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Road to Cohousing: People over Things

On the road to a future in cohousing, I have been on a dizzying journey: just this month, I moved to an in-town condo, and in so doing I have literally shed over half of my square footage and three-quarters of my family's accumulated material. Not that downsizing is so unusual: cross-country job hunters, house-poor retirees, the newly divorced, medical crisis survivors, and seniors face these kind of downsizing projects in great numbers, so often under duress. What may make me unusual is having embraced this pain before it was necessary. The upside? It feels better to go through the ordeal with some sense of personal choice, purpose, and control.

Redfin-sign

Why is downsizing so brutally hard? Beyond the immense physical drain of the effort, downsizing has crushing emotional and spiritual heaviness if it lacks empowering framing. Unless downsizing is the door to your vital future, it will be experienced as an agonizing series of losses (that was the kids' favorite TV chair; that huge Christmas tree was my dream). This is why we should be compassionate with our elders who fight relocation with what looks like irrational ferocity. "But I need you to be safe" rings hollow if it seems to come at the cost of everything she knows, relies on, and treasures, her comforts and very identity. The only way to reach peace is for her to see a vital future worth the change.

How I found my vital future, I realize now, was to define it in terms of cohousing, of moving into intentional, supportive community. I came to see that all-eggs-in-one-basket dependence on the nuclear family for emotional well-being perhaps works for some folks at some times, but it seems a poor strategy for the post-empty-nest phase of life, where households shrink and change and employment wanes. Space opens up in this phase of life, but our old suburban environment (which has ample busywork in the form of constant upkeep) lacks an organic means to infuse daily life with revitalizing and nurturing activity. Like a butterfly, we need to dissolve and rebuild ourselves to master what's next. Downsizing is our chrysalis.

Cohousing — short-hand for living in intentional community and sharing common spaces — has, at its core, the secret to downsizing: placing people ahead of things.

Things. During the nesting and chick-raising years, we become intensely thing-focused: rooms for kids; yards for pets; cars for errands; patio for parties; storage for decorations; upgrades for property value. Tremendous focus, time, and treasure goes into crafting our living space and all of its comforts and entertainments, all toward an imagined future in which we'll slow down enough to actually enjoy them. What we miss in that is the understanding that it comes down to Enjoy them with who, right now? Waiting around for grown children to visit relegates the bulk of life to gray in-between time, for many of us. And home improvement and maintenance, which we once met with ambition, now is left a tiring ritual detached from its prior urgency. Many punctuate these days with travel, but that can be largely a mechanism to flee the gray and fill the time. This heaviness is not a sign of a problem but of it being time to change. 

People. Cohousing is designed to encourage deepening of the community that calls it home. Like a retreat center, most cohousing prioritizes a central common space for people, to serve the needs of the group: a commercial kitchen, expansive dining/meeting room large enough for all, shared laundry and workshop/toolshed, yoga/exercise facility, guest rooms/suites, living/library room, art/craft space, community garden, car-sharing, and shared greens/playgrounds. The design encourages members to naturally spend ample time together in the community space and shared meals, so that private apartments can be smaller and simpler. Higher density is not only more cost-effective, but it facilitates easy interaction and connection, which is the heart of our vital future.

In the end, all of the things we worked so hard to buy were ultimately to be about enjoying ourselves with others we care for. When we firmly put people ahead of things (as I remember Suze Orman teaching in her financial training), we begin to correct our course. We see how our choices have become constrained by the needs of our stuff (cue George Carlin here), which is really backwards. We see how chasing security made us put our trust in things and neglect interdependence and community.

The problem is not finding practical help with downsizing strategy (you've doubtless heard of the delightful Marie Kondo and the book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, for example); the problem, I think, is deeper: how to want to downsize. That's where the vital future comes in: when we see living differently, living in community, as the longing of our future self, we can understand excessive things as being the barrier to that journey. We want to release whatever doesn't support us getting to that new home, which won't have space to house the museum of everything we've used and loved. Like the monkey who is stuck with an arm in the vase because he refuses to let go of any of the things he's grasping in his paw, we have to see that letting go of objects is the very means by which we can break free and get to a better place. 

