Our Family’s City Shake-Up: Trading Chaos for Calm

Raising kids amid the city’s constant buzz has me praying for peace at least twice a day. So, after some giggles and a family vote, we’re diving into a little adventure. Starting April 1st, we’re linking up with a fun group of local parents for a "simplicity challenge." Less screen time, more porch chats, and praying together without the usual distractions. It’s not a total escape, but it might just keep us sane. Stay tuned to see if we thrive—or if the kids revolt over no cartoons!

Risk Management

 

Something I’ve learned as a novice golfer is managing what’s a good miss versus a bad miss. Because I’m terrible, my shot dispersion is very large, meaning that if I’m aiming straight I can still hit it way left or way right. Given that I don’t know where my ball is going to go, I have to pick an aim point that minimizes damage in the likely event that I mishit the ball. So, for example, if there’s water on the left, I’d rather miss right than run the risk of a penalty; or, if I’m chipping onto the green, I’d rather make sure I get it on the green even if I leave myself a long putt, than to under-hit it and not make it to the green. 

This has proven to be a useful perspective for life, which like golf is all about “shot dispersion” (meaning, a wide range of possible outcomes) and risk management. For example, there are a lot of variables that go into getting myself, my family members, and our belongings through the airport, so it makes sense to go too early (where the risk is having to wait in the terminal) than to go too late (where the risk is missing the flight). Or, as I get older I find my short-term memory getting a little shaky, so if I’ve just left the Y and I’m second-guessing whether I remembered to put my swimsuit in my bag, I’ll bear the small cost of stopping and checking over the rarer but dearer cost of not stopping and losing the swimsuit. 

But these are trivial examples, albeit useful little things that add up to a less anxious life. I think the golf lesson also applies to the big things too. When faced with an opportunity to stand up for justice, it can be easy to not want to bear the cost of inconvenience or embarrassment or even ridicule. But when compared against the greater cost of lacking integrity and courage and conviction, the choice becomes clearer. Is it a bigger miss to lose your evenings and weekends for 2 years to go back and get that degree, or is it a bigger miss to not get that degree and wonder what if? When the game of life gives you a shot, know where your “water” is and where your ”safer miss” is, and swing away.

 

Outside of Work

“Work/life balance” is as elusive to define as it is to achieve. As a principal of a professional services firm (and former co-president), it was important for me to have a clear sense of what that balance meant, for my own sanity, and then be decisive and transparent in exercising it, so as to set a tone for others in the firm (since official policies are less binding on an office culture than “how does the boss behave”). 

But that’s not what today’s post is about. Rather, I want to try to catalog different forms of pursuits outside the office that people have, partly to make sense of the space and partly to acknowledge the importance of each and the freedom of all to find what works for them. I’d be curious to know if I missed anything or mis-defined anything, as well as to hear where you fall in this taxonomy. (Of course, many of the activities you pursue in your free time will blur the line between multiple of these categories. And, I’m excluding the mundane things we all have to concern ourselves with, like buying groceries and doing the laundry and bringing our car into the shop.)

 1. Familial obligations. I use the word “obligation” intentionally because even if you find joy in them, there is a responsibility there that defines these out-of-office pursuits. Caring for small kids, elderly parents, and out-of-luck relatives all fall into this category.

 2. Leisure pursuits. Whether solo, with family and friends, in affinity groups, or intersected with your work world, these are things like sports, art/music, cooking, gardening, and travel that are done primarily for fun (even if they have ancillary benefits like networking or health). 

3. Self-care. Therapy, meditation, and silent retreats are important things to invest time in for some, to preserve oneself and recharge from the grind of the work world. (Obviously, many leisure pursuits are a form of self-care, but I wanted to break this category out on its own to properly elevate its importance.) 

4. Side hustles. Real estate investments, DJ’ing, and the like are ways to make some extra spending cash and maybe scratch some creative itch that your day job doesn’t fully fulfill. (Side note: I have a friend who’s a really good poker player, good enough that he makes more money than he loses at the casino and tournaments, so that’s a fun example of a leisure pursuit that brings in money instead of costing money!) 

What did I miss? What did I mis-describe? What do you do? What works for you?

  

Social, Six Days a Week

 

The future may bring more time for me to be on social media. It is true the medium has its dangerous aspects, of which I am not naïve. Truly, I am trying to lean harder into real interactions with real people when it is clear that virtual forms are vastly inferior. 

But, used responsibly, it can be incredibly enjoyable and informative. For now, time permits very little consuming content on current events, pop culture, and the life happenings of all my favorite people in the world. 

