Spokes of the Flourishing Commons: Origins Podcast
There are many ways of knowing and a cultural commons is something that emerges from all of them. Part One of a series exploring the myriad forums of exchange that make up these Flourishing Commons.
Back at the very beginning of Flourishing Commons, I wrote about a spectrum of things that in some way sparked this newsletter and these commons. One of those is the Origins Podcast and I said then that this would be a space to be more spacious with the ideas that emerge from those conversations.
Here, in the living conversation (in the comments to these posts, in what you write in response, and in the events that we organize with the community that are a part of Flourishing Commons) we will make discussion around ideas from Origins, so it is important to introduce it.
What is Origins? Why do I consider it a component of the Flourishing Commons?
I was fortunate enough to spend two years at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A few months into that tenure, I got a call from my mom as I was driving into lab and she was animated about an NPR story she had heard about an asteroid that had a chance to hit Earth. I casually looked up the story and found out the astrodynamicist they had interviewed worked down the hall from me. And that she, like everyone at that brilliant institution, was open and eager to chat with me.
It was thrilling to realize that I was surrounded by these individuals. So I started setting up coffee dates every morning. Just for free-wheeling, curiosity-driven discussions. They went everywhere and no two conversations were alike, but they were the same in the energy they created. They taught me to cultivate a special quality of attention—that discovery and fascination can be everywhere and in everyone around you. We may think we're in some cultural pocket of squalor, that over there (wherever we might wish we were at any moment) would be better, but all of that evaporates when we cultivate a quality of attention for what's around us. It's like Marilynne Robinson wrote in Gilead, "This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it."
Two years and hundreds of daily conversations later, I was leaving JPL. But I wasn't ready to stop the practice of discovering the people around me and the way their perspectives and lives refracted the world for me in new ways--that was the birth of Origins.
Origins attempts to bring the brilliance of those JPL coffee conversations to broader audiences. Each episode is a nonlinear exploration of the pivotal moments across some thought-leader from science, engineering, art, or design, crafted specifically for the category-defying society that we live in; an hour every couple of weeks that is replete with new lenses for your own life.
One of our recent guests, Caitlin McShea (Director of the Santa Fe Institute’s InterPlanetary Project and host of the altogether wonderful Alien Crash Site podcast) articulated what Origins is (full episode here):
On the show, I try to draw into the guest's sensibility, their gifts of seeing and knowing. Anima Anandkumar (Artificial Intelligence (AI) pioneer and evangelist for women and minorities in refiguring how we approach technology and science) is an example of drawing into those core values of a guest (full episode):
I try to get at the questions my guests have been following. I try to draw that individual out on how those questions lodge in them and shape how they live, and in the process are material to shape how each of us live. Here's a clip from one of the most moving episodes with Sara Hendren (artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Olin College of Engineering) (full episode):
I'm increasingly discouraged by the turbulent news cycle. The wisdom we need is away from that. Origins is long form conversation, slow news so to speak. It is a forum that is comfortable with tension and is not constantly grasping for immediate resolution. My approach to the show is in part modeled after Adrienne Maree Brown's liberating notion of letting your default position be wonder. Or what former guest Dan Goods (NASA JPL's visual strategist) describes as the 'Museum of Awe' (full episode):
My approach to finding words that matter, questions that animate, and thoughts that invite and inspire owes a great debt to innumerable writers, scientists, and creatives. Because of Origins I have become a collector of questions and I draw constant inspiration from pioneers and people I think of as ‘Great Askers’ Krista Tippett and the On Being team, Ezra Klein (Vox Conversations and now the New York Times), Tim Ferriss, to name a few. I'm constantly inspired by Maria Popova. You will find those influences in Origins and in this newsletter.
Origins and the Flourishing Commons
Changing the way we see the world and witnessing that change reflected in the world is a slow process. Origins acknowledges that as do these Commons. Those episodes are small acts that may not have a reward in themselves, or soon, or with certainty (Rebecca Solnit Hope in the Dark). But the waves they set off in me and hopefully in you too, but certainly together, may shift the world. That is the very ethos of these Commons.
Two unmistakable links between Origins and The Flourishing Commons seem powerful to me now:
Pluralism. I'm a scientist and an engineer. But these forums believe that there are many ways of knowing. They attempt to span those ways of knowing (Origins specifically crossing science, art, engineering, and design; the Flourishing Commons embracing the planetary voice necessary for the future of our society). Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in her altogether life-lifting intertwining of science, spirit, and story Braiding Sweetgrass, "There are many ways of knowing and of understanding and knowledge is only deep when you embrace all of them."
Becoming comfortable with contradiction and ambiguity, with messiness. Change is the only constant in this world. To keep pace, we must learn how to adapt and that means becoming comfortable with the uncertainty that defines those transitional periods. We have to learn how to hold the contradictions that demarcate moving from something old to something new. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald's definition of intelligence, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.” Rebecca Solnit more immediately connected the same sentiment to the point of Origins and the Flourishing Commons, "A gift for embracing paradox is not the least of the equipment an activist should have." These are forums for nuanced exchange and for suspending resolution; for holding paradox which is where we start to sort things out (I'm thinking here, too, about Tressie McMillan Cottam's 'thick conversations'). The discomfort of uncertainty is more difficult alone, so we will do it together--community that can hold discomfort more robustly and generatively. That is the point - to be uncomfortable. To refigure. To reimagine.
What's happening now? Where do you start with Origins?
Season Five is now live - listen to the trailer here. Subscribe anywhere you get podcasts.
These Flourishing Commons have influenced the direction Season Five is taking. You can participate in that directioning by joining the conversation around these posts and joining the events we organize. These commons are meant to be participatory - create a conversation, share your marginalia as you are reading these posts.
Posts to Flourishing Commons will have lessons learned through Origins sprinkled in them, but I thought I would reflect on a bit of what I've learned from the first three years of Origins here.
Be a collector of questions; the art of the question
Make space for silence, let it do work
There is complexity in the world and there are things that are irreducible to dichotomies, binaries, yes/no. We need to have patience with that. Origins, as with the Flourishing Commons, is a space in which people can be subtle and complex
Everyone has doubts and dark periods of their soul. We do a disservice to ourselves in only telling the successes and portraying everything as light and good
Break the traditional narratives. Disrupt the news cycle and the idea that success stories are linear and predictable and without set-back, heartbreak, and uncertainty.
On Origins, we always ask four lighting questions to conclude the episodes. Thought that would be a good way to conclude this post. Here is how I would begin to respond to them now:
What is one book that you feel has impacted you unlike anyone else? What book do you have a special relationship to? Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths
What passion outside of your own field has most importantly helped set your trajectory? Competitive gymnastics. Throughout my childhood and through my college years, I was a competitive gymnast. I am still continually recognizing its influences and in fact only now feel like I understand the full reach of things gymnastics taught me like discipline of body and mind, mental visualization and focus, and the sensibilities of team and collectivity.
What is your latest and most consuming passion? What is making your heart sing right now? Being a father and a partner to a mother. I have only officially been these things for 14 months, but the transformation that they have worked in me is beyond its time.
What is one thing that you truly and fully screwed up? So many things and something new all the time. There are many instances where I have lost perspective and become impatient, angry, dismissive. I think the more I become aware of those digressions through mindfulness the more the periods I fail to be magnanimous weigh on me.