inspiration

Figure Out Your Intentions (Lessons From Hart House Training)

No matter what your external dimensions are, if you’re connected to yourself and your motivations are clear, you can light up a room with your personality, regardless of how petite you are. It’s not  related.

In acting you won’t get too nervous if you know what your character wants. It’s like life. If you know what you want and why you are where you are, it’s much easier to be motivated and get what you need to do done. If you don’t know why you are where you are, and the reason you’re doing what you’re doing, you’ll feel self conscious. Words that come through the heart and actions that are connected  to feelings will be successful. All words can be powerful when connected to the heart.

There are questions to ask yourself: where am I? what do I want? if I get what I want, what will it fulfill? Why do I want what I want? It’s important to know your values and what you find most important so that your activities resonate through those particular values. When you know where you are and where you want to be, you find lots of opportunities to build character. Often people will decrease their power so that they become smaller and don’t have to be vulnerable. But don’t apologise for yourself. Until you’re courageous and recognise who you are, aren’t fully alive. The greater your spirit is about the work that you do, the greater your work will be. It’s also helpful to have rituals. In drama, we have specific rituals, from voice to nutrition and meditation, and you need to find relevant rituals in your own life to be engaged.

~Kevin McCormick,Hart House Programme Intern Training, August 2011

2 Years Later,I’ve Got a Different Question (Reflections on Home and Travel)

Greetings friends!  Today’s episode (I still have a bad cold, but you can hear it here ) is about how although my term papers are still in full force, the sight of suitcases past my door of students has only intensified my desire to go home. I can’t wait to see my family, see the mountains, hug my books, make tea in a kettle,  have lunch on a proper dining table, cook food on actual counters, and iron my clothes on a honest to goodness ironing board. (I could go on and on) I found an old post from Dec 2009 today that talks about an equally intense feeling at that point in time, the desire to go and visit unknown places, and push myself to learn new things. Where in the home/travel spectrum are you? What are you thinking about? Do share your thoughts.

This is the Century for City-Lovers (An Evening Watching Urbanized with Gary Hustwit)

Going to a Gary Hustwit film without having seen Helvetica or Objectified makes you a minority, but when I heard Gary was in town doing a special (free!) screening of his new film Urbanized at the Design our Tomorrow conference, I just couldn’t miss the chance to watch the film with the directors commentary.  And the film did not disappoint. The film began with the voice of Ricky Burdett, the amazing director of the LSE Cities program, and continued with a discussion of Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, the Garden City and others familiar characters to the urban conversation. Because Ricky Burdett was in Toronto a couple of weeks ago for the Big City Big Ideas series, and Jane Jacobs is constantly discussed in planning classes, the initial content of the film was familiar, but the film as a whole gave me a lot of information I want to dig into deeper.  It’s rare for us to learn about cities outside of Toronto in planning school, but Urbanized’s tour of New York, Brasilia, Copenhagen, Bogota, (the globe really!) left me with a hunger to travel more and discover other places, and to learn more about fascinating practitioners like Edgar Pieterse and Jan Gehl. For those who couldn’t make the event, here are some selections from my notes.

On getting into films

I just wanted to see a film about fonts. I hadn’t made films before that. It’s a good cue, if something you want to see doesn’t exist, that’s a good cue to go out and do it yourself. I hadn’t made films before that. Then I made Objectified and now Urbanized. Our first question was how to see cities around the world in 85 minutes. And the answer is that we looked at issues that every city faced, and talked about projects that addressed those issues. The film has a loose structure, and less structure means that as a viewer, you have to think and figure things out. Don’t be afraid to do that, to let users (if you want to think about things from a design perspective) to think things over and figure things out.

On engagement

Need to involved people who systematically live realities of a place to figure out the most strategic way to respond. Putting stickers on window (referencing a project discussed in the film) and inviting people to participate is such a simple idea, but it can be easier sometimes to reach out to the whole world than our own neighbourhood. The stickers on the windows ask people who aren’t normally asked and might not show up to a community meeting,want they want in their neighbourhood.

What projects that didn’t make it into the film?

Parking Day  is one example. It started in San Francisco, and now happens in cities across the world, and it was a project where people put money in parking meters and then had that parking space for a period of time, and set up things in what was then their space.  I love DIY citizenship. Instead of  focusing on spectacle and trying to attract people, if cities just spent that time on liveability, they would get somewhere.

