Month: November 2013

Categories
People Travel

Ubuntu

car_ditchThere’s an African ethic know as ubuntu, which holds that our common humanity derives from what we share. No person is an island.

“In our culture, there is no such thing as a solitary individual,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said, describing ubuntu. “A person is a person through other persons.”

I experienced ubuntu firsthand on Saturday, after our Toyota Yaris became stuck in a drainage ditch while my girlfriend and I were en route to the Drakensberg mountains that line the border between South Africa and Lesotho.

The mishap occurred as I reversed the Yaris on a narrow dirt road and failed to see the ditch in time. Luckily for us, the car lodged on the ditch’s rim, which held the vehicle in place. Otherwise the vehicle could have overturned with us in it.

As we stepped out of the car and contemplated calling a tow truck, we resigned ourselves to our plans for the sunny, 70-degree day being upended by the accident. Just then, a car arrived and three Zulu guys jumped out.

They didn’t ask whether we needed help.

Instead, they sized up the situation without our having to explain anything and then filed into the ditch with the goal of pushing the car up and over the edge.

About then a second car appeared and then a third, and out poured the passengers of both vehicles. In all, we had six men ready to lend their strength to the effort. An Indian man arrived in his pickup truck. The group hatched a plan that the truck would tow while the rest of us pushed.

In what seemed like five minutes, the car was back on the road. Though the men did not ask for anything in return for their aid, I offered them some bottles of water that we had in an ice chest in the trunk.

In that instant, nine people on a road in rural South Africa came together in a community.

Ubuntu.

Categories
Life

Embracing chance…

I recently heard a talk that changed how I think about the world.

The talk was by Kevin Slavin, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences at MIT’s Media Lab, who chronicles the history and future of luck and has a message about the role of chance in our lives and society.

“It’s amazing, the idea that anything that seems to be built out of chance, or instinct or luck can yield to a computational assault, and that this is the essential narrative of our time,” says Slavin. “The myth that we live in is that you don’t just get what you get, you get what you deserve.”

“There’s so little luck left in the world,” he adds.

In the talk, Slavin chronicles how we’ve made chance the enemy despite irrationality’s surrounding us.

Chance has been a part of the games we humans play since the earliest times, according to Slavin, who observes that for most of human history we’ve been playing games, which come from dice.

“The impulse to play games is anything but trivial,” he says. “What we’re doing when we hold dice in our hand is something that’s actually unpredictable.”

Yet as Slavin shows, we inhabit a culture of control and live in an age when the prevailing belief is that life is meritocratic, that problems will yield to analysis of so-called big data and that all we have to do to get ahead is, as one best-selling book advises, to lean in.

Slavin asks what might happen if we praised luck instead of burying it. “There’s a pleasure and a value in not knowing what the future will bring,” he concludes, “and a truth in not pretending and to simply face forward and say, ‘Bring it.’”

Categories
Asides Favorite Places

Hacking Paris

paris copyOn Halloween my girlfriend and I made up our faces to resemble the walking dead and set out for the Tour Eiffel. After walking along the Seine and under the tower we headed to the Champ de Mars, the long green mall that lies immediately to the tower’s southeast.

Someone had removed a section of a black metal fence that cordoned off the green. About 20 people had entered through the opening. Once inside they clustered on the lawn, sitting on blankets in groups of two or three. Someone dribbled a soccer ball. A guy selling wine and champagne by the bottle made the rounds.

We entered, found a soft patch of grass, and unpacked a baguette, some aged Gouda and a bottle of Cotes de Rhone that we had in our backpack. We opened the wine and toasted a lovely night, with the tower looming over our right shoulders, illuminated in amber and flashing thousands of sparkly lights.

About four-fifths of our way through the wine, a police officer approached. At first we thought he was busting us for drinking in public. But we realized he was shooing us off the lawn. Other police had fanned out and were doing the same to the others.

Of course we complied. We gathered our things, headed out and continued to walk along the gravel pathway that lines the green.

Later I realized that together with the other merrymakers we had hacked the city. We conformed a public space to one that accommodated us.

We who use cities confront similar challenges daily. How does your city feel? How would you like to engage with it?

Street skaters hack their environment. Citizens are using publicly available data and computer code to solve challenges relevant to their neighborhoods. Pedestrians forge pathways in parks regardless of whether the park’s planner placed a path in that spot.

At PopTech in October I heard Helen Marriage, co-director of the London-based design firm, Artichoke, talk about the large-scale urban spectacles she produces. “A city isn’t just for toil, trade and traffic, it exists for people,” said Marriage. “The rules of our cities are not somebody else’s rules – they’re our rules, and we can change them, briefly, or forever.”

Categories
Favorite Places

The life aquatic

I went swimming recently at the Asphalt Green community center in Manhattan’s Battery Park City. The pool, which has six lanes that extend for 25 yards, opened in June. The depth runs from 3’ 6” at one end to nine feet at the other.

The pool is part of a 52,000-square-foot facility that includes a fitness area, locker rooms and basketball courts. The building, which occupies three levels, has earned a LEED gold-level certification for environmental friendliness.

Swimmers can leave the locker rooms and walk directly into the pool area.

The pool feels wonderful. Lanes are marked by green lines on the bottom and divided by blue and green dividers. While swimming, I loved looking at the pool’s bottom, which has none of the grime that can build up between tiles. The walls felt great on flip turns. The water was crystal clear.

After my swim and a shower, I thanked the people at the front desk, headed into the sunshine, boarded a Citi Bike and pedaled along Hudson River Park. The ride took me past Tribeca and the West Village and the new Whitney Museum that’s under construction

Categories
Life

Why I ordered a Tikker

I recently contributed $39 for an online campaign to build a digital watch that counts down the seconds you have left to life.

The device, known as Tikker, is the creation of a Fredrik Colting, a Swede who works in publishing and who found himself confronting the prospect of death after his grandfather passed away. “I realized that nothing matters when you are dead,” Colting told Fast Company. “The only thing that matters is what we do when we are alive.”

The Tikker draws on such information as your age, body mass index and where you live to determine your life expectancy. (Unclear whether the Tikker factors in the ages of one’s parents and grandparents.) The Tikker also tells time.

Apparently Tikker’s fundraising push resonated. In just over a month the startup raised more than $98,000 or nearly four times its goal.

I’ve wondered why I pre-ordered the Tikker. I know intellectually that my days are numbered and that my life could end at any moment. You don’t have to wait for the Tikker to obtain a guess as to your life expectancy. I am expected to live for 78 years and to die on Friday, April 5, 2041, according to the Digital Death Clock, an online site that will give you similar information.

I don’t even wear a wristwatch.

Maybe it’s my journey this year, having stepped out of America and decided to live awhile in Africa. Maybe my support for the Tikker comes with my being in a profoundly different culture, or having to make my way as a freelancer or to figure out what problems to work on. Some days I feel as if I launched from a skateboard ramp into mid-air.

That’s to say there’s urgency. I have to do everything as soon as possible because there’s little time. I would like to meet everyone whom I hope to meet and to ask as many questions as I can ask and to write as many words as possible and to do all that as soon as I can because I don’t know and you don’t know how much time we have left in this life that we’re all passing through.

There are many things to do and to make and to discover. By putting the date of our death on our wrists, the Tikker aims to spur us to appreciate the life we’re living. That’s a Kickstarter for me.