On the production side, I do seem to have found a rhythm, which has me posting at least six times a week, and usually many more to share kid pics, keep a food journal, and track golf progress: 

Monday – “Musings of an Urban Christian” blog post

Tuesday – “Let’s Talk Tuesday” discussion question of the week

Wednesday – “Another “Musings” post

Thursday – A “Throwback Thursday” song lyric for people to guess

Friday – “Huang Kid Khronicles” blog post

Saturday – “Saturday Spotlight” listing on Redfin that has caught my eye 

It’s a fun cadence for my creative juices, and I’m always happy when my content engenders engagement. Such is my dabbling in the world of social.

 

 

Blasphemy

 

George Bernard Shaw is credited with the quote, "All great truths begin as blasphemies." It's an old-fashioned word usually invoked in a religious context, as in speaking ill of God will get you smote. But I argue the sentiment of the term, and of the quote, is more universally and certainly contemporary.

It's good to feel strongly about things. But it's also dangerous when you stop keeping an open mind to the possibility that you are wrong and need to change, even worse when you feel so righteously that you consider that those who disagree with you are not only wrong but should be punished and damned. 

Much of our current discourse - not just the culture wars but political issues and scientific matters - is being conducted with high religious zeal, such that opposition is shouted down as blasphemous. I'm not arguing that we should be pushovers or not hold fast to any beliefs. I am saying that any progress - as a person, group, and society - depends on giving room for disparate viewpoints, even those that feel blasphemous.

I always think about how in the future the current present will be the past. Meaning that, think of how outdated it would feel to be transported to 150 years ago, and how little we knew back then relative to how much we know now. Well, 150 years from now, today will feel similarly archaic. Some of what was heresy back then is now accepted fact. So it will be today, someday. So we must not always shout down that which we find offensive. Innovation, scientific breakthrough, even societal survival may depend on our working through the heretical to get to the truth.

5's

 

I can't believe it was 18 years ago that I posted about my "5's," which are books I've read that have fundamentally changed my worldview (on a 1-5 scale in which, for example, 3 = recommended). Since then, I'm happy to have added a few. I wanted to take today's post to say a few words about some of these 5's, and specifically what it is about them that has continued to influence how I look at the world. These are kind of in chronological order from when I first read them, but sometimes I've clumped some together.

* The Holy Bible, The Message (Peterson). I suspect that the Bible is the most influential book for the most people in the world. It certainly is for me. I have since enjoyed reading Peterson's contemporary translation, which is a stark reminder that God's Word is meant to be conversational and approachable.

* Pleasures of God (Piper). Besides the Bible itself, this book has had the most profound influence on my understanding of what God is like. And guess what? He is a happy God for whom pleasure is a foundational characteristic.

* Crabgrass Frontier (Jackson), The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs). Cities are not accidents, but products of human choices in design and policy.

* Moneyball (Lewis), Good to Great (Collins). I love counter-intuitive narratives that sneak up on you, and both of these bestsellers are reminders that success in this world doesn't look like we might think.

* The Night is Dark and I am Far From Home (Kozol). A searing account of how public education has dulled our sense of humanity.

* Strangers from a Different Shore (Takaki). Growing up in an Asian-American household and in a school and neighborhood in which Asian Americans were pretty well represented, this account of how immigrants to this country from Asia (which I first read when I first left home, for my freshman year in college) have been treated was a profound eye-opener.

* Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Wilkerson), The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Rothstein), The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Alexander). An essential trilogy of how much of America is built on individual and systemic racism towards Black people.

* The Body Keeps Score (van der Kolk). Trauma is literally unspeakable, and it has been life-altering for me to come to grips with just how visceral and lasting an impact it leaves on its victims.

 

Germ of an Idea

 

 

Infectious diseases were a real problem back in the day when we had a primitive understanding of how germs work. By instinct and observation, folks learned cities were trouble whereas wide open spaces held the most hope for avoidance and recovery. It was once thought diseases spread through "bad air," so it felt easier to breathe in the countryside than in cities packed with people and industry.

We carry that same hunch to the present, even though we now know much better how one sick person can make other people sick. I won't speak to whether we layer on additional anti-city biases, as if to label certain people or places as inherently "dirtier." Here I'm just talking about how the transmission of disease happens more easily when you have more people close together than when you have fewer people spread out.

The point I want to make is that other things get transmitted when you have density of population. Spirit, ideas, and innovation happen in lots of different places. But the proliferation of them tends to occur in places where lots of different people congregate. Just as disease spreads through constant contact, so does culture and tolerance and discovery. (Including the concentrations of research, health care, and wellness that help us beat epidemics.)

I understand the impulse to think of cities as dirty, even if I don't excuse some of the conclusions people draw from that impulse. But I also want people to understand that the in the same way that germs spread faster in cities, so too do germs of ideas spread in those same places.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 462

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Native Nations: A Millennium in North America," by Kathleen DuVal.

