Episode 7 - Chris Paterson's Future

Episode Note

My guest this week is Chris Paterson, a friend and a former colleague. For years, I had the privilege to work with Chris in communities across Newfoundland and Labrador. We facilitated conversations about community futures, climate change, regional development and everything in between. Chris has done that kind of work across the United States as well. Today Chris lives with his wife and daughter in Grates Cove, a small community on the edge of the Avalon Peninsula on the island of Newfoundland. Our conversation focused on community, family and what comes next once you reach certain age.

I believe that these are important conversations, so there are no ads because you don’t need another mattress commercial interrupting the story and there are no paid perks. If you find yourself listening to the podcast and feel like you can afford to support it, you can Buy Me a Coffee. And if you like the show, please share it with your friends and family.

If you’d like to leave a comment or be a guest on one of the future episodes go to www.futurespossible.com and leave a comment under an episode. The website also features AI-generated transcripts of every show.

NOTE: This episode is late. I am sorry. It was a week of a Charlie Brown future, as Chris would call it. It’s all good now and I am posting this episode from Groningen before I head south to Austria and Croatia. My apologies. We will be back to our biweekly schedule!

Music: Blue Dot Sessions

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AI Generated Transcript

[BF] Hello again, I'm Bojan Fürst and you're listening to Futures Possible. I make this show in St. John's on the island of Newfoundland. My guest today is Chris Patterson, a friend and a former colleague. We worked together across Newfoundland and Labrador. Our job was to help folks in small and large communities across the province figure out how to work together on some common goals. Facilitating community conversations with Chris was always fun and I really respected his experience and the energy he brought to all those conversations. So Chris was somebody I consulted about the idea for this podcast very early on. As you can imagine, I was looking forward to this conversation and Chris didn't disappoint. So this is the future Chris imagined.

[CP] Uh, hello, my name's Chris Patterson. I am, um, who am I? Uh, I am a person that lives in Grates Cove, Newfoundland, which is a small community on the northernmost point of the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland, on the island of Newfoundland. Uh, I'm not originally from here. I originally grew up in California and through good fortune met a interesting, wonderful woman from Newfoundland. Um, and make a long story short, we ended up getting married and have had a wonderful 38 years of marriage so far. At my time and as often happens with Newfoundland Newfoundlanders, uh, one point she convinced me it would be a good idea to move back to Newfoundland. And we said, we did that. Yeah. So we've been living here for about 10 years now.

Growing up. I've had a strong affinity for the natural world and from the very early age sort of felt this emotional, almost spiritual connection with the natural world and have carried that with me wherever I go, including the work I do. So even, even in work that doesn't specifically deal with the natural environment, I sort of always bring that sentiment in and sort of help people understand that the connections we need to build are not just with each other, but also with the places where we live, including all those natural systems upon which we, at the very least, if we want to be sort of practical about it, that we need to survive. And if we want to be something more than practical, that bring a whole lot of joy and beauty to our, to our lives.

Well, I guess another part of a big part of who I am is I am a, uh, not only a husband, but also a father. I have two daughters, one of whom is a, both are adults now, one of whom has special needs. And so she is still living with us. So much of my, uh, life these days is also spent making sure that she is able to live a happy and interesting life. So even though I'm in my early sixties, I'm still a parent of sorts. And so that's always, also brings an interesting sort of dynamic into who I am and what I do.

You know, when we, when our daughter, early on in her life, we, we were living in Vermont at the time and, uh, we had the benefit of having our very active, strong sort of parent to parent network and family network. And I still write, we can still remember at one point, someone referred to this concept of being a forever parent. And at the time it didn't make a lot of sense to us. And then over the past five to 10 years, it really does make a lot of sense. Cause you know, when you approach, you know, 60 or at some point in your life where you're starting to think about, okay, I'm not going to work forever and I'm going to, you know, what do I want to do in my retirement? Um, for those of us who have adult children with special needs, who cannot live on their own. You know, that's just, just a factor that has to be built in. And for us, every single decision that we make. As a family has to sort of compromise between. Uh, you know, the, uh, a future that I would like to create or imagine and create, and what is going to be necessary for us as a family. And, you know, and I'm, you know, made a commitment long ago that family is one of the most important things. And I'm, you know, so the idea of for our daughter, you know, we have to have a future that involves interaction with people. She loves the social interaction. We have to have opportunities for her to engage and doing interesting things and continuing to learn. And one of the things that we've sort of discovered is that, you know, as we debated, you know, moving out to Grates Cove, which in some ways it feels like it's a, it's a world away. Um, and it's probably true of any small community. There are pros and cons of having a person with special needs in a small community. Aaron, we can let Aaron walk out the door here and she can walk wherever she wants. Assuming it's not too foggy and, and we don't feel, you know, we're not worried. And she's, and she now literally will go for walks and go drop in on people that she knows and hang out with them and, you know, have, have a cup of tea with them or in her case, probably hot chocolate. Um, and there are activities here that she, you know, just automatically gets involved in that, you know, we would, we would have to work hard to set things up in town for her to be involved. Whereas here, it just kind of all happens because that's what people do. No, Aaron's a part of the community. And, you know, the most recent thing is I think someone is talking already about building a Christmas float and they're engaging Aaron to be part of the float, you know? So it's, it's, it's, it's things like that, that affect, you know, I don't think we would have moved to a spot where we felt like we couldn't have had a good life for our daughter. Let's be honest. You know, for any, you know, that expression, you know, it takes a village to raise a child. Well, it really takes a village to raise a special needs child, a child who's now an adult, because believe me, she gets really tired of mom and dad pretty quickly. So, so it's the fact that she now has a growing network of other adults, both here in this community, but also in the surrounding region that want to do things with her is just, it's fantastic.

