Sylvia's Journal

In the introduction to the 2009 edition of his book ‘Theory U’ Otto Scharmer writes, “Because our thin crust of order and stability could blow up at any time, now is the moment to pause and become aware of what’s rising from the rubble.” The reference to ‘rising from the rubble..’ comes from Vaclav Havel’s Liberty Medal acceptance speech at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (4 July 1994): “I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.”

So, here we are, 26 years after Havel said those words, and 10 years after Scharmer wrote his. The thin crust has blown up and we are now in this strange new world, wading into the rubble of the old. 

As we hear other people’s perspectives on COVID-19 and the new world it has created for us, I see people on a spectrum that range from “this is nothing more than a very bad case of the ordinary flu!” (expressed by the guys who cut our neighbors lawn, who don’t wear masks or gloves), to “things will never be the same again” (as predicted by many scientists, economists, finance people, and me, all masked and gloved).

The SARS-CoV2 virus, in all its cleverness and tinyness, has accomplished in just a few months what the most brilliant, enlightened, farsighted and imaginative people failed to do since the second world war: getting people out of their boxes and reinvent how to live together on this planet in ways that are sustainable and leave no one behind.

Until just a few months ago plenty of people (at least among those who had the ability and resources to do so) had no interest in changing the way they worked. Now we are collectively doing it, even though some do it kicking and screaming. The people who will weather this storm are the ones who were prepared and saw this coming. Or those who may not have seen this coming, who are nevertheless able to see silver linings (no more commutes, more quality time with the kids, more freedom, no disruptions from bored or gossipy colleagues), and possibilities for the future.

As we now know for sure, we were never very imaginative about our future. We simply extrapolated from the past and present, with minor tweaks. The people who didn’t believe in online education kept on expanding their campuses with more real estate, upping their tuitions to pay for it all and hitting their wealthy alumns for never big enough endowments in an ever rising spiral. And now it’s ‘poof’ time.

In 1911 the Scottish naturalist John Muir wrote in his book My First Summer in the Sierra, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitches to everything in the universe.” I always thought this was about nature and the universe, but now I see it is also about our supply chains: Vietnamese factories cannot make an important export product (clothing) because they can’t get the buttons which come from China where the factory that made them is closed because the workers went home to be with their families and, even though they are now open, they cannot staff them because for them too, everything hitches to other parts of the supply chain, whether human or material.  It’s Poof time on a grand scale