Native nations existed in North America long before Europeans, Africans, and Asians arrived and continue to the present day. Indigenous civilizations did not come to a halt when a few wandering explorers or hungry settlers arrived in their homelands, even when the strangers came well armed. Native Americans made up the majority of the North American population through the mid-1700s and controlled most of the land and resources of the continent for another century after that.

The myth that Native Americans were primitive people too uncivilized to have developed cities was a convenient way for Europeans and European Americans to assert territorial claims and cultural superiority. In reality, Native America had a long and complex urban history that had been changing and growing for centuries before Europeans arrived. It was true that, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most of Native North America looked nothing like the cities that Europeans came from, but that was not because they were primitive or never had cities. Instead, by the time Europeans arrived, most Native Americans had rejected cities’ centralized power. As we shall see in the next chapter, the cities’ fall would create a new world in North America, long before Europeans claimed to have discovered one, and would prompt the development of some of the most egalitarian societies in the early modern world.

Gradually, across Native North America, people developed a deep distrust of centralization, hierarchy, and inequality. The former residents of North America’s great cities reversed course, turning away from urbanization and political and economic centralization to build new ways of living, more similar in scale to how their distant ancestors had lived and how some peoples had continued to live even during the height of the large civilizations. Smaller-scale communities allowed for both more sustainable economies and more widespread political participation. Peoples instituted a variety of political checks and balances to prevent dictatorial leaders from taking power and to ensure that citizens had a say. These changes did not all happen at once or in the same way everywhere. Many places had never established the hierarchical structures of Cahokia or the Huhugam, and some of the leveling trend continued in later years as societies adjusted to population declines resulting from European diseases or dispersed to get away from European settlements.

Western Europe took a different path in the Little Ice Age. For Europeans, the city became the marker of civilization—indeed, they share the same root, “civis.” They doubled down on hierarchy and centralization as means of dealing with the difficult times. Europeans’ resulting beliefs have shaped subsequent notions of what civilization is. Their assumptions informed later anthropological models, still taught in schools today, of how societies develop along an imagined progression, from the hunter-gatherer “Paleolithic era” to the agricultural and urbanizing “Neolithic era,” before they can truly be part of “history” once they invent writing, then passing through an age of absolute monarchs to eventually arrive at democracy. Europeans interpreted these steps as universal rules. Centuries later, in the Age of Revolutions, Europeans would call for the rights of man and curb (or guillotine) their monarchs. In some ways, Native Americans took a shortcut to democracy, developing participatory politics rapidly after rejecting the hierarchies of the twelfth century.

Urbanization is not a necessary condition for civilization, or for a good life. Smaller-scale societies that include hunting and gathering in their economies can provide their people with a better diet and more leisure time. Judging civilizations by their elaborate structures surely is less useful than asking what kinds of structures and ways of life made sense for people in a given place and time. In fact, people have had mixed opinions about cities for as long as they have existed. Those who live in and benefit from them often believe that urban life is the only life worth living. In the first large cities—ancient Rome and the cities of Han Dynasty China—urban thinkers and writers saw themselves as more rational, sophisticated, and advanced than rural dwellers.

But there has always been an opposing view, held by those on farms and in small towns and even shared by some urban dwellers: that cities are corrupt places, whose residents are willing to trade autonomy for material comforts under autocratic rulers. 

By the mid-1700s the Quapaws were receiving annual payments, plus additional gifts whenever a new French official arrived or needed a particular service, such as a guide, interpreter, or military escort. The practice had developed in the Iroquoian and Algonquian relationships with the Dutch and English in the late 1600s and had been adopted by France’s Native allies in Canada and the Great Lakes. By 1716 the governor of Canada was writing to his superiors that he needed gifts of six hundred guns, forty thousand pounds of gunpowder, and sixty thousand pounds of musket balls yearly “to maintain peace with the Indians and to prevent them trading with the English.” A South Carolina merchant represented many a frustrated European official when he wrote that “the Indians have been so used of late years to receive presents that they now expect it as a right belonging to them, and the English, French and Spaniards are in some measure become tributary to them.” Europeans wanted to believe that North America belonged to them, but in reality they were paying tribute or rent to have access to particular Native land and resources.

One spring day in 1789, Shawnees discovered men surveying and laying out markers for streets that would one day be Cincinnati, at a site north of the Ohio River between the Great Miami and Little Miami rivers, smack in the center of Shawnee country. When the Shawnees asked what they were doing there, the leader replied that he represented the United States. He showed them the commission that proved it: a signed, written document marked with the seal of the United States, a bald eagle holding in its right talon an olive branch and in its left a bundle of thirteen arrows. When the man explained the commission and the symbolism of the seal—that the United States desired peace (the olive branch) but would fight if necessary (the arrows)—one of the Shawnees countered that he “could not perceive any intimations of peace from the attitude the Eagle was in; having her wings spread as in flight.” As anyone familiar with birds and symbolism would know, he said, folded wings would show “rest and peace.” To him, the eagle was “bearing a large whip in one claw, and such a number of arrows in the other, and in full career of flight,” that it must be “wholly bent on war and mischief.”

