My Year of Hopefulness - Unaccustomed Earth

I'm reading the book Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, a book I've been interested for over a year because I was so touched by her last book, The Namesake. Lahiri has a beautiful way of weaving stories between generations and across cultures, identifying and then eloquently writing about her characters thoughts and their often mismatched actions. Her characters are flawed in serious ways, making them so real that after a few pages, we think they are our neighbors, our family members, our friends.

The title "Unaccustomed Earth" intrigues me. Before picking up the book, I thought Lahiri was talking about new and uncharted waters that her characters would take on. This true, with the added twist that the uncharted waters are new challenges taken on by new generations while their hearts, minds, traditions, and families remain firmly rooted in the past. Her main focus in this book is the conflict that arises in a family as the world, physical and emotional, quickly transforms and changes from one generation to the next.

In my home town, people rarely leave. 99% of families are Italian and Catholic, like mine. There are roads named after prominent families in town who have made their homes there for generations. Generations of families live side-by-side, childhood friends remain friends forever, having the same conversations day in and day out. There, time stands still.

My family is a transplant there - neither my mom nor my dad grew up there. My brother is there thought my sister, Weez, and I left as soon as we headed off for college and never looked back. This was an unfamiliar practice - most people who went to college went locally or at least within the state. My sister and I never even considered sticking around. We were off for greener pastures, the same way my mom and dad were when they were young. Maybe finding our own way in the world, away from everything and everyone we knew as kids, is somehow rooted in our genes.

While my mom always wanted us to make our own way, it's fair to say that she wishes we were all always around, all the time. It must be a hard process to watch someone you brought into the world head out into the unknown to see what they can find. Lahiri's stories boil down to a common theme: the unknown is frightening, and it's especially frightening for older generations who watch younger ones take flight in foreign spaces. I imagine it's the same for my mom - while she wants so much for us to have adventures, she also worries about Weez and I being safe and happy and healthy in a way that she doesn't worry about my brother.

Lahiri begins her book with a quote that puts her stories in perspective. "Human nature will not flourish...for too long a series of generations in the same worn-out soil. My children...shall strike their roots in unaccustomed earth. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne." While the stories mostly talk about conflict between generations, with Hawthorne's quote she acknowledges that future generations must put down their roots in foreign soil in order for us to move forward, evolve, and lead productive lives. It's that process of making the unfamiliar familiar that is so critical to our development, and the development of humanity. Adapt and change are the only two things we ever really have to do.

My Year of Hopefulness - Measure what's relevant

There is all kinds of advice out there in the media ether on how to survive this latest economic downturn. What to do with your retirement investments, how to manage stress, even how to talk to your kids about what's happening. And it's great advice on surviving, though very few people are talking about how to thrive in this current state of affairs. And why should they? I mean who thrives in a desert, right? 

Actually, a lot of life survives in a desert climate, and in this economic desert we would do well to think about how geographic deserts burgeon with life, mostly below ground and on a small scale. It involves taking a lesson from Darwin and adapting to change. And I don't mean adapting for right now and then looking forward to going back to the way we were before. Survival of the fittest doesn't mean changing for the short-term and going back to our same old ways somewhere down the line. The dinosaurs are not coming back. Ever. And neither are Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns to name just a few. Investment banking has all but vanished from Lower Manhattan and if you don't believe it go see for yourself - take the subway down to Wall Street and have a look around. It's eerily quiet and desolate. There are a lot of cavernous, columned buildings standing empty. These are the modern day dinosaurs. The meteor has struck, and it changed everything. 

With the economy top of mind for nearly everyone, I hear a lot of people throwing around phrases like "the market is way down" or "the Dow is plunging". I some times wonder if most people actually know what that means. The Dow is a set of 30 companies that are considered fairly stable, prosperous, large companies. Or at least they used to be stable and prosperous. Take a look at the list. It's not a pretty picture of America: Caterpillar, General Motors, Citigroup. (Notice the absence of companies like Google and Apple.) Should we judge our economic future on these kinds of companies? Doesn't sound like a wise idea to me.

I'm not an economist. I do have an MBA and I was an economics major in college. I was also a history major in college, and the one thing history shows consistently over time, as does biology, is that things change and in order to survive and thrive we need to adjust. Permanently. None of this "we just need to ride out this latest cycle until things get back to normal." This is the new normal - change. Radical and rapid. And I think it may be time to dump the Dow as an indicator of our future. To keep it is analogous to judging the future of life on Earth by the fate of the dinosaurs. 

We need a new perspective. Going forward, it will be small businesses and entrepreneurs that drive innovation and prosperity in our country. And this is a reason to rejoice. For the past few years, we have talked about the rise of the individual and personalization. Little did we know at the time that this trend wasn't just about ipods and Facebook. It will serve to underpin our entire economy in drastic and never-imagined ways. 

Change is never easy. There will be casualties in the process: big companies will go under, there will continue to be layoffs, and individuals will have to re-frame their lives. The longer we resist that re-framing, the worse off we will be. Rip off the band-aid and accept that change has arrived and will continue. It's time to we get to work and figure out how we are going to adapt and learn how to survive and thrive in the new economy. Stop lamenting what was and look forward to what we can have a hand in building.