the myth of consistency

untangling steadiness from capitalism

hi sweet humans,

Thanks for your patience with this email — it took me a little meandering to get it into your inboxes, which maybe makes sense for writing that touches on steadiness and undoing the myth of consistency.

anticapitalist steadiness of spring

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of steadiness recently. I don’t know if this happens to you, but often in spring I feel an almost physical sense of disorientation. It feels like being both too slow and sped up at the same time, a kind of “hurry up you’re missing it” and “oh my god why isn’t it here yet?!?”

For a long time this breathless energy during spring felt like a normal or natural part of the season. Spring served as an accurate annual mirror for my own disorientation. After all, isn’t the weather changing a million times every day during this season?!?

And then, a couple of years ago, when I started getting outside more during spring, standing under the trees and watching the buds grow, or watching the seeds that stayed on the trees way longer than I expected, or noticing the little fish gathering in the river on the sudden and brief warm days, I noticed that what felt like two extremes — on the one hand “nothing’s happening” and  on the other “everything’s happening” — that particular story of spring only feels true when I’m out of sync with what’s happening around me. When I’m indoors, on my computer, or having to push my body to move at the pace demanded by capitalism, the full spectrum of everything that happens during spring feels out of control and totally unpredictable.

But spring, I’ve learned, is also a season of steady attention.

Before I dig too much into that, I want to say a brief word about steadiness here, because there’s a way that that word or concept has gotten tangled up with capitalist notions of consistency — the idea that you should be able to perform the same amount of work every day, or at the same level of “excellence” every time you do something. Consistency is, in our culture, associated with performance, with concentration, with practice, especially in the realm of sports, but it’s also connected to a history of machinelike productivity rooted in colonialism and slavery, where human beings were treated not like humans but like objects who existed in order to perform labor and create profit. I want to be really clear that that’s not the kind of steadiness that I mean, the kind that does the same amount of work or applies more and more pressure to maintain the output, no matter the conditions around us.

Steady growth in spring is actually about presence. It’s about responding to the conditions that are around you. Every spring is different, and every day in spring is different. This type of steadiness is more about a kind of constant relationship between the different parts of our planet - the plants and the air, the sun and the earth, the memory of seasons passed down through seeds and memory and between roots and through the air.

For many of us, forced by our culture to move at a speed that’s faster than our nervous systems, a pace that often allows no time for rest, reconnecting with this kind of steadiness can bring its own sense of disorientation, as we’re having to let go of one paradigm (you should be more like a machine) and make space for another (you have a wise body with needs).

So many asides and tangents in this email: it might be easy to make a little binary equation here, where disorientation, since it’s connected to capitalism, is bad or wrong and should be ignored or abandoned or shamed out of existence. And we can build a new story, one where steady attention is the only correct story of spring, or of how to live our lives.

It feels important to note that that’s not what i’m saying here. I’ve come to see my disorientation as a kind of gift, one that can remind me to slip away from the grind of endless doing and spend a little more time with the trees and the ground and the clouds. I’ve learned, from watching and being present to spring, that steadiness is not automatically connected or contrasted with the idea of unsteadiness. That these two experiences, rather than battling it out with each other for dominance, exist at the same time, nudging me this way and that, allowing me to notice one thing, then another.

a corollary on slowness:

When the kind of steadiness of spring feels disorienting, slowness is one way to find our way back into our bodies, and our own capacity for steady presence.

If you’ve taken a class with me, you’ve probably heard me say that nature doesn’t really work in binaries; that our culture’s binary thinking has really tried to shove nature into clear “this or that” categories, but so much of what we’re learning these days is how much of nature exists outside of that line of thinking.

For example: slowness and swiftness are not always at odds in nature in the way they can be in our culture. For some beings, like trees, the growth happening above ground is partnered with a network of swift and constant communication + resource sharing underground.

Going slow, at times, allows us to notice more clearly all the ways that capitalism works on and in us. The push to constantly improve upon what’s here, to be a better person, to experience unlimited and machine-like progress — all of these cultural narratives can make it hard to know how to trust ourselves, to notice or know what we need (all while plenty of people and companies are happy to tell us that we want or should want).

Slowness can allow us to drop back into and notice our own unique ways + processes of integration. It allows us to recognize the ways that systems work on and in us. It gives us space to grieve what needs to be grieved. It offers us space to be precise, to sort through all that we’re carrying in a deliberate, unhurried way.

It offers us, too, the space to be poetic, and messy, and unfinished, and to witness our own unfolding — not on anyone else’s timeline, but in our own ways, at our own pace.

And in its own time, that kind of slow integration can create a foundation for swiftness, like starlings, and resourcing, like the signals passed back and forth between networks of trees, who take decades to mature but who communicate with a quickness facilitated by mycorrhizal networks and through the breeze.

As I read back through this email, I am noticing the ways, like my learnings of spring, like the writing of this email, that the words in here meander, slow, speed up. I hope over this next month you are able to find some time to notice this own kind of meandering, slow swiftness in your own lives, and — whether for five minutes or a whole afternoon, you get to watch the networks of trees around your do their thing.

And who knows? Maybe your meandering, disorientation, swiftness, and slowness might nudge you towards your own teachers and models of these kinds of integration and reconnection to our bodies, each other, and the earth around us.

Sending love from the creeks,

Kali