Zen and the Art of Growing Participation Culture
There’s a couple of “Zen and the Art of”s that have had a big influence on me. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig. Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet by Thich Nhat Hanh. In the later, Thay talks about how if we truly realise how our own nature is enough, then we can let go of consumerism and be happy with so little. How the sixth mass extinction is probably underway, but it is ok to die, because death is just transformation. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance, one vignette really stuck with me. It’s about guys that ride across the country on motorbikes. They don’t take the big highways, they take the side roads, because they want to feel the curves in the road, stop at the little forgotten roadside stops, relate to the country, be in relationship with the country, all of it. Not seperate themselves from the environment in the contained box of the inside of a car, but feel the elements on their faces. Navigate using their instincts. It’s ok to get a little lost.
The protagonist takes good care of his motorcycle, he’s adept at maintaining it. He is in loving, mana enhancing relationship with it. But his friend, who has a very expensive motorcyle, refuses to look inside it. It becomes a tension point in their friendship; if the protagonist probes his friend then his friend shuts down. Eventually he gets to the root of this disconnect; his friend is uncomfortable with “the machine” that society has become. Destroying nature, treating people as objects, transacting. I often think about how everything we humans have ever done is natural. We came from a natural evolution process. What if now is the time to figure out how to balance technology, societal organisation, and nature? Some human cultures, at different times, have figured out how to enhance and increase the biodiversity of the environment around them; it’s hard to imagine this in our current moment.
The participatory city approach grew out of the observation that participation is growing in localities all over the world; locals aren’t waiting for someone to help them grow a more collective, peer to peer way of living together. So Tessy Britton et al developed a platform to help participation culture grow, by reducing the barriers and making it easier for people in places to cocreate peer to peer projects and activities. But it’s interesting how, the participation culture that is grown intentionally seems qualitatively different from “pure” organically emerging participation culture. A lot of the people who put their hands up to cocreate street cafes with Maree in the Strengthen our Streets initiative talk about how they’ve thought about doing something like this for a long time, but it was the support system created by Maree that helped them step over the leith (the boundary, into the unknown, which the word “leadership” comes from).
I often think about the balance of “machine mode” and “organic mode”. How can we be just organised enough, and really keep the care and love inside the system that we develop to grow participation culture? We create the machine, how might we create a machine that’s full of love?
How might we practice Zen and the art of growing participation culture?