It was too late, U.S. reformers feared, to assimilate adult Indians, so they targeted the children. They took them away from the supposedly terrible reservations and placed them in boarding schools, often purposefully far from home. Richard Pratt, the founder of Carlisle Indian School, in Pennsylvania, declared that his school’s purpose was to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Reformers separated children as young as five from their parents and grandparents and made them take new names and wear strange clothes. They forbade them from speaking their own languages or practicing their own religions.

As boarding school survivors remembered and later investigations and hearings exposed, many children were taken by force and, once in schools, faced horrific mental and physical abuse at the hands of people with far too much unregulated power. Former students recalled being starved and beaten. Countless children died at school, never to return home. Most Native families were affected—in 1926, for example, more than 80 percent of school-age Native American children were in boarding schools, and the schools lasted for many decades, over two full generations of children. The goal of boarding schools was to assimilate Native Americans into white American culture, yet because this era was the height of white supremacy, the place within white American society designated for Indians, like other nonwhite Americans, was not an equal one. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 advised that “in the schools the education should be elementary and largely industrial. The need of higher education among the Indians is very, very limited.”

Mohawk scholar Tom Sakokweniónkwas Porter calls Carlisle and the other boarding schools “almost a knockout blow to our Native religion, language, community based lifestyle and our Indian pride.” Reservations could be places of preserving language, culture, identity, and community; boarding schools were designed to take those things away, leaving generations separated from the knowledge and ways of their peoples and repeatedly told that those ways—and their family members—were backward and doomed.

Allotment and boarding schools brought tremendous loss and trauma, yet they did not destroy Native people or their nations. Ojibwe historian Brenda J. Child noted that her grandmother returned home from boarding school to “re-embrace her culture, language, and community.” Reading letters and other accounts by children who attended the schools, Child concluded that they were not broken or assimilated but instead that the “deep and abiding commitment to children, demonstrated time and time again by parents and others at home…outlasted and outmaneuvered a failed educational idea.” Boarding schools tried to make non-Indian children, but their families and communities “refused to allow government boarding schools to supplant their essential roles in child rearing.”

Cities are for People, Not Cars

 

A while back, this photo was making the rounds in my social media feed. The scene is the Embarcadero in downtown San Francisco, the left side showing the former decked highway and the right side showing its present-day layout. The comments this photo evoked were universally that auto-only infrastructure, once removed, is rarely missed, replaced as it is by things that are more accessible and pleasing to people outside of when they're in their cars.

And this is a central premise of what I think we need to reclaim in our cities today. I own a car, and drive it multiple times a week, so I don't find anything inherently wrong with car ownership or car infrastructure. (Although I think car use should be properly priced relative to what it imposes on society, but that's a post for another time.) But, the vast majority of my movement around my city does not require me solo driving. And that's how it should be:

* Auto infrastructure literally destroyed neighborhoods, usually low-income communities and communities of color who lacked the political power to fight against their houses being demolished and their one part of their neighborhood divided from another. Non-auto infrastructure can stitch neighborhoods together and create public space that is accessible to and enjoyable for all.

* A built form that prioritizes cars is necessarily one that requires lots of road width and parking space, which spreads uses out and makes it harder for everyone else to circulate. Elevating a non-auto-oriented built form creates the density needed to encourage intensity of exchange across diverse participants, which is a prerequisite for human enjoyment, cultural expression, and scientific innovation.

* If driving is the predominant form of travel, that does not scale, so adding population to a city (or increasing demand in a particular area for residential, employment, or leisure) bumps up against a diminishing return. Walking, biking, and transit are far more scalable for moving more people at the same time.

* Driving is bad for the environment. Walking and biking (including to and from your transit ride) are forms of active recreation that are good for our health.

* There are higher barriers to entry to driving than to walking, biking, and transit, the latter being free or cheap, and the former requiring access to a car, expenditures on insurance and maintenance, and gassing up your tank.

Cities are for people, who sometimes drive so you have to have some car infrastructure. But too often our cities, and key parts within our cities, seem to be made for cars, given the primacy they are given in terms of infrastructure investment and circulation. The cities that have decided they need to make a U-turn and tear out car infrastructure and invest in non-car infrastructure have found all kinds of benefits are unlocked when they do so. Let's hope we all go boldly in that direction.