Why You Can't Go There Alone
Murmurations and migration
Hello friends.
I’m off work today for May Day. Please enjoy this post.
My piece last week—on Not Going Back To Normal—seemed to really resonate. Thanks to those who read and shared it, and welcome to the new subscribers.
This past week the ongoing war, unprecedented global economic disruption, and rampant corruption was joined by an assassination attempt and a new attack on voting rights. The mess (new word: omnishambles) has gotten so numbing it’s almost boring. It feels like people are ready to think about what could be better, and the change we want to be a part of.
But it’s so easy to get stuck on deciding what should come next, and what your place is in all of it.
This week I talked with my friend Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson about her new book Climate Wayfinding.
And we came to a co-realization, a co-insight, in real time. It was one of my favorite kinds of conversational moments, when you’re in dialogue and you come up with something that you didn’t know until you said it. It’s an understanding I’m going to be sitting with for a long time.
This book is really one point in a generative cycle that Katharine has been following for several years, of sensemaking and change making. As a writer by craft, who also aspires to make change, I'm paying close attention.
First, Katharine got a job writing the Project Drawdown book — a big, bestselling collaborative work designed to highlight climate solutions, like green roofs and biochar. It was practical. Busting with charts and graphs. It was inspiring! And (not but) she came to the conclusion that “solutions are not the problem.”
There are so many, many wonderful things we could be doing to make the world better. But we're not. She started to think about the climate crisis as a leadership crisis. And—in my words—she started to think about that leadership crisis as a justice crisis. The problem is that we need to be listening to women, BIPOC, and those most affected.
Her next step was another book, All We Can Save, a co-edited anthology with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson by women about the climate crisis. Full of beautiful writing, poetry and essays.
People were inspired, again. Maybe even more deeply. But they still didn't know exactly what to do next. How to integrate those feelings.
So she created a program, All We Can Save Circles. Kind of a jazzed-up book club. She and her team brought it into colleges and universities. They made a template, and hundreds of people started their own circles.
Her new book is a distillation of what they learned and developed in those circles. It's a manual for groups, almost like a cookbook for orienting yourself and moving forward with courage.
We talked about why the metaphor of “wayfinding” is so resonant right now.
“The climate crisis is literally making it hard for our maps to keep up,” Katharine said. “As changes happen so quickly, shorelines slipping beneath the sea and glaciers melting and forests and in some cases entire towns going up in flames.
“ But that sense — that the maps are coming up short— is I think also something we're feeling internally. We're feeling it societally. We're feeling it in our organizations.”
I completely agree. And for a lot of people that maplessness translates to a sense of feeling stuck. Powerlessness. Paralysis.
Even within movements we see this. The function is right there in the name. They're supposed to be going somewhere.
But in movements, people spend a surprising amount of time and energy arguing about where, and when, and what to do next and how to do it. (The Democratic party, anyone?)
Because failure seems so terrifying. The stakes so high that we dissipate in stasis. We pull in different directions when the fact is there are thousands, literally thousands, of right, necessary actions. And if someone else wants to do something different from you, good! We need a diversity of approaches. And people should work on what they're most passionate about.
The polycrisis is uncharted territory and it will continue to be for the (un) foreseeable future. To navigate a mapless world, we need a strong compass, to choose the right direction and the next right step, to survey the possibilities before us and to course correct.
And I think also about the concept of a moral compass here — a phrase which suggests we cannot make ends subordinate to means. We have to have fierce convictions as well as flexible tactics. This is why, for example, we can’t endorse the actions of an assassin even if we might agree with some of his words.
Katharine spoke about the embodiment of the compass.
“I really had fun getting into the literature about our capacities for actual physical navigation that are so inbuilt into our brains, our flesh.”
Did you know that bilingual people tend to be better at spatial navigation? And that the two occupations, out of hundreds, with the lowest lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s disease are taxi drivers and ambulance drivers? They strengthen and actually grow their hippocampus while constantly navigating busy streets.
“A compass is not just something we hold,” she said. “It's something that we are.”
If your imagination lights up at this idea, I highly, highly recommend The Wayfinder. It’s a magical realist epic historical novel by an Indigenous author about the peoples of Polynesia navigating their own ecological, political, patriarchal crises, and trying to keep alive their incredible wayfinding abilities that enabled them to cross oceans a thousand years ago. It gets to the question of what knowledge needs to be preserved and what beliefs need to be discarded, where is home, when to persevere and when we must abandon. All critical questions in our time. Plus there’s a talking parrot.
Of course many species have incredible wayfinding abilities that are total mysteries to us.
The arctic tern migrates farther than any other animal, between both poles. 20,000 miles round trip every year. It weighs no more than 4.5 ounces.
The humpback whales migrate farther than any mammal, some from the Antarctic Peninsula down to Costa Rica. They move at the speed of a person walking, no more than 5 miles an hour, but 24 hours a day. And we have no idea how they know where to go or exactly why they do it.
And the painted lady, the most widespread butterfly in the world, somehow crosses from Europe to Africa, a trip that takes them up to 10 generations to complete.
I realized something as I was saying this to Katharine. They have something in common, these astonishing, mysterious, long-range migrating animals that span the globe, whether in the oceans or the sky.
They do it together.
Flocks. Pods. Murmurations. A swarm, rabble or kaleidoscope (yes!) of butterflies.
The benefits of migration in groups have been under-studied, but a 2022 paper suggested that animals pool their information, which allows them to make better collective decisions in a fast-changing environment with limited information.
They find safety in numbers as they move through unfamiliar territory.
In longer-lived species, younger creatures of course learn from elders.
Even some types of songbirds that are typically solitary will fly together at bottlenecks like alpine passes— and if they are not flying closely together, they will sometimes call out to each other.
This is what adrienne maree brown calls an emergent strategy. It's a strategy for figuring out where to go, and it's also a strategy of how to go.
Together.
Upon reflection, I realize this has been the most important shift of my 40s. I was raised on an individualistic, zero-sum model of success. Be the “Brand Called You”. Stand out. Lean in. I saw other people as competition, or as too important to bother them. I even refused some offers of mentorship because I didn’t know quite how to accept them.
Now, in a quest to live more authentically, with more meaning, more purpose, more impact, more joy, and more learning, I have started to intentionally track, ping, and gather with folks I find inspiring. Not just for friendship and not for anything as rote as networking. But to tell each other where we see glimmers on the horizon, and to spell each other on the way.
I am especially moved by the concept of multigenerational migration. I believe that’s the kind of vision we will need to carry us over the high mountain passes of the next few decades.
Let’s try something—say hello in the comments. Make connections. Ten thousand people or more might see this post, and I know from being in touch with some of you, that you might be inspired by knowing each other.
"I am especially moved by the concept of multigenerational migration. I believe that’s the kind of vision we will need to carry us over the high mountain passes of the next few decades." 💚 🦋🌈
Hello, everyone! What’s your favorite response to the question “How are you?” right now? I’ve been saying “the horrors persist, but so do I”, which people seem to appreciate. :)