Emotive Mechanics in East Detroit

Yesterday I met with an East Detroit school principal at his school. Few things ground human relationships like concern for the safety of people who have been harmed, and you could see it in his face as he spoke about the number one thing his students ask for help with: safety from violence in and outside of school.

You can read about that in the news or a policy report. Hearing it directly from Detroit youth, or taste gunpowder in the air from a recent shooting, and see it momentarily tug at a grown man's composure takes the experience to a different level.

The issue moves him and his staff, he's doing things to cultivate a culture of empathy and appreciation to help the most "at risk" youth in the school move forward from within and beyond the city. I call that emotive mechanics. We aim to change the way people look and feel about the world with tangible actions, but we're guided by a judicious mix of our own emotions and tools for making sense of the world. In that sense, we're emotive mechanics too.

Wisdom to be

Wisdom as it is.

I recently gave feedback on the draft speech of a fellow social entrepreneur who was invited as a keynote speaker for the Jane Goodall Vision 2020 symposium.

While I won't be there for the symposium (it's in Australia), I can imagine the following for events of this caliber and magnitude:  people are privileged to attend, and the event organizers bring in some of the best speakers they can find to leave all their attendees charged with the finest of rekindled hearts and solid wisdom.

While I was more or less familiar with various strategies she explores in her speech, I'm starting to realize how tremendous an opportunity it's been to have access to her speech and organization: due to the nature of the organization's programs, I've been privileged to learn about some of her organization's deepest challenges in ways that most people would never imagine possible for someone working with it in such a short amount of time.  I know that in some way, the things they might have struggled with are the very same things I struggle with too.  They probably boil down to very simple (but tremendous!) things that were affirmed at the end of her speech: perseverance, commitment, and belief in your own success before you begin.

If you're left with the same things you had questioned before, it's time to get moving--sometimes you must live to understand them, rather than know them to live.  Some ideas retain resilience even when we don't feel we have a complete grasp of reality or the concepts in our minds.  Those come from learning by undergoing the most trying challenges of fully living our lives.

Heed your vision to find your bearings before committing, keep your eyes open, and dive in

Perseverance and sustainability

Perseverance is a powerful thread of sustainability.  Yet in the opposite direction, perseverance in purview of foolhardy and narrow commitment can become the undoing of an individual, community, or organization.

We require vision to ensure the viability of our perseverance and ultimately, our sustainability.
#added 20 III 2013 11:22

Music actually starts in the last ten seconds.  The tune is called "Courage in Complexity" and was completed this summer (I won't go into depth about the piece here though).  Chelsea, Dima (the one singing) and I retreated to the parking structure after watching a substantial part of the Transit of Venus take place in Michigan.  In conversation with Chelsea and Dima, I mentioned how I had hacked together some rhythms from disparate sources to try finishing this tune on viola.  One of the motifs in this tune (not heard in this clip) uses a common rhythm heard in some dubstep music (which is why they said "dubstep"), and coincidentally was figured out in the same parking structure a day before the Detroit Electronic Music festival.

Attendance for the Transit of Venus event was unprecedented--an audience of people well into the hundreds came to see Venus cross over the sun on the University's telescopes.  Celestial events with large public audiences always prompt me to ponder "WWSD?" AKA, what would [Carl] Sagan do?  At the time, I was a little distracted by how the campus observatory missed a huge opportunity to give people a quality "The Meaning of Humanity via the celestial bodies ala Carl Sagan" moment.  To make things even more existential, we had just gotten done discussing about the phrase "YOLO" (You only live once) and what it was like to prepare for going to a prison for class.

Later on I found out a brutal beating took place on our campus, possibly within a few hundred yards of where we stood just hours before this was recorded.  While the two events are so disparate that they'd seem unrelated, there's a definite privilege to recreational learning and our capacity for creativity which shares a common root: both require security.  When it comes to preventing and minimizing violent altercations, I'm certain that education, even scientific, requires some ethical context to foster compassion.

[note, this post was back-dated to the time of the video's recording for archival purposes]