To Those Who Bloom Through the Concrete
on living with intention in a world that would rather we not
Welcome to Slow Folk - a community for gentle hearts and rebellious creatives, thirsty for a slower life in a world obsessed with speed.
Welcome to the Unbusy Revolution.
Yesterday morning, while stuck in a constipated queue, I discovered (in a fit of rage) that yet another store I frequent had done away with its cashiers.
A steady stream of middle-age and older women quietly cursed over the self-checkout screens.
The manager responded to my concerns with a trite - It’s the way of the future. To which I responded - It doesn’t have to be.
It got me thinking about how many other things in our lives we accept or take on in the Holy Name of Progress, or the Inevitable Order of Things, without question.
Who gets to decide? Who benefits? Where is our agency, our free will, in that mix?
We forget - these things are a choice. Not one made by us, the customer, but by someone. By definition that means that there is at least one other option. Like the choice to say -
Thanks, but no thanks. We’re good.
Sometimes I wonder if personal agency, like privacy or free speech, will become yet another outdated ideal relegated to the margins of civil society.
How quaint, people used to think they had a say in their lives!
Regardless, I’ll continue to joyfully employ mine even if it means facing the ire of minimum wage managers at the local craft store. I’m not ready to surrender, even though I know, much of the time I’m shouting into the abyss.
Let’s face it.
Asking beautiful questions of sucky systems . . . sucks.
And yet - what’s the alternative? Allow myself to be swept downstream like a child’s boat made of twigs and leaves, to be broken on the rocks?
No thanks. If I’m going down, I’m going down singing.
There’s nothing in this world so sad as talking to a man
who never knew his life was his for making
- Ray LaMontagne, Old Before Your Time
I don’t want to buy my paint brushes from a computer screen.
I want a conversation, a chat about pros and cons of the latest line of large format oil pastels. To share a gripe about the weather, to exchange a smile along with legal tender.
I want to pay with cash, for the love of Pete!!
I want to have a choice. Lots of choices, actually. *I* want the opportunity to say - Thanks, but no thanks. I’m good.
How do we live our lives with intention in a world that would rather we not?
How do we create space both within and without for thoughtfulness? Consideration? Self-compassion?
How do we seek out human connection in world where our daily needs are increasingly met by robots, computers or AI?
How do we continue to lay claim to these human needs, to even remember that they exist?
How do we call bullshit on the smoke and mirrors sideshow act that has become our daily lives?
I think about the carnival that used to roll into my home town each spring. We’d watch the carnies from our bikes as we rode to school, the rickety rides arriving on big wheelers; grimy tin and plastic.
Then, at night - it would be lit up. Bright lights and garish music filling the blacktop of the hockey rink parking lot. We would scream on the tilt-a-whirl, our faces sticky with sweets.
It was magic. It was also charade.
It was a sleight of hand that even my 8 year old self could decipher from the banana seat of my Rainbow Bright bike, streamers trailing through the truth of the illusion. The beads on my spokes sparkled with laughter at the transparency of it all.
Our shared knowledge of the illusion was part of our delight.
Then, somewhere along the way, the carnies traded their greasy jeans and corn dogs for the corner office and we forgot that it was all a show.
The shabby illusion escaped the confines of that long-weekend ice rink parking lot.
Our pride and delight in our knowledge of the illusion fell out of style, was left behind along with Rainbow Bright and Strawberry Shortcake and banana seats and beads that made music as we rode the wind of our childhoods.
WE traded unsupervised childhoods of skinned knees and drinking from the hose and catching frogs and the delicious, deep waters of the privacy of our own imaginations for the painted tin of the carnival. For constant surveillance. For safety, always more safety.
We raised our babes and rejected the wisdom of our grandmothers in favour of experts or worse yet, the almighty Google (which, as far as I know, has yet to raise a child). We shed our worthy and honourable and active roles as Citizens for the shiny, passive badge of Consumer.
We chose the garish, metallic, two-dimensional illusion of the carnies’ world over the deep, rich, deliciously complicated world of our own making.
Then again, maybe we didn’t really choose.
Maybe a choice was never offered. Or when it was offered, it was in such tiny, seemingly innocent packets that we didn’t realized we’d engaged in a Faustian bargain.
Maybe we just so loved that sense of weightlessness, the bright lights, the spinning away of worries through the centrifugal force - that we never got off the ride.
Sure we loved the wind in our hair, the freedom those banana seats brought us, roaming the neighbourhood until the street lights came on. We marvelled at the way the salt of the ocean mist stained our lips while we explored the mysterious depths of the tide pools at the end of the block where the road ran out, the exhilaration of summiting the rocks overlooking the ocean where the big kids played . . .
Our world was wide and mysterious and full of conflict and tumbles and we figured it out.
We knew which old ladies always had cookies if we got hungry too far from home, whose garden held berries, which doors contained grandmothers who would tend scraped knees. We learned which lawns were ruled by tyrants who’d chase our bikes down and call our mothers, and which ones offered such essential short-cuts that they were worth risking the thrill of the chase.
But there was also the time that we climbed those rocks by the ocean and couldn’t make it down.
The neighbourhood kids abandoned us and we sat there forever, wailing, until Mum’s silhouette finally appeared over the horizon. Or the time our best friend silently slipped under the murky surface of the frog pond, was dragged sobbing and coughing onto the bank by a furious father…
So there was that.
And so, maybe, when we were offered in exchange ease, convenience and safety in small, incremental, imperceptible steps, maybe it seemed like a fair trade.
Or maybe we didn’t notice.
Maybe we thought that freedom, that privacy, that autonomy were just another child’s plaything to set aside.
Maybe we chose. Maybe we didn’t. Maybe we chose some, but not all. Maybe we didn’t realize we were choosing.
Maybe we didn’t know how to calculate the cost. Maybe we didn’t know there would BE a cost.
It doesn’t matter now. What matters now is that we can choose something different.
We can look for opportunities to get off the damn ride. We can see the carnies in suits for who they really are.
We must remember that we CAN choose. That choosing something different doesn’t have to be grand gestures or mean setting fire to every last damn self-checkout in the market (as satisfying as that would be).
What does it look like to reclaim our agency, our humanity, our knowledge of the illusion from those shifty carnies, full of tricks and with all the power?
Could we trade surveillance of tech giants for the benevolent eyes of neighbours like we’d enjoyed as kids?
Could we become like that kind widow across the street who always has cookies and kept a keen eye out for skinned knees? Who offered a popsicle and a Band-Aid, instead of tattling that we’d rode too far, too fast on the wind?
I’ll never forget Norah, even though my memories of her are so old that I cannot see her face. I can only remember how she made me feel.
Maybe we can choose to be like Norah, even though the world around us has changed.
Even though the carnies (mostly) call the shots. Even though Progress and her disciples march tirelessly on.
What if we can be an oasis, a speed bump, some small but not-insignificant burr in the machinery?
What if a direct assault on the forces eroding our humanity, our option to opt out, isn’t what’s called for?
What if we need instead, to take the form of guerrilla gardeners, sowing seeds of defiant daisies among the sidewalk cracks?
Stacey Langford is a writer, renegade farmer and slow business mentor living and working in Canada’s Fraser Valley. In 2010 Stacey ditched her cubicle in the city to turn her attention homeward, farm and help others craft a simple life, from scratch.