Tracks (1)

“It's very easy to lose track of the environment around you, to lose touch with the present.”

I’m ever curious about the geometry of my landscape.

Our local version of idyllic countryside reflects a regimented, linear, modernised version of industrial agriculture which parallels the straight lines of Roman roads, the enclosure act, and the Dutch engineering that laid access and drained the land. It’s a peripheral place; rolling chalk and limestone hills edge fenlands that push the horizon away into a blue distance.

I’ve enjoyed the respite of these quiet spaces for years now; a recuperative contrast to a life lived in motion, at speed and short notice, across geographies. The chaos of working with the energy and pacy confusion of disruptive and constant innovation mapped too easily against my ego-driven prodding at the status quo; a life of throwing stones into the pond and, opportunistically, reaching for whatever surfaced in the ripples.

Some time ago, as a new MBA graduate, Joseph Schumpeter’s ‘gales of creative destruction’ pushed at my back and I ran with his ideas of resources, actors, processes, firms, nations, networks; abstract economic language that easily loses track of our real, living, sensed and intimate relationship to our environment and each other.

And words, after all, make worlds.

But it could be that we have seen enough of chaos and destruction.

Most of us are in need of healing, salve, and gentle holding as we hope for a settled period of recovery. As I ponder the path to restoration, I’ve discovered simple daily disciplines, practices and habits that have been vital to my often fragile sense of self: family, walking, photographing, writing, calls with supportive friends, space, playing with the dogs.

Our search for a new normal could be easily derailed if we simply return to the energy and disintegrative creativity of the past. We each need to find the words for the creativity and leadership that reintegrates; that contains and cares, that holds us in our present reality and situates us, firmly, in a renewed sense of ourselves, among each other and deeply connected to our environment.

Our future might be forever veiled in the blue haze of distance, but we can still travel well, helping each other to find the gentle disciplines and attentive contributions that will keep us on the right tracks.

Notes:

Rebecca Solnit’s ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ gave me the words for the blue fen horizon:

“If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival.”

The book is a collection of essays, eclectic and beautifully written. Solnit sees getting lost as a joy; something that feels increasingly hard to subscribe to in our GPS, smartphone equipped days. You may also recognise her famously as the woman who had her work unwittingly explained to her by a man at a party as he pronounced on the silencing of women.

I’m pretty sure that Joseph Schumpeter’s 1948 work is still a feature of contemporary MBAs. Here, a Princetown academic reviews his biography ‘Prophet of Innovation’ by Thomas McCraw.

Finally, if you follow the direction of the track in the photo far enough, you will end up in the land walked by the poet, John Clare (1793-1864). He is a particular favourite of mine and lived through the agricultural revolution, the enclosures, and watched as the countryside he knew as a child was uprooted and fenced. The process deeply distressed Clare as rural economies were destroyed by the greed of the new landowners, much of which was recorded in Clare’s poetry. Spend some time with his glorious ‘The Wood is Sweet.’