The Coronaviary

Thinking about ‘Festina Lente’

August 10, 2020lynnmorstead5 Comments

“Festina lente” read the text during a recent longer Zoom workshop. I had to look it up. My fellow cohouser often sends me messages that require a learning moment on my part. I love the way she challenges me.

Oh yes, that’s it! Like “Eile mit Weile” or “Make Haste Slowly”. I try to relax, leave my old self behind — again — and clumsily ease into a new way of collaborating.

Working on our cohousing project during the COVID era has immersed me in a world I’ve only read about until now. The group operates — or rather, is learning how to operate — by consensus principles.

Starting assumptions.

From the outside looking in, I had assumed the end product would simply be decisions that everyone “could live with“. That would be it. This would be achieved through some mysterious process, as long as we have enough good will and reasonable people. The benefit was reported to be that decisions “stick” better and are less likely to be revisited. Ok, I can get behind that.

I had heard some stories about it going a bit slower sometimes, and other buyer-beware warnings, so I was on alert. Our highly developed survival instincts make sure we remember these red flags.

So imagine my surprise as I start to get glimpses into something very different unfolding. Something much richer and broader.

What it looks like.

It’s a way that doesn’t require me to fight for air time. The process assures my voice gets equal and sufficient time — not just an after-thought, polite “what did you think” if I don’t wedge into the fray.

It’s a way that doesn’t favor the most persuasive orator. The process trains us on deeper listening, so your contribution is accessible even if it’s sometimes jumbled. The ‘receiver’ works hard to compensate for your ‘sending’ flubs.

It’s a way that pauses to make sure no person or idea is left behind.

What it feels like.

It’s a place where “I” am not pressured to win to feel good about the outcome. The work is focused on getting the “We” to win — moving us to a place where there are no losers.

I’m experiencing interactions that demonstrate how a deeper understanding of your position contains the seeds of the bridge between us. Me unpacking your side of things and you fully soaking in mine, strips away the clutter of our differences and opens up a new path forward.

How is it changing my approach to the meetings?

In a former life, performance and time pressures conditioned me to “bring solutions”, “demonstrate initiative”, and pile up “individual accomplishments” to pad out annual performance reviews. Meetings were arenas, where you went to perform and win.

With consensus, I don’t have to arrive with all the answers and be ready to fight to get them recognized and adopted. It’s understood that the final outcome will be a “best of breed” of our collective input, rather than a vote on an individual’s proposal. Now I am working on starting meetings with a more “open” stance. I’m not going in attached to a specific solution I’m bringing — well, mostly anyway! I’m working on it …

The mental workload is shared. Stress levels drop. You don’t have to be “on” and ready to lead the charge. You just need to show up, listen, contribute, do your best and stick with the process.

It’s obvious that I’m very much a ‘work in progress’, and easily revert to my standard MO. It’s hard to switch styles after so many decades, but it’s an exhilarating challenge.

I’m thinking of an old African saying, that reminds me of the prize:

