a model is born

I was sitting in a cafe in Havana, reading The Botany of Desire, taking a break from the bustling activity in my in-laws homes, when the idea for my wellbeing model came to me. It arrived in it’s current shape. So clear. I still have the tiny note paper where I first jotted it down–a Venn Diagram of Material Security, Relationship and Flow, with Meaning as the terrain, the environment where they flourish, or not.

The idea that sprung forth was no immaculate conception. Something about fruit, born of the flower, nourished not just by the sun and the rain but also–and this is critical–by the nutrients drawn up by roots, extending deeply, subterranean, drawing in the remains of predecessors. We are nourished by the sun and the rain and the compost of what has come before. We live through this integration. Life that dares not drawn on what has fallen before may grow, but it cannot flourish.

And this idea, the model, “my” model, was amply nourished.

It must’ve been the summer of 2007. I had just finished the first year of my PhD, and my then-husband and I were visiting my in-laws on a trip timed to coincide with the branch of the family living in Italy. Italy, where the national August holidays shape the rhythms of life, rest and travel. 

By chance, I had heard Jonathan Haidt interviewed on CBC radio about his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, the previous summer. It was so compelling that I bought it immediately, while it was still only available in the oh-so-costly hard copy version. And, on reading, I became so intrigued that, on the eve of a PhD with a planned focus on the comparative impact of radical national agrarian policy on the food security of so-called second world populations, I was drawn to explore positive psychology and the burgeoning science of wellbeing.

A candidate in an interdisciplinary PhD program that called on students without a doctorate to design their own doctoral program (yes, that is at once as liberating and terrifying as it sounds), when I sat in that café in Havana, I had just completed my year of coursework and designed my program. For my first comprehensive, I would look at how a wellbeing approach to social policy resolves what International Development Studies never could, because it moves towards what works rather than away from what does not.

And this idea, the model, “my” model, drew on my understanding of the failures of purportedly well-intentioned, western, white saviour approaches to “development.” An understanding I’d sharpened in my undergraduate thesis contrasting the horrors of an exogenous “Green Revolution” agricultural policy in the Punjab with the remarkable efficacy of the endogenous Low Input Sustainable Agricultural (LISA) Revolution in Cuba during the “Special Period” in the early 1990s. An understanding deepened through my participation in rural Cuban work brigades, an internship at the teaching farm for Havana’s significant Urban Agriculture in the early 2000s, and a Master’s thesis on Cuban Food Policy.

I had become enamoured with Cuban Food Policy when I learned that, though the average daily decrease in caloric in Cuba during the “Special Period” was greater than the average decrease in Ethiopia during the infamous famine in the 1980s, in Cuba no one experienced starvation, no one died. They distributed the scarce resources according to need. The case of Cuba demonstrated that, when political will is present, even in the worst of times, suffering can be mitigated. As someone who had grown up experiencing cyclical food insecurity at the end of every month, the case of Cuba was a beacon of hope, a pathway to the possible.

In my BAH and MA research, I was drawn to the work of Indian-born economist, Amartya Sen, on Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation (1982). In Poverty and Famines, Sen demonstrates conclusively that famines in the modern world are political choices, not natural disasters. Indeed, in every case, regions experiencing so-called famine were, in fact, net exporters of foodstuff. As I approached this pivot in my PhD, I was again called to the Nobel Laureate’s work–Development as Freedom (1999), a work where he critiques GDP based assessments and, instead, advances the Capabilities Approach. He notes, “human capital tends to concentrate on the agency of human beings in augmenting production possibilities. The perspective of human capability, on the other hand, on the ability–the substantive freedom–of people to lead the lives they have reason to value and to enhance the real choices they have.” (pg 293)

It is this current, the understanding of the importance of endogenous motivations as in my undergraduate thesis and of the objective of improving substantive freedoms, that nourishes and informs the wellbeing model that sprung forth in my mind that day in that cafe in Havana. The model that shaped my doctoral research project. The model that gave rise to my last business, Flourish Wellbeing Sass. The model that nurtures all of the work at flourish.energy

Over the years, the model has evolved along side me, tested through research, peer-review, practice and the lives of the many people and organizations I’ve worked with. What began as a quick sketch of three intersecting circles has become a living framework for how we root, rise and renew. 

When we attend to, and integrate, the lessons in all domains, we flourish sustainably, lead in alignment, and nurture without burning out. This is flourish.energy