Vision of Victory
Fighting to lose more slowly is not fighting at all.
I was wrestling with academic research about mental health and third spaces, trying to force another essay out of data and citations, when I stopped. That's not what this is.
This is far simpler than that. This is me thinking out loud about what we believe, what we're fighting for, what we're trying to build. A restatement of our values so I can see them clearly again, so you can see them too.
We live in an age of salvage operations. Each morning arrives with another crisis to manage, another institution gasping for breath, another beloved space hanging a 'closed forever' sign in its window. We have become masters of damage control, spending our days racing from one emergency to the next, trying to preserve what we have before it slips away entirely.
It's necessary work. But it's not enough.
We must also think about what comes after we save what's left. We are here to imagine what we build when the immediate crisis passes. Otherwise, what will call us to battle in the first place? Without a vision of victory, we are merely fighting to lose more slowly.
That's what these essays are really about. Not just the spaces we're losing or the maligned systems that strangle them, though those matter deeply. They're about remembering that we are builders by nature. That the institutions we're scrambling to preserve were once someone's audacious vision of what could exist.
It feels almost grandiose to talk about building a better future when we're barely keeping the lights on. But that's exactly why we have to do it. The alternative is a world where our highest aspiration becomes keeping things from getting worse.
You've joined me in believing that we can do better than that. That while others triage the wreckage, we can draft the blueprints for what comes next. That even in the midst of all this necessary rescue work, we can still remember how to dream forward.
Thank you for coming along on this journey. Thank you for believing that building is still possible. See you next week.
I have been focusing on this for the last several months, in yoga we speak about two distinct energies. The Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine energies. The Divine Feminine energy encompasses the ability to flow around obstacles and create from the abyss. She is the oracle who dreams the new dream, the visionary. The Divine Masculine energy creates safety and security while providing structure for the new dream. Vision without structure is just fantasy, while structure without vision becomes analysis paralysis. To create the New World we must bring ourselves into balance first and then expand out.