Back home

And… exhale.

Back home, in the living room, in my comfy chair, watching the sunrise. It’s good to be back home – really. Five weeks, 12 beds, six planes, 1 boat, four bikes, and countless trains. Creating that balance between needing to see it all and having the space to digest it, and the coherence to enjoy it. We paced ourselves well for a trip of this length, but it’s still quite a push. It’s good to be home to recuperate.

An thus amazing adventure ends, and now the integration begins. I feel much wisdom percolating through my system – but it is still disorganized, scattered. As I tell the story of our trip, it will congeal. As I spend the next few weeks writing my report for my sponsor, it will take more shape. But it may take years to fully wrap my head around the experiences and lessons of this trip.

A few things are obvious off the bat. First, that Europe is full of amazing cities, where regular people live with an incredibly high quality of life. Yes, they may have less materially on average. But that material wealth comes at a cost – of course, environmental, but also the attachment we place on things that can distract us from life. I am as susceptible to this as anyone – it’s the natural inclination of the mind to want more and more. But, personally, I don’t want to be materially rich at the expense of being spiritually rich. Instead of chasing things, I want to live well now. And part of my own wellbeing is seeing that those around me are taken care of as well. Which we just don’t do well as a society here. We saw more homeless, hurting people on the two block walks from BART to our house than we did in all of Europe. We might have a higher average wealth, but our standard deviation is much greater as well. In Europe, there is a social contract that sets limitations on some people, but in turn creates an amazing support system which benefits the great majority – imagine excellent, free education for your kids without having to move to the suburbs, imagine never worrying about your health care coverage, imagine approaching retirement knowing you’re well taken care of. At all stage of life, there is provision, such that you need not live scared. Being scared serves the employers, the politicians, and those that exploit your fears to their end. Fuck them. They are holding us down from experiencing a truly richer life. And to what end – I wouldn’t say I’ve seen a lot of happy CEOs and politicians, either.

The next observation is that cities are getting better. After half a century of neglect and decline, the last 20 years have seen a reinvigoration of cities everywhere. I need to understand this more – my initial guess is it’s a return of the suburban kids to the cities. Whatever the reason, the same thing I’ve been witnessing in the US is occurring throughout Europe as well. Everyone I talked to was optimistic about their cities, investing in their cities, and happy with the quality-of-life changes that had been made in recent years. There’s just more good people doing more creative things. This manifests in the arts, the intersection of arts and commerce (i.e., restaurants, fashion), transportation (especially the bicycle movement that keeps growing), ecological awareness and innovation, and in how we design our cities at the ground level to serve people, rather than from the sky where the plans look pretty. Even during the difficult economic times of the last few years (and possibly moreso), improvements have been made. Let’s hope the tipping point has been reached, that the momentum keeps improving civilizations, and that cities can keep learning from each other (especially if that involves paid trips to understand what’s going on).

My final quick observation is that I work in a great profession. Every planner I met on this trip was savvy, smart, and heart-oriented in their work. There is a kinship across this field of good people doing good things. It made me proud and honored to be part of such a profession.

And with that, I return to work. Beyond the thousand emails waiting for me, I so look forward to integrating what I’ve learned into the wellbeing of San Francisco. It’s not clear to me how or where exactly it will happen – but in anything I’m involved in, the wisdom of this adventure will be there with me.

As such, this will likely be the last blog entry (until Abbie finds the time to post more pictures, and we may find a better venue for that). Thanks for coming along, I hope you enjoyed, and please send me any comments or feedback you have on what I’ve shared.

Love-
Steve