I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about metronomes during my time away from social media and over the last year, amidst the chaos in my neighborhood, faith community, city, and country.
Metronomes offer a “pulse” for musicians. They keep the tempo. They give us something to regulate to, keep us steady. They offer a pulse, a precision, a rhythm, and that seems especially important for lots of people around me at the moment, and for myself.
So I was wondering what are the metronomes in our work in the global development sector? Grant cycles? Email? Quarterly meetings?
What keeps us steady?
Clearly it’s not our dysfunctional bosses or teams or overly bureaucratic processes or toxic workplaces. Nor is it the good intentions that continue to disappoint.
What keeps me steady is never the stuff of headlines, but what doesn’t make it into the news stories. It’s not remarkable. Yet, if we bother, it’s noticeable. Often times, it contains everything that is most important in this life. What keeps me steady is not connected to what we have been programmed to deem “worthy” of time and energy, but it’s something we may be happy to be invited into.
It’s the rhythms, rituals, and routines in our lives that keep us steady in trying times. These are actions easily dismissed as “non-productive,” but they are fundamental to reminding me that I am human.
And like a metronome, with my own rhythms, rituals, and routines, I choose the pace. I remind myself that I am connected to my body, the land, my family and friends, my teachers and mentors, my ancestors and lineage, my creativity. I remind myself that care – for myself and others – has to be at the center of everything I do.
And in our sector, I believe that – especially right now as we navigate so much uncertainty globally – we can break and then change our pace.
What if we slowed down enough in the social good spaces we inhabit to create new rhythms, rituals, and routines that steadily ushered in a more just world? What if our time was organized at a pace that made care and reflection and rest and adaptation to external conditions more possible?
What if we stopped the focus on completing deliverables, and focused more on providing reliability, dependability, and unwavering support to each other in our teams and organizations so that that care could extend to the communities we serve?
“What if?” feels like important questions to be asking all the time now, and this question will likely provide more challenges to the status quo. But that is the time that we are in. Amidst whatever comes, let us be the metronome for a new social and economic order…but more importantly, for each other.
What if each tick of the metronome reminded us of our togetherness?
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