Five years is an interesting time period because, you know, often when you think of the future and, you know, you're looking further out. So it's, you can almost separate yourself from a current reality and looking out and, you know, next week is easy to predict because you're doing a lot of what you're doing now. So five years is kind of in that, that transition zone to use sort of an ecological term. We live in an interesting time, you know, the future ain't what it used to be. And that was a quote attributed to Yogi Berra. And, you know, that's probably been true for almost every era, you know, as people kind of look into the future and say, oh, you know, things are, things are different, but somehow recently feels a lot different, feels fundamentally different. And I think part of that is that the systems that we almost take for granted, that we don't give a lot of thought to all of a sudden are now either breaking down or at least kind of being opened up to change in unpredictable ways. And when I say systems, I'm thinking about climate change and, you know, species, you know, being lost. So we're now looking at a future where really it's much harder to predict kind of what the natural world is going to look like that we are living in. But also governance systems, you know, how are we going to make decisions as collectively or and who's going to be in charge and how are they going to interact and all those sorts of things now feels like we're in one of those odd tipping points where we could go in a lot of different directions. But we're really just not sure what that's going to look like, part of what I try to bring as I think about my future in the, in the sort of the world that I am trying to partly envision and partly create, you know, in five years is this notion of resilience. And by resilience, I mean, you know, what's, can we increase our ability and our likelihood to not just survive, but to thrive in whatever those unpredictable futures might look like?

I, on, you know, it really depends on which day you catch me. There's certain days or

I'm less optimistic about the future.

And then there's some days where I continue to have a great deal of hope that human beings will be able to figure this out.

I, in terms of the future here in Grates Cove, similarly, I mean, you know, Newfoundland, Labrador communities, in general, are going to face an interesting time over the next 10 to 20 years. Small communities, aging population, hard to continue to provide services, you know, and it's only going to get more challenging. You know, the more things change, the stress on government and government budgets, you know, the idea that somehow all the systems we have in place now are going to continue to be able to provide at the same level to communities that are widely distributed. It's hard for me to imagine. So what is the new, what is the new economic model look like for small places, including Grates Cove? There's a lot of great research on the effects of climate change on the North Atlantic current. I'm forgetting the scientific name. I haven't seen anything talk about the direct impact of the, you know, if the North Atlantic current collapses or changes in some ways, what are the impacts on Newfoundland? I haven't seen anything on that. But I think if you're going to adapt to some of these things, you've got to start doing it now. How do we plan for resilience? You know, in places like Grates Cove,

that's always going to be a little bit of a challenge trying to figure that out. There's a recognition in a lot of places, and Grates Cove being one of them, that it's going to be really hard to survive on our own. So, you know, if we want a local economy, then we better support local businesses. If we want to be able to have, you know,

the relationships needed to deal with the next time we have a major storm and power gets knocked out, then we better figure out ways to work together with each other. And a lot of that's been in place, you know, in fishing communities for generations already. But as we have places like Grates Cove where we see new people coming in, then, you know, those are new relationships. And how do you rebuild some of that?

I've learned it's a really bad idea when I move to a new place to start gardening right away. I need to wait at least a year to understand that place, that climate, that the soils, you know, what grows, what doesn't grow. And as a case in point of where I kind of temporarily lost my mind and didn't follow that pattern. So last year was our first full year living in Grates Cove. And I kind of made an assumption about what the limiting factors were on gardening here. And so when I thought it was mostly, it was temperature and soil. There's not a lot of good soil here. And obviously the temperature is not brilliant. So we had some raised beds and we positioned the raised beds and the area was going to get a lot of sun. I gave, you know, the plants their good soil because we created it. And we put them out there and let them go. And for the little while, everything was great. And then all of a sudden we had a big storm. And the wind came down over the hills and just battered our poor, I mean, and these, you know, like zucchini, things that, you know, aren't, you know, not even corn, or not even things that are growing tall, but just, and it just sort of wiped them out. And I learned right then and there that the limiting factors here, you know, yeah, soil is a challenge, but again, you can create your own soil. Yeah, temperature is a challenge, but really it's warm enough here that you can grow things. The two great limiting factors here are wind. And then the other, which I hadn't even thought about until this year and talking to people, is salt, spray from the Because then when we get storms, the waves come crash in and then you get all the sea spray coming up. And depending on where you are, you get a lot of salt on your plants. So I think, you know, I better show some humility because the things that I may have learned in other places don't necessarily apply here. And I need to sort of relearn kind of what makes this place work.