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

~~~

Afterthought: Maybe our national approach to the current crisis could learn something from an alternative universe like this. Just maybe …

From Act of Faith to Beacon of Hope

July 24, 2020lynnmorstead4 Comments

From earlier in the week …

It’s Monday morning and we’re on a high from a weekend-long collaborative design workshop. Guided by a professional facilitator, our CoHousing Houston community worked with our architects to align on a shared vision for the common amenities in our project. It was a surprisingly exhilarating experience for so many hours spent parked in front of a Zoom screen.

This would be a tall order under any circumstances for any group of people with relatively little shared history, mostly zero experience living in community and still stubbing our toes on working with consensus.

When you layer in 2020 COVID dynamics it might seem like a stretch too far. We haven’t even met our post-COVID new joiners in person. Lively pot-luck social-cum-business gatherings have been downgraded to the flatness and boxiness of Zoom galleries with tightly scripted agendas.

I’m mystified by this uplifted feeling after ten hours of Zooming with 18 people. I was fully expecting to be depleted and cranky at best and thoughts of “I can’t do this any longer” at worst.

So what happened?

Investing significant time and treasure in the early stages of a forming cohousing community is an act of faith. A core group of us have been working on this for over three years now. We had finally reached the point where we had land under contract, the legal structure was in place a date was set for the signing of legal documents plus the first sizable down payments made, and the timetable for face-to-face design workshop weekends was fixed in our calendars.

It was all systems GO, then the COVID lockdown burst in on the scene.

Do we postpone? Do we slow down? The answer was a resounding NO. We will not be deterred. Let’s press ahead. We have great momentum. Carpe diem, and all that — and anyway, this virus thing won’t last forever.

“Onward through the fog”, as they like to say in Austin, Texas.

Four months later, we’re Zoom-weary, we miss the contagious energy of a group gathering, some are technology frazzled and others are suffering financial fears. The idea of even seeing people face-to-face, let alone living in a closer community together is seeming more and more remote and nostalgic. It’s a like a faded painting which we can no longer visualize in its original vibrant colors.

Yet we carry on in faith.

Then this virtual design weekend happened. I’m sure if we were honest about it, nobody was really looking forward to all those hours staring at the tidy framed grid of Zoom screens. Ugh.

Yet we all showed up ready to participate.

We very quickly found ourselves imagineering an oasis of community living.

This was going to be better than expected …

We shared pictures of communal dinning and living. We dreamed of shared drinks on the rooftop terrace overlooking the treetops of the neighborhood at sunset. We placed ourselves in the meditation space, the reading nooks and even hanging out around a pool. We felt the joy of bumping into each other in the mail room, distracting someone cooking in the community kitchen and shooing the noisy youngsters into the kids cave after dinner. We dreamed of group woodworking and ceramic projects and borrowing bikes from each other.

We spent the whole weekend living in a world we long for and cannot see being lived out anywhere on the planet right now. It’s a world filled with the things we have given up these past few months.

It’s a place where we can channel our dreams for a better future.

So many of our social institutions and structures are being eroded by lack of connections. What will be left standing on the other side of the pandemic? All the places that have knit us together — what can we count on still being there? Even some of the basic foundations of our society like classrooms, churches, concerts, plays — what will they look like?

We can’t predict or control many of these broader outcomes, but this weekend we brought to life a sparkly alternative to an otherwise bleak forecast. We can see this more clearly now, we can see the road map to getting there and we can visualize a vibrant oasis with us in it.

What had felt like an act of faith in a risky social experiment has morphed into a beacon of hope.

It’s called CoHousing Houston. We believe we can make this happen.

If you’re curious, check us out at cohousinghouston.com or under cohousinghouston on Facebook. There’s room for more!

“Developmentally Inappropriate”

July 20, 2020lynnmorstead4 Comments

“It’s like Chinese New Year every evening at dinner” reflected one of my Singaporean friends. The surprise gift of time with our young adults seems to be felt across the globe. They’ve returned to the nest during COVID-19, and those who were still living with us are suddenly spending all their time at home — rather than treating us like a free AirBnB.

