The Next Love Affair

by Susan Szpakowski

My son’s yellow Tonka trucks were solid metal and impressively big, with fat black rubber tires. He could move them around, load dirt, create piles and then plough them down with his little three-year-old hands. Even when he still travelled in my backpack we would stop near construction sites because he loved to watch dump trucks and cranes and diggers in action. His favourite videos were the real-life, no-plot There Goes a Truck and There Goes a Bulldozer. Through him I realized that the love affair with machines that work and build and destroy runs deep through our species, and that my ideas about gender conditioning were just that.

Whole generations of us fell in love with the beauty of smoothly functioning machines, cars, and gadgets. Things that work, better and better. Cars that are sleek and fast, appliances that are shiny, elegant, and efficient all at the same time. This love affair goes back to time before memory, but really took off with cheap energy and production lines that maximized efficiency and made enough of everything, available to all. This was the story of success we applied to our schools and organizations. We mass produced students, profits, franchises, along with conceptual tools, strategies, and gadgets to fix whatever was broken. In our enthusiasm we fell out of love with the natural world, which was slow, messy, and—compared to what seemed possible—irrelevant.

Of course our world is not a machine, and neither are we. We always knew it, and had spasms of dropping out or going “back to the land” or home schooling or importing this or that kind of spirituality. But these gestures were eddies around the edges of our focused mainstream quest.

But now something is changing. For many of us, machines are no longer as satisfying as they once were. The knowledge is sinking in that our efficiencies and fecundity are destroying our planetary habitat. We are beginning to see through the shiny exterior of our beautiful appliance, to the junk it will contribute to endless mountains of waste. Our sleek new cars have an embarrassing tailpipe leaving carbon trails. Life on the production line or in the cubicle or classroom can be pitifully thin when measured against meaning. The glamour of our romance is quickly fading.

What is the next love affair? My son, now a teenager, is in love with his computer and the world on the other side of his digital portal. Over time I’ve had to admit that it’s not just about screen addiction; for one thing, he is part of a virtual community that is co-evolving a sophisticated online game. Through his computer he enters a virtual ecosystem of relationship and creativity.

I think there’s also another romance waiting to happen—an old love almost forgotten, patiently waiting. We may find our way back to her in unexpected ways. She is already among us, though often invisible to our old machine and more recent virtual eyes.

Is it possible that our global connectedness is leading us back to the matrix of our being, out of the empty shell of atomic thought and into the creative mess of self-organizing systems?

As I drive to work I suddenly notice the trees bordering the road. Their naked winter branches are networks, quietly playing with the sky. I feel an echo in my own arms, with their arteries branching inside my hands. Even though the tree trunks are ringed with grass and concrete, I know their root system, deep in the earth, is like a mirror of what is above. A reflection in the looking glass of living things.

Something stirs. The beauty of ecosystems. A friend recently said, What if our city were like a forest? What if it felt like a forest, breathed like a forest? What if the architecture and streets had the textures and surprises of a forest? I felt the twitch of a deep yearning.

William McDonough and Janine Benyus are two of the prophets of this possibility, helping to awaken the romance. They don’t talk about returning to nature, or even learning about nature, but learning from her. Suddenly we remember that we want her. We want to be like her, be with her, be joined again.

Benyus shows her biomimicry slides to the TED conference—sea life and forest life that are infinitely more complex and resilient than any of our inventions. And beautiful. I am aghast. How could we have missed this before? The engineers in her story suddenly realize that the organisms around them have already solved their biggest, toughest problems. They dive into the water, hungry to learn from the Galapagos reefs. We need these solutions, we want these secrets.

We look in the mirror and we see an ecosystem, alive and beating, intelligent, networked and evolving. Is it possible that at last we are falling in love with ourselves?

Susan Szpakowski is the Executive Director of the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Halifax, Nova Scotia.