Never Miss the Opportunity a Good Crisis Affords

Diary. 20th March, 2020
Never Miss the Opportunity a Good Crisis Affords

The title phrase dropped into my mind as I sipped my morning cuppa and mulled the ideas  clearly audible in the river’s flood. It has a fast pace this morning. I can see choppy waves with white caps. The water is brown, presumably the bed churned up from activity upstream. There are branches and twigs in the mill.

In the context of a global pandemic my small crisis was only the unfortunate experience of finding my car clamped in a Greystones car park when I wanted to get home after a Dart journey. I had paid the parking fee but inadvertently one of the coins inserted into the meter had been one, instead of two, euro. Or so I assume, as the ticket indicated my payment was a euro short of that needed to park there for the whole day.

The clamping was less shocking to me than the difficulties incurred in making contact with APCOA Parking, their implacable response - and fee of over a hundred euro immediately demanded before the clamp could be removed. Perhaps it was the absolute unwillingness to engage in any question of justice or the fact they apparently still held out-of-date details of my credit card and the nature of an officialdom augmented by the simple digital alternative options of ‘this’ or ‘that’ that led me to feel so assaulted.

Being able to make use of such an experience, as I have found before, by feeding it into a creative endeavour at least ensures no good crisis is wasted and leaves one feeling less helpless. So this week I followed a link* to renew my learning on haibun – a poem that involves a combination of prose and seventeen syllable haiku - and drew on the experience to have a go.

It was tempting this morning to stay observing the flood in my quiet meditation. I managed it at the earlier thought of the stick I picked up on the path while in Beddinge, southern Sweden, when there  for a week at a design workshop some years ago, but the opportunity afforded by a good crisis thrust me to my feet. 

In addition to my personal small crisis, this is a week of global crisis. The onslaught of the Corona Covine 19 Virus that is now hitting Ireland, too, has led the government to shut schools and ask those whose immune system might be compromised, by virtue of age and/or former illness or ongoing medical condition, to socially isolate themselves and stay mostly at home. The entire population is also asked to practice distancing themselves from others by a meter or two. Age and radiotherapy treatment ten years ago technically put me in the ‘compromised’ frame although I’m in pretty good shape overall right now. Still, never miss the opportunity…. So it is easier to write and consider new projects whilst virtually ‘self-isolating’.

The Beddinge stick lying on the side of a pathway through trees alongside the sea spoke to me strongly at the time and resides now on the hearth of my home. The idea of talking-sticks – now often used in business meetings and other gatherings and not confined to sticks, favoured objects may be instituted instead – came, as I understand it, from First World People, Native American tribes. 

In a group meeting the person holding the stick holds sway. It would be impolite, to say the least, to interrupt. When they have spoken, or held the attention of the group in silence, the stick is passed on. We passed a communal talking stick around the circle at our gatherings of people interested deep imagery and later in my Dancing the Spiral workshops. Other times it was put down in the centre of the group for whosoever was inspired, or had something they wanted to say, to pick up.

The stick is shouting to me, My former  experience of facilitating workshops, particularly more recent conversations drawing on poetry as a stimulating resource, has me wondering about doing something similar on wellbeing and resilience, or developing a network of support for people in later life. Considering what they’d like to do for what might be the next thirty or forty years could help counteract the idea that they, and I'm one of them, should simply retreat into silence. I am in thrall to the stick. Totems are powerful.

It may be, that when the virus is long gone, or is dormant with only occasional outbursts, this time may come to be remembered the tipping point for a fuller move online. My parking experience does not endear this thought to me. I have a dread of ‘Surveillance Capitalism’. I’ve resisted the demand of a large firm of Financial Advisors to fill my financial details into a form provided by another company with its own Terms and Conditions. I am convinced they must be selling the composite data gathered to those developing Artificial Intelligence fields of data. This enables the developers tune their products to appear ‘empathically’ sympathetic to consumer interests, gain trust and ‘nudge’ them in directions they desire to have their consumers go. I hate this process and its, literally, mesmerising effects. I’m familiar with the expertise from early studies in hypnosis - see Bandler and Grinder on Neuro Linguistic Programme or Milton Erickson’s book, My Voice Will Go With You. But for the first time I find myself putting all that aside. I’m making more contactless payments, I’ve given up on the financial advice as the markets crash (no doubt they’ll recover to some degree at least temporarily). And now I’m considering facilitating workshops online!

I am not a conspiracy theory devotee. I believe the evidence that events, for the most part, arise and are often used to further various nefarious and also other, good, purposes so I am not even considering the possibility the virus is anything other than the effect of careless inattention to the inevitable disasters that face the planet. Overwhelmed, for the most part, we just do not line up the dots and face up to the dangers inherent in the possible consequences of our developing knowledge.

When the virus is no longer newsworthy historians may point to this moment in time as the time when the internet truly took off with the primed bed of artificial intelligence warmed by the sun of disaster and the seeds sprouted. It wouldn’t be likely that the digital business world would miss the opportunity afforded by a crisis either. In fact it is gifted to them on a plate. But neither need we refuse the possibilities - not least the opportunity to get creative and transform fears and challenges faced into whatever kind of art appeals. Such endeavours may even be the counter catalyst that ensures 'the human factor' remains sufficiently unpredicable that it remains impossible to predict and ensures our behaviour cannot be too extensively controlled.

Related Links - haibun; Surveillance Capitalism; Beddinge retreat 2020.

* cattails: a journal of the united haiku and tanka society

This website, indirectly brought to my attention by Maeve O'Sullivan, has haibun and haiku details.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff review – we are the pawns | Books | The Guardian

2020 Retreat at Beddinge combining yoga and creativity

http://liznilsson.com/retreats

Related and Relevant previous blogs:

Having the Conversation - About...   Poetry related converstions see 2017 post:

https://susanlindsayauthor.blogspot.com/2017/03/join-in-new-conversation-doubt-faith.html

Dancing the Spiral see 2014 post

https://susanlindsayauthor.blogspot.com/2014/11/dancing-spiral.html