Coherence?

I’ve moved (again), and I’ve been running “hither and tither” as Danny says, and I haven’t stopped for even five minutes to make meaning of any of it. Africa, a massive move, holidays, intense relationship, more travel, more travel, more work than I can possibly accommodate.

It’s overwhelming, and spending time in SB last week at the celebration of bp’s life/work just coalesced for me that I’m running about with no core thread. This new office space — “field poppy” coloured, perched high above the city, desk with an expansive view — it does ground me. I feel like I can tap things out, order my space, order my thoughts. For the first time in … forever. Clearly demarked zones for sleeping/eating/working (I think they call those ROOMS, cate) make it more possible to really work when I’m in here. So that’s a start.

LB and I were lamenting the post-doc aimlessness the other day. And I have been trying to understand my still flimsy sense that my three most important voices nudge against each other, but I can’t make them talk to each other yet. The CMM work — the communication theory around making better social worlds; my Uganda work; my work-work in hospitals and communities. I haven’t yet found a way to really make coherence here. So I give myself the challenge of this blog as a place to start.

CMM. “Coordinated Management of Meaning.” When we talk about CMM, the first thing that flings forward is the theoretical language — an impenetrable framework of analytical tools, metaphysical notions of what makes us human, the superstructure of how to understand what we are doing when we interact. And, at heart, what it means to me? That when we understand interaction as constantly creating something, we have choices in every interaction to change what we are doing. That we can recognize what feels like “instinct” as choice, understand the impulses that lead us to choose one thing or another — and therefore, make better choices, create more of what gives life. In everyday life and in the global sense.

For me, the theory behind CMM is ludicrously freeing. By understanding what guides our sense of “the kind of person I am” or “the kind of group I am part of,” we can choose to change what that is. By changing the way we interact, we can change our selves, our relationships, our cultural stories, our worlds.

I’ve been trying to figure out the connection between CMM as a theory and Nikibasika, my Africa project. I’ve written a bit about how I *use* certain CMM techniques to shift where I get stuck on this project — but I’ve never stopped to really figure out the relationship between doing the project at all and CMM-land. I don’t know that there was any “causal” relationship — but I do think that somewhere, stepping into the lifelong commitment to the project came out of the liberation of CMM — the notion that better worlds are possible, intractable conflicts are movable, that what feels stuck now doesn’t have to stay stuck. And, I see that stepping into such a bold commitment reinforces and enhances one of my generative/desirable stories of self — that I’m the kind of person who’ll do something other people think is outlandish, that I’ve transformed my Catholic sense of social justice into a humanistic, equally binding kind of morality, that I’m the kind of person who sticks to what I start. And along the way, I discovered that the work enables me to be the Auntie, the loving maternal one, the brave and independent explorer. Even when my graceless self shrieks itself to the surface in extreme stress, the overarching context is me-as-Auntie, me as competent explorer.

I may not have seen the link at the time, but the overarching narrative does fit — I began to believe in the possibilities of shifting the intractable, I began to understand CMM as providing a frame to do that, I began to believe in the genuine possibility of “better worlds,” was drawn to a place on the planet that embodies the need for shifts in the intractable. The umbrella narrative is sound, to me — and, I need to work on my turn-by-turn ability to keep that story paramount. Sometimes, like today, when I ran into conflict with my umbrella charity over reporting etc, already tired from traveling and too many time pressures, my story of “totally put upon and left holding the ball” also swims strongly to the fore. Unpicking that piece by piece, trying to find ways to be more graceful in the moments of pressure.

Writing in this quiet peaceful room, with the luminous city outside and below, a start.

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