The topic of the End of Men was hit upon by Hanna Rosin, first appeared as an article in the Atlantic in 2010 and then later a book.  It delves into the the phenomena taking place whereby women are quickly rising to the top while men are falling behind in the world of work, higher education and life in general.  The End of Men asks if the increasing dominance of women as degree earners and the new workforce majority is actually indicative of something far greater than feminist goals of women’s rights and equality.  In a postindustrial age,  it asks if women are plain and simply better suited to the new realities of the world we now live in?   Described as an ‘unprecedented role reversal’, the cultural implications of this change up are impressive and as our conversation proved, already evidenced at home, in the family, our schools, on the street and increasingly at play in the office.

One key area identified as ‘end of men’ problematic is the fear of the feminine that exists within the masculine and how its confusing for many men to come to terms with.  It was commented on as contributing to the difficulties many have accepting and dealing with their emotions and vulnerability in healthy and accepting ways.

There were also strong feelings that the traditional values we continue to raise boys with just aren’t preparing them properly for the realities of work and life in this era of subtle vs rigid rules and rapid blurring change. Given the state of things, many felt its no wonder men are struggling and being eclipsed by women.   And in the end, it was suggested that maybe, just maybe, the archetypal death of men isn’t a bad thing.  In fact, this ‘end’ may be exactly what society needs to finally break free of the restrictive limitations we hold of each other.  With the end of one way, the opportunity for a new emerges and this is a chance to take past attempts at progress to new heights of individual opportunity to achieve a greater balance of yin and yang within us all.

A multi-faceted and complex topic that surprisingly, didn’t spark denial of the demise of men.  Instead those present jumped straight to an acceptance of it with a strong sense of support and momentum already underway in new and more progressive directions.  A redefinition of what it means to be a man, a woman and plain and simply a human being was already underway in this group of sparking conversationalists.

A Series look into the coming of age story of a city on the cusp of something big.

There’s an attitude in the air that’s burning a hole in this city and it goes a little something like this;  “Toronto is not a city for the world’s starry-eyed dreamers.  It’s one resigned to the demands of practicality”.  Stated in a goodbye letter to the city, author Michelle Dean explains her reasons for rejecting our more fair than fine city as a place contented with a lackluster and passionless existence.  Devoid of the drive and desire to make something more of itself, Toronto is cited as not only lacking in great expectation, it suffers from a historic inability to even inspire it.  Harsh words and ones that, despite having been written over a year ago now, October 7. 2011 in Toronto Life to be precise, still hang heavy, never having been fully addressed.   So, although a little late in coming, its time we set the record straight and put a stop to the negative persona our city’s taken on and clarify what seems to be going amiss for so many.

Why is it for example, that cities like New York and many lesser known outposts are happy to toot their own horn but we Torontonians can’t muster up enough city-pride to get even the tiniest bit excited about ourselves?   A sports team here or there, and the odd festival or parade sure but our city itself – not so much and far too often Ms. Dean’s words are left to ring true.  Are we truly the passionless, ambition lacking, Rob Ford loving city so many believe us to be?  And if so, why on earth are more of us not protesting this loathsome fate?  Truth be told, our lack of protest lends weight to the conclusions drawn against us but not all is done and said for, there is still far more to our story then this and it’s a story we owe to ourselves to get straight.

What we stand for, our identity and your association to it matters.  How we feel and act towards our city has the power to impact the place we live for good or bad and works to shape our future fate as either the place of our dreams or just another forgettable place on the road to somewhere else. The answers to the questions Ms. Dean’s letter raise are what this series of city soul searching, identity defining, truth telling and future envisioning is all about.  Stick with us, it likely to be a bumpy but well worthwhile ride!

Part II follows here.

Counter-intuitive sounding and down right wrong in feeling, my ego hates crossing over to what feels like enemy lines. Holding onto righteous pride, oh how I delight in digging my fingers deep into you to cut you as you so cut at me all those years ago. I have always needed to be more right than you but this flawed attempt to prove myself beyond reprieve has failed in proving you more wrong than me. And yet I still hold tight to try to chock you into confession all the while its I who suffers and suffocates at my own ringing of your neck.

A stubborn refusal in me doesn’t want to let go no matter how little air it leaves me. Waiting, waiting for you to be tried and found guilty of my undeserving in all of this. Damn if my ego doesn’t want to open itself up and expose me for who I too truly am, flawed especially before you my befriended enemy of all these years. We’ve remained locked in this standoff a lifetime now and until one of us budges nothing will change, I’ll only grow weaker for lack of air.

Only now that you’ve gone and died, the first step lies with me here above the grave. So I ask your help to forgive and be forgiven pain and all, oh please brother and mother of mine. Its the only way out of the tyranny of relentless perfection pursued. The justice I seek with never take place in a court of law on this earth or heaven above as it was never truly about me, it was always about you and yours but that little me couldn’t tell the two apart. The me I now am no longer has any excuse to hide behind.