Here in the US it’s rather similar to Thanksgiving. You know you can count on everyone showing up for a family meal together. There are no competing anythings to draw them away. We can check in with each other more deeply, catch up, and continue conversations from the night before. We even go for evening strolls after dinner and watch a TV show together occasionally. It’s a throw-back to earlier family life. It’s cozy. I’m getting used to this. I already know I going to really miss this on the other side of the pandemic.

“It’s developmentally inappropriate” is how my 25-year old positions this after prefacing her comment with “no offense or anything, but ….” I guess she does have a point. This would not have been my definition of a daily choice of fun when I was in my 20’s. I get it.

So many young people are locked up in isolation with their parents. It was tolerable — more or less — while everyone was going through the motions of online schooling and young professionals zooming into work, AND we thought it would all be over by the summer. But now, we’re into summer, there’s no end in sight and the troops are getting restless.

The generation that we thought subsisted on texting, Snapchat and Instagram turns out to have a greater appetite for face-to-face contact with their peers than we had thought. How re-assuring.

How will the youngsters on the stair steps to adulthood be changed by 2020? Are they going to miss some steps along they way and get tripped up in the future? Or worse yet, fail to make it to the next step?

A missed prom or walking the stage at graduation won’t change anyone’s life trajectory. But what are they missing by not being able to venture out into the world and cut their teeth on real life experiences without a parental blanket covering them?

They’re not taking those first self-organized and self-propelled adventures – either near or afar. They’re not figuring out their own plans for the fall season, be it school or new jobs. Many have lost employment opportunities to help fund next years tuition. And none are they off on last-chance carefree trips on shoe-string budgets.

They’re frozen in time and place.

They’re waiting to be told what the boundaries will be within which they can operate. Will they be sitting in classrooms together and if yes, when and how? Will they be able to take the necessary national tests required to move to the next step? Employers are moving the start date or withdrawing offers.

How can this generation get out the door and get launched?

If “adulting” was already a “thing” that was hard, won’t it get that much harder?

Generation “Z” will surely get some new nickname a few years down the road, just as I’ve been labelled a “Boomer”. The story has not yet been written – we’re still in the first chapters. Who knows what the impact will be. Will they be the locked-ups, the mollycoddleds, the zoomers, or simply the pandemics?

They’re not on the trajectory they had imagined for themselves. Their ideas about how the world would unfold for them have shifted. The old model has been discontinued, but the new one hasn’t yet evolved.

At a certain point they will stop waiting and begin to define the new reality for themselves, so they can live into their potential. We need to make sure that we are willing to let them leap and start taking the risks that will be needed for this to happen.

And it will not be risk-free for any of us.

For me this will be hitting very close to home in a couple of weeks when our medical student leaves the safety of online only classes and ventures into the heart of the Texas COVID epicenter. Our protected bubble will be compromised, our risk level goes up, and at the same time we need to support this next step forward.

Forbidden Fireworks popping off all around

July 5, 2020July 5, 2020lynnmorsteadLeave a comment

It turned out that we didn’t need to find a distanced vantage point to last night’s Freedom over Texas spectacle downtown. All we had to do was to step out into our own street to see some fireworks.

There were rockets aplenty lighting up the skies above our neighborhood. Unplanned pockets of firework enthusiasts erupted all around us. Erratic bursts of crackling, pops and booms came from over the fence, down the road and through the trees.

The sounds and sites took me back many decades before sensible city ordinances put the kibosh on backyard July 4th celebrations. It was heart-warming.

A few days ago I remember wondering if the number of PSAs about firework restrictions inside the city limits was on the increase this year, or am I just paying closer attention to the news? I didn’t think that much about it until the sun was setting on our evening walk and we started hearing some pops here and there. Aha! Some smart person somewhere was tipped off — hence the PSAs. How did they know?

