Navigating Work and Purpose During Global Crisis
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What shall we build on the ashes of a nightmare?
We don’t need another hall of finance, wealth, and exclusivity; no more symbols of class, power, and privilege. We don’t need another gargantuan modern-day mill where some working people slave over mops and vacuum cleaners in the wee hours of the morning, and others over computers and fax machines way past sundown. Yes, jobs are valuable and necessary in a world where everything—even food, shelter, and clothing—is a commodity. But now is the time to think like poets, to envision and make visible a new society, a peaceful, cooperative, loving world without poverty and oppression, limited only by our imaginations.
— Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams
Hello again, after so long! How’s everyone holding up?
The quote above comes from the epilogue of Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams, wherein Kelley considers the future of the site of the former World Trade Center towers in the wake of their destruction in 2001. The first line of it– “What shall we build on the ashes of a nightmare?” has been running amok in my head ever since I first read it a few years ago, but particularly recently.
I’m currently visiting Baltimore and DC, a graduation gift to myself after finishing circus school– yes! It finally happened. After these past two years, I can definitively say that circus school was much, much harder than getting my PhD. When I started, I anticipated being physically tired… that much seemed obvious, because duh 40 hours a week of physical movement is a huge amount of exercise. What I didn’t anticipate was that, because I was learning new things (as one does in school) I would also be mentally and emotionally exhausted beyond my wildest imagination. The Aloft Circus Arts program has been one of the most challenging and most rewarding experiences of my life, and I am tremendously proud of having made it through.
The past month has been a frenzy, with a cabaret style show on the 4th of May, followed by a completely different ensemble show, Two Truths and a Lie (directed by the amazing Tanya Burka) less that a month later. If you’d like, you can watch my capstone performance here, which was a very serious and personally meaningful piece… by comparison, my solo from Two Truths and a Lie was a romp , and involved my classmates chasing me with anchovy puppets (you’ll have to wait for the video of that show, as I don’t have it just yet!).
Now, as I sit in a café writing this, I’m trying to enjoy a moment of stillness in the midst of transition (naturally, I no longer have any idea how to sit still, if I ever did at all).
One part of that transition has been to consider my workshop offerings for the summer: I went to put out another round of Values-Based Decision Making for Your Career, only to discover that the video lessons and prompts have completely disappeared from my hard drive. After having a ✨small meltdown✨, I thought again: when I originally offered Values-Based Decision Making, it was as I was emerging from my own period of transition in 2022, where I’d reached a career crossroads and took the road that required me to buy a clown nose (yes, really).
Now, though, the need I see is different. This past semester, I had to pause while teaching my astrobiology class to make space for my students to process the mental gymnastics of doing coursework during a genocide. What prompted this moment was the noise of a protest outside, a few days after many of my students were forcibly removed from the grounds of the Art Institute of Chicago by CPD/SWAT. For context, even when Chicago police decide to mass arrest protestors, SWAT is not typically involved– but they were brought in in this case, resulting in a particularly violent mass arrest of nearly 70 people. A number of my students were recovering from this experience, and trying to make sense of how they should think about their work and lives at a time of crisis.
Personally, I know that feeling well— I don’t know that I’ve stopped feeling it in the 25 years since my first forays into antiwar activism in the early aughts. I don’t know that I have any straightforward answers (or any answers at all), but I do know that feeling grounded in what I believe to be important helps me think through what my commitments should be when the world is a tornado around me.
This coming Saturday, I’m offering some guided space to others who might benefit from time to do the same. Navigating Work and Purpose During Global Crisis will have some guided exercises for identifying one’s values, much like the previous version of my values workshop, but will also be geared towards opening space to reflect on making sense of our work in a world on fire. The workshop is two hours, sliding scale, and there will be a recording available after the fact if you can’t make it live.
May you be able to hear yourself think amidst chaos,
LW