What was your process making the film?

I spent six months talking to people, reading a ton of books, attending conferences, and doing things like that before I started filming anything. It’s a step by step process. You meet one person who says you simply must meet “so and so” and it moves from there.

Advice to Students

I was talking to someone who mentioned that out of a class of 200 people, only two got jobs. And for me, that’s a wonderful opportunity. That’s 298 people who have an opportunity to start their own projects and create their own thing. That sounds like a really great opportunity especially with the ability the web has of showing your work to other people. Don’t wait for a big company to hire you, get together and do projects.

The Power of Video: A Beautiful Video from TEDxDubai

The theme of TEDxDubai this year is The Beauty of Small Things, and the event promo video is a time-lapse of Dubai’s growth over the past ten years. It’s a stunning watch, and a great reminder that outside of North America planning looks very different, (and it’s important to understand different contexts) and as planners, it’s important to be able to tell stories in multiple ways. We spend most of our time thinking through words and written text, but the medium of film can create space for entirely different conversations to occur (To read more about the event, their Vimeo page is here)

TEDxDubai 2011 | The Beauty of Small Things | Main Titles from METAphrenie on Vimeo.

What If We All Got Along?(Take-Aways from What If at U of T)

Every month Hart House hosts a different What If conversation, an event that can be best described as an opportunity to hear eloquent, interesting speakers discussing a question that warrants further reflection. This month the question was “What If we all got along?” and the discussion panel featured Nouman Ashraf, a Research Fellow at the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking (and former Director of U of T’s Anti-Racism and Cultural Diversity Office) and Corey Scott, the VP External for UTSU, two highly articulate, thoughtful, interesting individuals that left me inspired to work harder at becoming someone who can think and communicate with precision and elegance.  After the event, the most common piece of feedback I heard was that audience members were impressed at their ability to think quickly and say so much without the ‘um’s and aahs” and general hesitation that normally accompanies speech. For those who couldn’t make it, here is a brief re-cap of the snippets that made it into my notebook. =)

Firstly, they spoke about the conditions of creating dialogue, with Nouman noting that

 First of all, we have to think, what is the value proposition of getting along? If this (Hart House) is a living, learning lab, we need to share space for dialogue and open, civil discourse. Not possible to always agree, but important to create that space and enable certain conditions for open discourse. This is not about getting along, it’s about shared intentionality, the ability of others to create shared intentions and joint endeavours. And so we have to think, what are the conditions for shared intentionality? Because it’s important to ask provocative questions and give assistance for that shared intentionality to occur. Agreement is setting the bar too low. It means we are just tolerating each other, but we need to be more robust, more authentic. We need to advocate for own views and inquire about others.

They  spoke about allegories of power, the possibilities and limitations of theory in trying to understand our world (As Corey said, “Butler is amazing, but theory has nothing in comparison to talking to someone from a different background”) and the power of sharing experiences. Nouman shared a story of people from different faith and philosophical backgrounds coming together to talk about food, and said that “assumptions of power can be challenged when share common experience. Common experiences may not lead to common conclusions, but it will be transformative”.

They also spoke about what extreme dissent is, with Nouman noting that “any discourse that breaches legal limits is off limits, though it’s difficult to talk about extremes without talking about the norm” and Corey noting that it is difficult to talk about legality because sometimes what is considered illegal in the present is viewed positively in hindsight (the Civil Rights movement was discussed as an example). Nouman spoke about  how “we need to reverse engineer what dissent looks like because innovation doesn’t just happen overnight”, and Corey noted that “we don’t often have owls (in reference to an earlier story) asking us why we’re upset about mobilizing. Most people are content to just watch news to give us its take on things.”

And finally, they left us with questions of our own. Nouman spoke about how we force-feed people our ideas, but we have to resist that itch for the health of the body, and asked:

“How do we actualize the potential on campus? What tools can we offer communities (note the plural) on campus? How do we cultivate genuine curiosity of others, instead of Othering others? You need to experience representation of self in positions of privilege in order to believe you can acquire them yourself.

