later to try figuring out what happened. In my mental map, a trail surrounds the entire drainage that I usually work within. But two days before, I had come to that trail from an unexpected angle so I did not recognize it as the boundary trail as I crossed it. I roamed up along the area on the other side of the trail, beyond the drainage, thinking I was still within the drainage. I couldn’t figure out how this “sub- drainage” I was within fit into the drainage system that I thought I deeply knew. (It didn’t. It fit beyond that drainage.)
If I stay up late and have to switch off the last living room light, I have to walk to our bedroom in the dark. Though the narrow path has turns in it, the kinesthetic map in my body allows my hands to guide me easily to the bedroom. But one night, I walked into unexpected bumps and vanished walls. Deep confusion. At the next unexpected bump, I stopped and felt along the wall. It was oriented at a different angle than the walls on my “map.” I had to switch from my kinesthetic map of the walls to the reality of how the walls felt and proceed from there. As I did, my map recalibrated and I knew where I was.
In both cases, an unrecognized rotation prevented my maps from aligning with what it was supposed to represent. This pandemic feels similar. The economic map by which we orient much of our lives does not align with our actual experience now. “Essential workers” are earning minimum wage and not provided with protective gear. Hospitals are closing in the midst of a pandemic because they had to postpone the elective surgeries that generate the profit for the hospital. Farmers destroy their crops while people go hungry. Something is amiss. Where are we really?
The following paragraph (from “How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump“ by Evan Osnos from the May 11th issue of The New Yorker) describes an earlier map.
“In 1927, Owen D. Young, a Greenwich resident who was the first chairman of General Electric, gave a speech at Harvard Business School, in which he scolded businessmen who “devise ways and means to squeeze out of labor its last ounce of effort and last penny of compensation.” He encouraged them instead to “think in terms of human beings—one group of human beings who put their capital in, and another group who put their lives and labor in a common enterprise for mutual advantage.” Rick Wartzman, a longtime head of the Drucker Institute and a historian of corporate behavior, told me, “This really was beyond rhetoric. We were much more of a ‘we’ culture than an ‘I’ culture.” On Young’s watch, G.E. became one of the first American companies to give workers a pension, profit-sharing, life insurance, medical coverage, loans, and housing assistance.”
How did salaries change from being part of the benefit a company provides to being part of a company’s expenses that must be minimized? How did we as consumers come to focus just on the price so that a company that is miserly with its employees undersells its competition and obtains a larger market share?
Even though the oil demand dropped, the oil had to keep flowing to fulfill futures contracts which anticipates future demand. An incorrect prediction of the future pushes the present on towards that future. I feel as if everyone’s caught up in a circular flow of contracts and debts where everyone in the flow has to do what they are doing because the others within the flow are doing what they are doing. Renters need to work to earn the rent to pay their landlord who needs that income to pay the mortgage that the bank needs to … Companies need to pay workers less so they can sell products for less so they can gain greater market share to boost their profits to raise the price of stocks which allows top management to turn their stock options into maximum salary to allow them to invest in high leverage instruments which requires them to maintain that flow of income. How does one shift from these circular assumptions, responsibilities, and expectations to create a more resilient system? (I recommend again Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth.)
The pandemic reminds me of a story from my ranger days in Denali National Park. Some of the climbing rangers were skiing down the Ruth Glacier when they encountered white- out conditions. One of the rangers continued gliding along just fine. He went to give himself an additional push with his poles. When his poles contacted the snow, his kinesthetic sense immediately knew he had been standing still, not gliding along. The sudden disorientation caused him to fall down.
One of you sent me a link to a short, sweet video about the pandemic that I really like so I pass it on. Here is a link: If the link doesn’t work, you can just search for The Great Realization.
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