human flourishing – Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs

Everyone Can Wait

I have spent the week complying with deadlines, that quaint arrangement in which a date arrives and something is expected to be finished. Public writing had to take a back seat. Having finally resurfaced, I turned to the Sustainability Council’s anniversary minutes and discovered an altogether more accommodating relationship with unfinished business. In the party games of public participation, everybody can be involved without necessarily being allowed to interfere with anything. After ten years, the interesting question is what membership enables people to change, beyond their afternoon plans.

What the Water Knows

There are people whose ethos reach us through a sentence, from many miles away, long after they claimed it. Since this summer, Wendell Berry has been keeping me company. Others may leave a garden, a footpath, a stubborn patch of green that might so easily have become something else. In today’s world, we may struggle to remember that we inherit more than what has gone wrong. We also inherit what humans before us loved enough to keep. So with Berry in mind, I’m trying to think more about life’s quieter bequests. The places that still make room for us. The words that arrive at just the right time. The care we never witnessed, but whose consequences we are able to enjoy. What would it mean to recognise this inheritance while it is still alive, and leave something living in return?

Everyone Can Advise

I may be the only person on Åland untroubled by the missing job advertisement. Why make strangers audition for an occupied chair? What interests me is the resources attached to it, the council assembled to bless it, and the difference between being allowed to do something and exercising good judgment. The recruitment theatre was cancelled. The coronation appears to have gone ahead.

Everyone Can Speak

Micke Larsson welcomes discussion. Fredrika Fellman would like an answer. His latest interview and his summer talk raise a question about ambition, power and social sustainability: what changes when a leader’s account of himself meets somebody else’s experience? It is possible to leave Wimbledon without leaving the VIP section. Everyone can speak. But power must answer for what it does.

The Phantom Steps Forward

“Everyone” must also include the person who asks an uncomfortable question. The person who wants her work to be recognised. The person who is trying to build a future here.

human flourishingA collection of 5 posts