And it is a better place. My new condo community has lots of retirees and single women like me, and every dog walk or trip to the mail can be an hour of happy greeting and getting acquainted. Just by eating my sandwich in the courtyard by the pool, I am easily approached by neighbors hoping to meet me or share some advice. There is comfort and belonging in this condo of a 100 households, where I already know more people than I ever did in the suburbs; how much richer and deeper will it be when there are only 20, and we share so much more?

May 13, 2019 in Cohousing, Homestead | Permalink | Comments (0)

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So, why cohousing?

Now that I'm a member of a cohousing community in development (Ralston Creek Cohousing), folks are asking how I got into it. Truth is, I've been intrigued with the concept of cohousing long before I ever heard the term. Here's where my ideas came from, best I can remember:

  • As a tween, I watched The Waltons and noodled about how smart and supportive their multi-generational common house was; the older folks were able to contribute and also have the support they needed, the parents had many helping hands, and the children had the security of more adults to rely on. Living in an extended family seemed far more balanced than the nuclear family models all around me, which tended to result in too much responsibility being carried by the mother.
  • As a teenager, I read In This House of Brede (see Diana Rigg's great performance), and I was deeply moved by Phillipa's letting go of her glamorous professional life and dreamy apartment in order to join the deep sisterhood of a cloistered Benedictine community. I seriously considered becoming a Franciscan sister.
  • I commuted far to college and was socially isolated, but I stayed in graduate housing at UT Austin for my master's degree. Living with other graduate students from all over the country and the world, I learned how suite-style living with shared common spaces made for easy and ample companionship, and the shared meals in the dining hall were a wonderful way to enjoy that diversity of people. I was aware that it worked so well because we were all graduate students, so we shared a lot of traits (such as introversion), values, and interests. We were a tribe.
  • When I joined my first software startup company, several of the founders shared a large house, and several of the single programmers lived there as well. I envied the easy, fun lifestyle they shared. And the longer I worked in software shops, the more I realized that I enjoyed them because of the type of people who tended to work there, much like graduate school, and wouldn't it be nice to extend that environment outside of work hours? to live with your tribe?
  • I reconnected with an old coworker who, depressed, had quit his job and traveled broadly. Seeing him years later, I found him greatly transformed, and I learned that he had been living communally in the local Zen center for over a year. I was amazed at the benefits he'd gotten from Buddhism and from living intentionally. I wanted what he had.

About that time, cohousing surfaced. An email search reveals that I first mentioned "cohousing" eight years ago, hoping to interest my folks: "I found out about cohousing.org from a brilliant scientist whose blog I admire: http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2010/05/odds-of-cooking-grandkids.html". Now I knew what to look for, but it was several years before my own path got serious. Then life happened: I divorced and empty-nested in the same year, so I stepped up my search for new intentional ways to live.

I started seeing and sharing articles about cohousing in Scandinavia, and I signed up for newsletters for cohousing.org and ic.org (Fellowship for Intentional Community). It was there that I learned about a Cohousing Association regional conference being held in Boulder, Colorado. Wanting the excuse to visit family in Colorado and wanting to tour and test my notions against actual cohousing communities, I splurged and attended the conference. Definitely worth it!

While in Colorado, I stayed at my brother's brand new house in a net-zero (carbon-free) development just south of Boulder, called the Geos Neighborhood. I learned that Geos had space allotted for a future condo-style cohousing unit, called The Gatehouse, just down the street from him! The community is still in the forming stage, so I joined to get in before all of the apartments were spoken for.

At the same time, I joined every cohousing and co-op group that I could find here in Austin. Sadly, those who have been working in this area for years tell me that Austin is actually one of the hardest cities in which to develop cohousing, due to the nature of its zoning codes. Just as disappointing, the CodeNEXT initiative that would have addressed this has just been torpedoed. However, there are multiple groups that are working on housing innovation, and I'm eagerly attending and supporting all that I can:

  • AustinUP, a community alliance, austinup.org (I just today attended their 2018 ATX Aging & Innovation Summit)
  • Aging2.0, Austin chapter: aging2.com/austin
  • Shared Equity Co-op, an informal group formed by co-op veterans who are seeking to develop new co-op properties for non-students
  • Armadillo Cohousing, a group that's in the early form-up stage

I'm very excited about the growing energy around making cohousing work in the United States, for more than just well-heeled retirees (although they deserve credit for driving this forward, as they look for alternatives to the sad senior housing experiences of their parents). I hope to contribute what I can to its success, as well as enjoy the experience of it! Anyone else?