Yes! It’s going to be more interesting tonight than we expected. How exciting. I’m completely onboard with all our normal safety measures, and I hope that nobody was injured last night. But, we needed a collective expression of some measure of “freedom” on a hot balmy night when a mask order had just been declared, gatherings of more than 10 had been banned and the parks had been closed.

So when the firework symphony got into full swing after dark, we put on our masks, and strolled through the dark streets. What a festival of sparkles in the sky and a liberating sense that we’d taken something back that had been taken away from us.

A little bit of magic returned to the day. July 4th, 2020 didn’t turn out as deadly dull as expected.

The only thing that would have made it even better would have been having my own sparkler to run around with on the lawn making pretty patterns in the night. Remember doing that?

Time to rewire “temporary”

July 4, 2020lynnmorstead5 Comments

Note to self:

2020 is half over. It’s time to get out of idle and shift into gear again.

Enough of “waiting” to pick up and carry on … until this …

Enough of “postponing” life events … until that …

Enough of “suspending” connections … until the other …

I’ve been thinking this is temporary. Just wait it out. Soon enough we will be able to pick up where we left off, and carry on as usual — mostly. In the meantime, four months have flown by and it’s looking like we’re in this for the long-haul. A nebulous soon has turned into a nebulous distant future – maybe even 2021. I’m pushing myself to consider this possibility – while also not having a panic attack about it.

Do I want to continue living like this another year? Absolutely not.

Does this mean, I’m going to cast all care to the wind and sport mask-less bravado? Also, absolutely not.

I’m working on re-wiring my own personal internal thinking about how I arrange my life. Staying within the bounds of COVID safety to do all the things I want to do, involves greater effort, greater planning and greater discomfort. Thus far, I’ve made rather lazy and comfort-seeking decisions behind the veil of caution, comfort and lack of urgency.

Rejecting Zoom invites, because I might self-combust if I have to sit in front of the screen another hour. Not making the effort to arrange for creative outings, because … well … it takes effort. Forgetting to call people I would normally collide with in my daily comings and goings, because out of sight is out of mind. Dragging my feet to invite others to social distance with me, because it’s hot and buggy outside these days – and muggy too on the Texas gulf coast. Pushing things off til tomorrow, because there’s no sense of urgency for today.

Do I want to be taking inventory at the end of 2020, and see the whole year was a holding pattern? Maybe one year is fleeting in the grand scheme of time, but the sands of time on my personal clock are not endless.

I need a paradigm shift. I don’t have lots of answers yet, but I know “Awareness is the greatest agent for change” – thanks for that thought Eckhardt Tolle.

On a whim, I cycled by a friend’s condo yesterday, called her on the phone and asked her to step out on the balcony. She’s not in a position to social distance, so we waved and chatted on the phone. Even though she was 14 floors up and I was standing on a busy street corner, it felt more real and intimate than a Zoom session. More of this …

It gave me a real bounce. I hope it did her too.

The spontaneous balcony visit was on the way home from a patio coffee shop visit with a friend I haven’t seen in person since late last year. It was a multi-sensory technicolor experience compared to the flat world of emails and Facebook posts. We could laugh, catch up, wander down assorted paths of conversation, recycle topics, chatter and debate and go back-and-forth in real-time. More of this too …

It was invigorating for me. I hope she feels the same.

Working on it …

Non-Zoom ideas most welcome 🙂

When you kinda wish you were wrong

June 30, 2020lynnmorstead1 Comment

Ever since May 1st, we’ve been angst-ily deliberating the do-or-don’t we break out of our bubble question. On May 4th I put a stake in the sands of my daily journal declaring “wait 3-4 weeks to see what happens in Texas, and then start tip-toeing out“.

The May stats remained unremarkable here. Things trickled along at a steady pace. There appeared to be a glimmer of light at the end of this dark Rona-tunnel. We didn’t do it, but a visit to a restaurant no longer seemed as outrageous – at least for outdoor dining. We could imagine a gradual return to more contact with people. We actually let a social distancing visitor enter our home to use the restroom. Gutsy. That felt like a bold move in our own ‘opening up’.

Then, poised on the edge of a shift change in our movements … the death of George Floyd brought thousands into the streets and Memorial Day gatherings enticed large crowds to beaches, parks and barbecues. On May 28th we plugged into a special vaccine update by Dr. Peter Hotez where he spoke of a potential Texas surge coming as late as July and no vaccine until 2021 at the earliest.