Lessons from Julia Butterfly’s Talk at Hart House

It’s hard to describe how lovely Julia Butterfly’s talk was at Hart House this evening. I was a bit late coming in, but I found myself drawn into her story and her beautiful lessons despite craning my neck to see her speak. She was powerful and compelling, and I think everyone’s throat got a bit lumpy at times as she detailed her journey of 738 days living in a tree called Luna to protect it from being cut down.

For me, I came to the talk after an intense week school-wise. I’ve been struggling to find new ways and concepts to express the ideas I’m trying to explore with my thesis, and while I’ve been trying to keep positive about the opportunity for learning, I’ve also been feeling very overwhelmed by the current gaps in my knowledge. Over the past couple of days I’m been telling friends at lunch that I feel like a caterpillar. Intellectually it makes sense that if I stay committed to learning and keep striving, eventually I’ll turn into a butterfly, but a caterpillar is so far removed from a butterfly that transformation seems a far-fetched possibility at the moment.

And then during the talk  Julia spoke about the liquefying process caterpillars go through, and it made me feel so much more optimistic about the learning challenges (or opportunities!) ahead. Normally I always come to lectures with a notebook, but today I didn’t, so I took notes over the top of my evaluation card. As a result, this is not a complete set of notes (far from it!) of the lecture, but it does give a sense of what happened.

  1. Take a breath. It’s a miracle we are able to do that. What will you do with your life that honours this unique miracle? That honours this gift?
  2. I am a mirror. If something resonates with you, only because of something that is already within you. It means I’ve been a good mirror. If you don’t like something I say, don’t trash it, compost it and let it create new energy. We throw away things too easily.
  3. If people can identify with you, can relate to you, then it is harder for them to hate you.
  4. The way that we work towards a goal is as important as the goal itself. We have to model what we want in the world. (There was a beautiful story later on in the talk about loggers who helped rebuild the tree Luna when someone attacked it with a chainsaw, and when asked why they helped out, they said it was because “Butterfly, you always dealt with us in an honourable way)
  5. Whoever we are is exactly who we are meant to be. Society teaches us to feel like we’re not enough, that we need to change, and so we buy more stuff and more silly magazines and feel like we aren’t enough as ourselves. But we just need to learn to direct the all of who we are to the right channel. For me, it was not about changing who I was, it was about sculpting the core of who I already am. Our mind is usually our biggest obstacle. Can’t control what life sends us, but we can control how mind relates to what life sends us. We need to engage our hearts.
  6. We all love butterflies but we don’t want to liquefy. But a caterpillar literally has to liquefy itself to become a butterfly. It’s like when we go to the gym and we look at the machines. We want the results but we don’t want to do the exercise. And so during those 738 days with Luna, I would ask the universe for strength, and things would literally get harder. And I would say, hey, can you give me a break? And the universe would say, you didn’t ask for a break, you asked for strength, and so here you go, here is an opportunity to get stronger. Everything about me had to liquefy in order to turn into a being who could find strength where there was no external strength. When things were so intense that I had frostbite on my toes and had to prop my sleeping bag up off my feet because the pain was too much. We are so attached to outcomes, but if attachment to outcomes was all I had, it would have killed me.
  7. People would ask me when I was up in the tree what I missed about being on the ground, and when I was back on the ground people would ask me about what I missed about being in the tree. It made me realise that we are tricked constantly to be anywhere but here where we are. The question is always what do you miss and not what do you appreciate about right now? Instead of missing what is absent, why not be grateful and present to what is here and now?
  8. Love is a taskmaster that demands me to be a better person than the person that I know myself to be. It’s easy to talk, difficult to communicate. Communication is about asking someone’s opinion and caring about the answer.
  9. Julia told a beautiful story of an evening with loggers shooting at her, and having to take a deep breath to reach within and engage with them with humour, and then those same loggers bringing her organic fruits and vegetables a few weeks later. And then Julia said “this doesn’t always happen, but it can never happen if we don’t stay committed and model the world we want to live in.
  10.  It’s important to ask: who am I authentically in this moment and how can I learn, how can I grow in this?
  11. In each moment, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before. But we too are ancestors of the future.
  12. Pessimism, hope, these are just stories, not facts. I’m pessimistic, but I don’t let my pessimism get in my way. All I’ve got is right here, right now, and the question is, how doI honour this time? I can’t control anyone else, but I can control myself.
  13. It’s about a lifetime of offering ourselves. Nature isn’t sustainable, nature is regenerative.
  14. What is your passion, what is your gift? What do you want to do to co-create the future?

