Localized
January 14, 2025
3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: Peak by K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
Listening: Run It Up by Hanumankind
If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.
Quick Notes
New Work:
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Operation Absolute Resolve
This week’s Brain Lenses essay is on the Rumpelstiltskin Effect & the pod is about Contagious Smiles
Localized
Something that wasn’t obvious to me (not consciously, at least) until the pandemic forced me to slow down and stay put for a few years is that while our contexts are informed by meaningless happenstance and historical dice-rolls, they’re also the consequence of intentional cultivation and curation.
People aren’t just shaped by their geographies, relationships, and cultures, they shape these things in return. And that means our actions (even seemingly very personal, isolated ones) can result in both positive and negative flywheel effects for the large number of people with whom we share a given context.
When I first moved to Milwaukee, I had a world-spanning collection of relationships and cultural touchpoints guiding my thinking and actions. And though I moved here purposefully—it seemed like a good place to be, for many reasons—I didn’t fully immerse myself in the local context because of all those other ones I was juggling.
Over the past few years, though, I’ve recommitted to not just immersing myself in the local context, but trying to positively contribute to it, as well.
I’m still figuring out what it means to be fully invested in an adopted place, because for most of my adult life I’ve straddled many of them at once, finding immense value and fulfillment in an overlapping (and conflicting) confluence of peoples and places.
I still truly believe there’s value in cross-pollination and regular exposure to the distant, distinct, and different, and I think it’s important to attain an intuitive understanding of just how diverse the world is, and how many inbuilt biases we have because of where we happened to be born, who raised us, and the cultural milieu in which we spent our formative (and later) years.
That said, I also think it’s important to explore and experience being a local; being of a place, not just in a place.
I still want to maintain a strong sense of my place in the larger world, but I also want to tap into and help maintain (and grow, refine, and feed) the local mycelial network that all neighborhoods, towns, cities, and other communities, large and small, have.
A lot of this is new to me because of the odd life I’ve been fortunate to live, but filling in these sorts of knowledge and experiential gaps when we notice them in ourselves tends to be a worthwhile investment, and there are worse ways to spend one’s time than coming to understand one’s social and physical ecosystem with the intention of enjoying what’s already there, while over time committing to make both a little better for everyone.
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What Else
I apparently did something weird to my dominant-hand thumb, and now any time I reach for something and tauten that thumb tendon, I get a jolt of alarming pain from tip to palm and recommit to not ever reaching for anything ever again (a commission I break five minutes later when I use my body in a normal way, rather than the hobbled, pain-adverse manner I’m aiming for).
I’m pretty sure it’s De Quervain tenosynovitis, which sucks because it apparently takes a long time to heal and again—dominant hand. Please pray to any thumb gods you know about that my poor little digit heals soon (and properly).
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