So I moved the goal posts in my journal again: “Revisit release date early July“

2020 feels like it might be a wipe-out.

Starting June 15th, the daily Houston virus stats chart in the local paper began showing a slight increase. A noticeable up-tick followed by a couple lower readings and another higher one. Not yet sure if this is significant – a new trend, or just a blip? The signal that something might be changing became dramatically clear when I opened the newspaper the morning of June 23rd. The jump looked foreboding.

The next day, the paper removed the chart — that was even more scary. I’d been tracking the new cases every day for weeks now. The daily new cases for Houston was replaced with the % positivity chart. Is that an indicator that we shifting into a different level of alarm? We also now have people in our closer circle getting sick.

It’s getting real.

Today, a week later, the positivity % continues to rise and the conversation has shifted to ICU bed capacity and forecasting. Apparently we are going to also argue and cast doubt on these numbers, but I won’t get into that here.

Academic projections are manifesting in real life.

I am comforted that the scientist’s assessments match what is happening. Cause and effect can be linked. This is something I can understand. It makes sense when so much else around me makes no sense at all right now.

I happily pay my flood insurance every year and hope it’s money down the drain. Similarly, we stayed at home after the stay-at-home order was lifted, hoping that would have been an overly cautious complete waste of time. I’m glad we did, but …

I kinda wish we had been wrong about this.

What’s next?

Stuck in No Man’s Land

June 16, 2020lynnmorstead1 Comment

The grand re-opening continues unabated. The public has risen up and said “enough”. All the while virus cases are on the rise, letting us know that “it’s not over yet”.

I’ve had enough too.

Yet, I watch and wait for it to be “over”, though I have no clue what that might look like.

The initial glow of a welcome respite from routines, commitments and schedules has long lost it’s shine. Once we had mastered the new challenges of acquiring our basic needs and caught up on a few back-burner to-dos, we settled into a comfortable sameness. I’ts been rather dull some days, but tolerable nonetheless.

Tolerable for a while. That comfortable sameness is now old. My tolerance is wearing thin. I’m done with it.

I’m ready to move on, but not sure what makes sense.

I’m caught between friends who are out eating at restaurants again and others who haven’t even gone to a grocery store in three months.

I’d love to meet up at a noisy restaurant for fancy cocktails and tasty deliciousness served up in multiple complex dishes. My heart is ready — “you go for it girl!”, but my mind says “wait, what about all those droplets spewing into the air?” Feels too risky. I reconsider.

I’m stuck between joining in on group gatherings and life moving on without me. Are we creating even more divisions in our world? Those who meet up in person and those who remain virtual?

I’m conflicted about saying goodbye to family members moving out of state, for forever, without a hug goodbye. Should we take a leap of faith and do it anyway? We all feel healthy. Surely one big bear hug would be fine, but what if it’s not?

Time with our older loved ones is precious and yet we’re trying to limit our visits? There’s something not quite right about that. I’m questioning my efforts to protect my dad so he can stay healthy and yet more disconnected. What if I got tested before I visited? There are too many reasons why a negative test is no guarantee that I might not bring the virus to his door anyway.

What if this situation lasts the rest of the year – into next year? Beyond?

If it’s just a matter of time before we all get exposed, maybe I should just get it over with. But then again, the longer I can delay the inevitable, the more knowledge and research I will benefit from as an eventual patient.

Hang on a little longer.

It’s clear that at some point each one of us is going to take the next big step out into the open. Just like making the decision to get into my car and drive somewhere in Texas, where the rate of fatalities is tracking close to our current Coronavirus deaths.

I don’t stay at home because of car fatalities, so should I continue to stay at home because of the virus? I feel more comfortable with the risk on the freeways because I drive along under the illusion that I have more control over my safety. But I’m not so sure about this new virus.

We will eventually learn to cozy up to this new threat. We’ll integrate it into our daily micro-decisions about safety. A choice to not drive after midnight on New Year’s Eve might become similar to a choice not to go bar-hopping in the inner city. Some will still do it, but many others will choose not to.