 

November 28, 2018 in Cohousing, Homestead | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Digitizing and publishing photo albums

For my folks' Golden Anniversary, I completed a project that had been on my mind and heart for years: to digitize and publish their many wonderful photo albums, preserving the photo arrangements and the typed and handwritten commentary that my mother added to the pages. Adding to my sense of urgency was knowledge that flooding had damaged those albums, and mildew was taking its toll. The sooner I acted, the better.

Here is the process that worked for me, in case it benefits others who are facing a similar challenge:

  1. Photograph each page of each album.
    • I used my Panasonic Lumix, fixed to a tripod and rotated to face the floor. I worked in indirect morning light, no flash, with Macro focus enabled and maximum resolution.
    • I stacked up hardback books underneath the shooting area to position the pages optimally.
    • I pulled off plastic covers and used the tripod crank to zoom down to the page area.
    • Important: Avoid breathing mildew! Gently remove mildew with a baby wipe and let dry.
  2. Copy off files and back up to thumb drives.
    • After each album was finished, I popped out the SD card, put it in a USB card reader, and transferred the files to my laptop, removing them from the SD card (to avoid confusion).
    • The autonumbering of the photos ensured the correct ordering.
    • I named the folder according to the date range (e.g, 1969-1979) and backed it up to two 16GB thumb drives.
  3. Process photos (rotate, crop, correct).
    • In Picasa, I used the Picture > Batch Edit options to rotate and autocorrect (I'm Feeling Lucky) all the images, which worked well.
    • I opened each picture and applied Crop > Letter Size to clean up the images and ensure that they all had the correct aspect ratio for publishing.
  4. Set up Word files to lay out the photos for publication.
    • Create a letter-sized Word document with minimum margins (0.25-in all sides).
    • Zoom out the Page view as much as possible (I was able to get down to 14%), which lets you manipulate the embedded photos as thumbnails.
    • In the folder with your album JPGs, create a folder called \Added, to help you track progress.
    • Add the first photo by dragging it into Word from File Explorer.
    • Select the picture and click the Picture Tools: Format tab.
    • Select Compress Pictures, Options..., and select Print output. This default will apply to all.
  5. Populate the Word files with the photos.
    • In File Explorer, open a specific album folder and multiselect a set of 20 JPGs (your mileage may vary).
    • Drag them into the Word file (which resized them to fit the margins, by default).
    • While the files are still selected, drag them into the folder \Added.
    • Rinse and repeat for remaining sets of photos to go in album file, always allowing Word time to complete its Save before adding more.
  6. Generate PDFs.
    • Verify that the pages are in the order you want.
    • Add a title page or additional commentary, as needed.
    • Select File > Save As > PDF.
    • Verify the PDF options and generate the PDF. In my experience, the hugely compressed PDF files still had terrific photo quality.
  7. Upload PDFs to Lulu book project.
    • Log into Lulu.com and create a new book project. I selected a letter-sized hardback with color pages.
    • Upload each PDF in the order you want them to appear in the book.
    • Use the wizard to design the covers and spine, and publish the project.
    • Don't forget to check your email: Lulu sends you a coupon toward your first copy.

My book is in production right now; hardbacks take longer, so plan in extra time. Let me know if you want more information about any of these production methods. Hope they help!

July 02, 2011 in Homestead, Technical Writing, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

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New photo location: Picasa

Ah, I'm such a Google junkie! the mail, calendar, doc/spreadsheet, and now the Picasa apps have me giddy. Here's where the new photos are posted:

Family photo albums

January 02, 2007 in Homestead | Permalink | Comments (1)

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