The two big things I worry about is we are, you know, we're messing with systems and by systems, I mean, our natural systems, our global systems,

environment, ecosystems. We're messing with systems that have evolved over centuries, millennia, and they're working. We're working and now we're changing those systems in less than a hundred years. I'm in that. I just mentioned the word humility. I don't think we've done this with a whole lot of humility. We are messing with systems and we don't know what the outcomes are going to be. And what we know about what we're doing suggests that we're moving the systems in a way that are going to make life a lot more challenging for humans. The earth will survive, but it may not be a suitable place for human beings.

Um, so I worry about that.

And I guess on a related note is this movement toward governance systems that are more authoritarian, less democratic, um, more protectionist. And so I worry that how you respond to these challenges is going to

make it hard for a lot of people, but we have no way of predicting how this is all going to play out. Um, and I guess, you know, if I want to get selfish about it, you know, for me and for our family in particular. So we have a special needs daughter who in some future worlds would be completely devalued.

Um,

and so, um, both my wife and I are sort of in our sixties and so, you know, we're no longer in the age where we can sort of, from a financial perspective, all of a sudden adapt and do things. And so if things start to go south and some of the economic and other governance systems, what does that mean for our ability to sustain ourselves financially and just our household and things like that. So it's those sorts of, um, things that make, make, you know, that I won't say they keep me awake at night, but I think about them.

I have this, this sense that what's going to be even more important in our futures are the role of artists, writers, people that can help us as human beings imagine differences, imagine different futures. Imagine kind of understand sort of human condition in different ways. So that it's not all politics. It's not all science. It's not all in the head space. It's our ability to sort of feel and, you know, sort of imagine, because I think. It's that capacity to imagine and then translate that imagination and to say, all right. Well, you know, how could we move more in that direction? I think imagination is an under appreciated capacity and resource that needs to be nurtured. And right now, you know, I worry that our imagination capacity is declining. What gives me hope is that there's a whole lot of people out there that are helping us not lose that way of doing that. No, I have an effect. I have an effect on people and places I've been and, but that's, you know, one, like throwing a pebble into a big pond. So it's creating a ripple, but then there's also lots of other ripples. And eventually, you know, after a few centimeters, that ripple goes out, it gets intersected with others. And it's quite pretty quickly. You can't quite tell, you know, what my ripple is doing with other ripples. That's okay.

Until I come up with something better, let's, let's think about that as the Charlie Brown future. Charlie Brown, he keeps, he's a good guy. He keeps trying. Things keep going wrong, but he keeps trying. So maybe, maybe there's something that.

One thing I am trying to do. So again, much of my professional life was working with others, helping them do things. And there's sort of a safety in that, to be honest, because you're not taking personal responsibility therefore than what you're doing. So one of the things I've made a conscious choice to do is to do the best I can to be a role model. So not convince other people to do things, but try to live my life in a way that people might see me doing certain things. And maybe they'll wonder why. And they'll talk to me about it. And they'll ask about it. We'll have conversations. Will they change what they do? I don't know. That's not my goal. My goal is to, again, for them to see that other, some things are possible that maybe they hadn't thought about before. So one thing is just trying to be a little bit more intentional about what I do, because recognizing that what I do also sends out those ripples.

I like quiet time. I like to spend, I mean, one of some of my best times of my life were and still are going for long walks. But I also like engaging with people. And maybe that goes back to this idea of sort of learning. I love listening and talking with people and kind of hearing their stories and learning kind of what new things. And so that's the other thing is to just engage with people to, you know, build relationships, you know, sort of honest, authentic relationships. Not always loving relationships, but authentic. Like I am literally trying to understand them and respect them for who they are. I'm not saying every person I've met in great scope I want to hang out with, but I hope I get a chance to talk to most people eventually over the next five years here and learn a little bit about them. If that means that's building community, then maybe then, maybe that's what I do.

[BF] Thank you for listening. That was Chris Patterson and his Charlie Brown future. I am Brian Fierst and you listened to Futures Possible. I talk with my guests about their futures and a way of being they can imagine for themselves in these uncertain times. You can find Futures Possible wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you want to leave a comment or support the show, visit futurespossible.com. If you like the show, the best way to support it is to share it with your friends and family. Take care