Doom, through the looking glass

One of the great benefits of our practice at PARE is that we are aesthetically, philosophically, and creatively predisposed towards long termism. We note the froth atop the waves, but in the end, we’re much more interested in the deep currents, in the tides, in the geological movements that give rise to the everyday.

This attention to the long term offers benefits far beyond the clarity of focus and profound appreciation for the human condition that our clients embrace and seek out; in particular, this attention means that we are fundamentally optimists. We believe and practice the certainty that, however bad things may appear, the long and deep story of our species and our planet is one of eventual okayness.

Yet aren’t we faced daily with a world that seems absolutely bonkers? One in which certainty has given way to something resembling a roulette table? Where the guardrails have developed worrisome gaps, and the fall—just there—seems existentially deadly? Yes, of course, all these things seem true.

And, according to almost every measurable statistic there has never, ever been a better time to be alive. Whether one thinks of medicine, food security, education, newborn and maternal mortality, social mobility, deadly conflict, and so on, things have never looked so good. But those statistics to be meaningful are at a macro level and have nothing whatsoever to do with perception. The problem is, we don’t live our lives at a macro level or in a little stat-driven bubble.

We are tiny, largely ignorant bipeds on an absolutely insignificant speck of space dust. And that’s no way to live. Instead, we have our grand civilizations, our continent- and centuries-spanning mythologies, our cities, towns, and get-away-from-it-all mountain cabins. We have families, and loves, and children, all themselves great vessels for the ceaseless struggle in our souls over the power of the past and the possibilities of the future. We have 8.1 billion others just like us, some of whom we love, and some of whom we hate. We have a life lived in the brief illumination of a lightening strike. And it’s all that matters.

During a recent conversation, Steffany and I were talking about how one understands the times we live in, in a way that is anything but doom and gloom. Certainly, if you spend time on social media, consuming news, walking down the street, or breathing, it’s hard to believe anything but doom and gloom.

I’ve been engaged over the last few years with a ceramics practice. It has been a constant teacher in this regard. In ceramics you are working with the fundamentals of water, mud, fire, and time. It is a necessarily optimistic undertaking, beginning with a handful of sloppy wet earth, and ending up with a manifestation of human creativity and perhaps even beauty, that is by its very transformed nature, timeless. But, wow, the journey! With each great disaster (and those are more frequent that we’d all hope) something is learned—a better way to do something, even if it is not to do that thing. And even in your successes, you learn about patience—the heating and cooling of clay, the experimentation to find the right tones, gestures, and expressions, the need in the those last hours before you open the kiln to have hope.

In a previous life I was an historian, one that worked on questions a thousand or two years old. And a few years ago, as a Zen Buddhist, I undertook ordination. These two things—my experiences with trying to understand and contextualize a deep past, and my commitment to seeing the world as it is, plus this ceramics practice—have helped me do the work we do at PARE. Because here, deep in the bowels of this project of Steffany’s and mine, we bring a belief in humanity that is both long term and expansive to every single thing we do. However bad the world seems, history and experience tell us that it will also get better.

We’re just trying—in the work we do, in the clients for whom we do it, and with the fellow-travelers we find on the way—to make that happen sooner rather than later. Thanks for being here and supporting what we do.

—Peter