Much later I noticed, among the hundreds of draft pieces, I had never published the set, partly because it was so important. I had wanted to get it right. I have a vague memory of noticing someone else writing on a related topic the week I wanted to publish and didn't want to coincide. I now think this was a mistake. Other topics took over but the theme has persisted in tango and in life.
In essence, the conditions were things like the host, the welcome, the lighting, room size and shape, good lines of sight, the seating, tables, the music, technical management of the music, the sound system, the floor, adherence to milonga codes, maybe more. The key was that these were often essential before finding a great dance partner for that sublime experience. This won’t be the case for everyone and Why is it so for some and not others? is an interesting question. Why are some people so difficult to please? or, in the common tango parlance “so snobby”?
The theme s of necessary or good conditions and of flourishing has often appeared since in The Outpost in various guises like gardens, growing vs building, emergence, uniqueness, things of that sort. Later that year there was a post on eudaimonia, a concept in the branch of ethics that considers what is a good life, a life well lived, famously explored by Aristotle and other Greek philosophers.
I noticed the themes of emergence and flourishing and of what contributes to flourishing were appearing in response to my experience of trauma, extreme stress and anxiety. Partly, it is because when fear colonises so many corners of a life, a way to counter that is to expand agency. The fear can be acknowledged but when you are gardening, fear can takes up less space. When enough of your mind is occupied on a task, or when meditating for that matter, but when, in some way you are focused enough in the present that your mind does not wander into the future or the past, agency increases and diminishes the power of fear.
What the health sector calls “self care” is even more important I suspect than is often suggested in that industry. The sense I have there is that drugs, therapy - things that can be professionalised - are the main things, but actually, I feel it’s absolutely key to health to do things not only where I feel safe or “safe enough”, but that I enjoy, that are interesting and exciting. Sometimes they are physical like Glasgow Magic Cycling club, which is like Critical Mass but with more social time, less politics, and happens more often and with more people than the Central Belt can usually command for CM. Sometimes that special thing is conversation with someone unusual or intelligent, or it’s something creative, but the really special activities, the ones that I notice not only improve my health stats but also make me feel great have an elusive kind of spark and play to them. There is healthy relation and response, reciprocity, generosity, stability, play. And ego is absent. Other people will be restored by different things no doubt.
In the past, I had been interested in what the conditions for flourishing were. Flourishing of many kinds - a dance event, in a person, a mind, a group, an organization, a town, society, or in nature. In recent years, having experienced a stalker, a narcissist, someone who tried to extort me while I was stuck abroad with COVID, and, most recently, someone with an immensely destructive dark triad personality, together with the complete indifference of organisations whose mission is purportedly, to help and protect, I had experienced, like a plant in storms, the forces that impede flourishing or cause it to fall away. Unsurprisingly, these were the old themes of The Outpost and of the darker corners of the Intertidal Zone pre-trauma: control, tyranny, money, manipulation, power.
I see now that the conditions that allow a dance, a garden, a person or a community to come alive are also the conditions tyranny, domination and control most reliably destroy.
So does that mean that flourishing is not decorative or indulgent, the cherry on top, but a matter of survival? And yet don’t we think about flourishing as more than survival? Flourishing is the flower when it blooms. But then if the flower doesn't bloom, we wouldn’t say it had properly lived or flourished, because it hasn’t fulfilled the form of a flowering plant, it hasn’t “been a flower”. It certainly hasn’t produced fruit and had an opportunity to carry forward life. So I'm inclined to wonder now if flourishing is not just "the best" of something, but actually, integral to the definition of surviving at least when we consider plants and perhaps people too. What life and survival flourishing meant seemed at first to be separate thing but now I'm not so sure.
The rain is mundane, sunshine is commonplace, the dirt is…dirt and yet together they create life from the miracle of a seed So, too, the small practical conditions that let life recover in people are not trivial at all.