STOP PRESS: I just learned that our local gym has reopened with strict safeguards. OH! This might be my moment of daring! I’m not rushing over there yet, but I am doing some serious investigations on their new COVID setup.

Stay tuned …

Is the wind at your back?

June 5, 2020lynnmorsteadLeave a comment

We set out west for a bike run along the bayou near the house. The morning was perfectly still. The heavy days of summer are creeping up on us, when the only thing that moves is the air vibrating around the singing cicadas.

The trees are still, leaves are fixed in place like a still life, the flags hang limply around their poles. We cruise along effortlessly. The only resistance we meet are the new trail overpasses.

It’s going to be easy riding the whole way.

We come to our turnaround and start to retrace our route back east. A surprising breeze greets us as we now ride in the opposite direction. Did that just come out of nowhere, or was it pushing us along the whole way and we didn’t know it? I turned back again to check. Indeed, we had enjoyed a glorious back wind riding west. We had no clue.

What an image for our times.

I’m not ok either…

June 2, 2020lynnmorstead3 Comments

Today this blog is mutating. The ‘novel’ coronavirus threat is commingling with an older persistent threat, which demands to be heard.

It’s easy for many of us to hide out in quarantine. Pull the covers over our head until it passes. It’s a bit harder to work on your “super powers” of patience, gratitude and kindness. Some days it feels almost within grasp, but there is a measurable slippage — as noted in a recent survey* on the level of depression and anxiety. But still, we have tools and tips on how to navigate these waters. We will overcome.

It gets a little harder when other threats start circling over head like vultures waiting for you to collapse. Will these other threats swoop down to feed on us? A recession, a direct hit hurricane, or a surge in the virus. These inject worry and fretting, but we come together to press on. These threats come and go, they’re not continuous — you get to breathe in between them.

Some threats never go away

All this felt manageable until a week ago, when I was forcibly reminded of a threat that never goes away for many of our brothers and sisters. The threat of racism. They never get to breathe easy between events that are often hidden from view. In this case a man’s breath was literally taken away — out in the open in front of several bystanders. A white man with power perpetrated an unthinkable fatal indignity on a black man …

Something cracked.

This is not an outlier, not a first time, not even a surprise. It was the match dropped into a pile of kindling that has been growing over too many years to count. The list of names and incidents stretches deep into our history. And the unequal impacts of the coronavirus on communities of color has piled on even more.

George Floyd’s murder felt like a direct assault on every one of us. We have all been wounded and diminished by this. A deep sadness pours out of me for a world where onlookers don’t stop it — they video it, because that’s their only recourse. I quickly leap from sad to furious.

How can anyone be ok?

I‘m hearing my “Black Colleagues aren’t ok” — of course they aren’t ok, how could they be?! How could anyone be ok?!

I don’t need to spend too long wondering how we got to this place. It’s staring us in the face — if we care to look. What’s more surprising is that we don’t have more eruptions of outrage than we do. I don’t feel qualified to dig very deep into the larger systemic issues, but …

… What I do wonder about is what is my role in this? What am I doing to propagate a society in which this can happen? Don’t I vote to change policy, elect just legislators? How am I complicit? What are the unconscious things I do to aggravate the situation? I try to listen, to educate myself, to ask questions, challenge myself … but that feels ineffective and weak when I look at the face of that policeman in the video.

Will this threat be handled or vanished?

This virus will surely pass over. The numbers will eventually go down. We will integrate it’s threat into our lives and we will carry on mostly as before — after we’ve exhausted ourselves talking about how things are different.

What will it be like on the other side of the George Floyd incident? Will we simply integrate this story into the collection of unjust, unpunished crimes against our fellow man? Or will some real change result from the public outrage? Will the threat of a repeat incident vanish underground for some, and seep deeper into the psyche for others?

Will we carry on mostly as before? I fear we might — after the rage is spent and the protesters have gone home.

I’m not ok about that either.

*the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) partnered with the Census Bureau on an experimental data system called the Household Pulse Survey