Question Period Take-Aways:

Love is a verb.

Every Day is a Day of Giving Thanks

While reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature today, I came across this beautiful paragraph:

The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on the green ball which floats him through the heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? This zodiac of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold year? Beasts, fire, water, stones and corn serve him. The field is at once his floor, his work-yard, his playground, his garden and his bed.

“More servants wait on man/Than he’ll take notice of.”

And this one:

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of the cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

In addition to those tremendous blessings Emerson describes there is so much to be thankful for closer to home. I’m thankful for beautiful parents, siblings that double as best friends, a lovely nephew, dear friends that inspire me with their example to do better, teachers, professors and fellow students who demonstrate what it means to have a polished intellect and contribute to your community, and a university and city full of people searching after knowledge and striving to be the best they can be. I love this city of art, interesting people, public lectures, books, and Islamic classes and its energy never fails to fill me with joy. I love studying at a university with beautiful prayer spaces and neverending activities, and having the opportunity to live with inspirational junior students (I’m a residence don), and soak up their courage and enthusiasm for life. And I’m grateful for “fresh new days with no mistakes in them” as Anne would say, days that are opportunities to become better at things I find so challenging.

Because friends, the days of this lovely graduate school adventure suddenly feel very limited. The days are short, and what seemed to be a long two year experiment not that long ago, now feels alarmingly short. Far too often, I get stressed about what lies ahead and all the unknowns in the future (what job, what city, will everything get done?) and like Emerson’s description of people ignoring the stars, I forget to notice how extraordinary everything around me actually is.

Everything that is a part of my life I prayed and wished for beforehand, and when all these different things now challenge me and ask me to be a better, kinder more intelligent person, my knee-jerk reaction is to feel stressed and overwhelmed, and worry about how I’ll manage it all. I want to improve though and embrace the “joy of the strife”  instead of retreating into what is safe and comfortable or feeling worried about outcomes that are not within my control.

I was on a panel with Professor David Naylor the President of U of T a couple of weeks ago, and during the conversation he told us not to think about what we wanted our legacies to be, because the best thing  was “to find something you love and to follow it as far as you can.” A legacy is something that “20-30 years later someone will figure out”, but it is important “not to take ourselves so seriously” because “we’re all grains of sand”. After all, even as a university president, “in 200 years, your portrait is in the basement”.

And so in the spirit of learning more about what I love and following it as far as I can, I’m going to try to write more frequently about thesis writing, my new neighbourhood, working at Hart House, the interesting people, the lovely readings, the intellectual problems, and all the rest of the adventures and things I’m thinking through this year. It’s a different set of challenges, a different set of people, and if you’re interested in reading, I’m looking forward to sharing bits and pieces with you and giving thanks on a more regular basis.

The Magic of a Library Card

A couple of weeks ago, I disconnected my Facebook account to carve out space in my day to read more. Not that reading online isn’t lovely (I hope you like this blog for instance) but time is finite, and I agree with Farhan Thawar‘s advice at the recent Nspire Discovery Series “The Modern Tools of Creation”  that it is important to prioritise your reading, so “if something is temporal, unless it’s the Harvard Business Review, just stop reading it and do something else”. He explained what he meant by saying “my own reading hierarchy is books>mags>blogs>twitter, and I always have a book with me. If you check my bag at any point, even tonight, you would find one there.”

And while I still love Twitter,  I’ve been taken aback by the difference more books and less social media has made to my happiness level. When I first moved to Toronto, I couldn’t get a library card right away because I didn’t have any paper bills yet, and then when I finally started receiving mail, I was so swamped with actual school reading and work that I just never made it out to the University of Toronto libraries or a Toronto Public Library branch to discover new book friends. But this all changed with the new semester, and in the past couple of weeks I’ve read two lovely books. I’m amazed at how this simple addition has made such a huge difference to daily joy, and my ability to be critical of myself and aware of my own shortcomings while still being kind and hopeful about progress on things I find difficult.

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