Zen and the art of getting a grip

In November 2016, almost immediately after the presidential election, 300 residents of Jackson Heights gathered in a small pedestrian plaza, braced themselves against a biting wind and swore undying allegiance to each other.

If the new president wanted to deport undocumented immigrants, then Jackson Heights would give them sanctuary. If Muslims were ordered to place their names on a registry, then every Christian, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, Sikh and atheist in Jackson Heights would register too.

They were well-meaning and sincere gestures, but I wasn’t sure they were what this hardscrabble community needed. The most vulnerable of my neighbors had more immediate concerns: paying the rent, putting food on the table, saving enough money to buy a modest coat for the coming winter.

At least, that was my current working theory as a hyperlocal journalist. Then again, before the election, I thought my neighbors worried (or at least wondered) about the New York DREAM Act and the upstate political machine. The truth is, I had no grip on what the people of Jackson Heights wanted or needed. I never asked. I only assumed to know the answer.

What was missing from my data analysis and astute but aloof observations was empathy. And not just regular empathy, where I share my neighbors’ fears of deportation, and then go home to my comfortable apartment, swaddle myself in the US Constitution, and give thanks that the farthest I could ever be deported would be back to my native Brooklyn.

What was missing was that heavy-duty, Zen-like, design-thinking kind of empathy. Heather Chapman, an assistant professor of journalism at The New School and author of Guide to Journalism and Design, described it as “listening with humility”:

a kind of listening that puts aside what you’re expecting to hear, hoping to hear, or fearing to hear…

[T]his approach is in fact a powerful way of going beyond one’s subjective experience, closer to reality as it actually is …

[I]t helps us hear both what is said and what is not said.

For me to truly, humbly listen to what my community wanted, I had to strip away the greatest barrier between us: my ego. It meant surrendering to the reality that I knew nothing, but not in a deflated way. In fact, the more I accepted it the lighter I felt. No longer did I have to stack one layer of speculative bullshit on top of another, or worry about that wall of bullshit collapsing on me.

Furthermore, it meant that I was no longer alone in this journalistic endeavor. Empathy would spread the responsibility of identifying and (hopefully) solving a problem among the members of my community. It would give my neighbors agency in how they lived their lives. That was all I ever wanted for them anyway.

So I sent out a call on Facebook.