Asking your forgiveness is at first a tearing defeat to my perceptions, a seemingly weak and passive surrendering an enemy that deserves no mercy. There is however a part deep inside that now grows and surrenders to humility and our begrudgingly shared humanity. There is a humbling that must take place as I leave my perch from high in this tower I’ve built above you. My created hierarchy is crushed, and I now let if fall and collapse to the ground as ash all around me. I capitulate healthily.

Neither of us has won dear brother, dear mother.  All we can now do is seek and ask to be free of a past that keeps from our own being and life itself.  Forgive me.

Sound hokey, maybe but look around and consider for a moment if you haven’t experienced the  same sense of profound respect and humanness towards other perfect-city-sharing-strangers.  There’s a feeling of unity that can be felt, tapped into and used to fuel us when the values and beliefs of our diversity kick in.  They’re the energy and aliveness we’re looking for, talking about, and trying to find elsewhere.  The trick is, we were expecting them to look and feel like something else, like some other city experience but comparisons will never provide the sense of ‘us’ that we as a city and collective just ‘are’.  We need to get used to this feeling of us and sink into it with greater acceptance and more willingness to work with it.  In the ways it still squeezes too tight and doesn’t suit us, its up to us to put our collective heads together and harness the power of our diversity, creativity and innovation to come up with a means of fitting it to size.

The sum of these separate pieces represent the true aspects of who and what we as a city are; our newness, clean slated-ness, possibility, humanity, openness, diversity…  Who we are becoming is a product of all these pieces coming together under the right conditions.  We ARE a social experiment in progress with the sky as its limit and when I’m on that dance floor, I can see it, feel it and attest to the fact that our collective spirit has the  power to spur us forward in amazing and potential filling ways.  Moving this phenomena off the dance floor onto the city stage requires a replication of conditions, namely the recreation of salsa’s animating force, the support and structure of open, inspiring and accessible space, the backing and presence of values based leadership, a diverse and enthusiastic collection of participants and the soul feeding fuel of connection, meaning and enjoyment in what’s taking place.

Recreate the model of salsa, one first created on the floor of the Toronto Salsa Practice, and what you’ve got is an exciting means by which to create and connect communities, diffuse and build upon our emerging values, develop an identifiable culture, harness our innovative capacity and build a creative city as well as a robust fusion economy.  Those who’ve already begun to embrace models of social innovation are an embodiment of this Toronto in development.  Maybe Michelle Dean, the author of the letter that first sparked this series didn’t tap into our emerging spirit but I hope the rest of us will.  We need to see ourselves and our potential for what it is and allow our hearts and souls to be moved to the point of passion for what’s taking place.  So forget New York, we’ve our own Toronto to make.

The next piece in this series will take a look at how best to mix these city making and culture creating ingredients together, the model mentioned above, to bake ourselves up one heck of a city.

Without our humanness firmly in tact, what’s left to separate us from them?  Almost no one picks up the phone any more, mobiles have become near permanent extensions of our arms, most all communication between real live humans has been reduced to virtual text of one form or another and we’re so plugged in to our headphones, iphones, ipads, that we barely look up to take note of  another human being when one does happen to cross our path.  Most move about in machines, work in boxes and star at screens all day which leaves little room for the natural world to have much sway.  Its as though we’ve tipped the balance in favour of the virtual, make believe and manufactured world over the real one that lives, breathes and feels human emotions and drives us to act from a place of sensed awareness, not just via mechanical interfacing and virtual smiley faces.  Consider for a moment just what that says about us and where we’re headed.

Technology saves us some time and convenience but at what cost?  At the human cost of connection, human contact, touch, feel, association, relationship, real socialization, interaction, internal growth and evolutionary soul based development.  We’re stunting ourselves, staying frozen in a land locked space of too much safety and not enough closeness.  We can reach around the globe via technology in and connect to a hundred people instantly but we no longer connect to those right before us in real and meaningful ways which is leaving many more alone and isolated than ever before.  What can be transmitted by a screen will never fully compare to the real life communications needed by our by  heart, soul and physical body.  Technology is a tool, it was never meant to become our everything and we need to consider whether we’re allowing our it to run us or do we wish to remain the master of our own domain.

Bottom line is we need each other, in the flesh, real and perfectly imperfect.  No spell check, no auto correct, no photoshop touchups or video game distortions, just real human to human being.   There is no equivalent substitute no matter how masterful technology may be or how much much easier it may seem to be free of all pain and sadness like a machine.  Without each other and all the joy and hardship that goes along with our feeling, heart bleeding, stomach churning, and tear jerking humanity, we’d just be another hunk of cold parts without the full experience of living in the real world.  There’s no way around it, we’re social beings and are meant to interact in real and meaningful ways.  Our most fundamental needs of esteem, friendship, love, security, and physicality go grossly unmet otherwise.  Ask Maslow, he’ll vouch for this, and the consequences are there to be seen in our lessening humanity towards one another as well as ourselves and the natural world we live and depend upon.  The quality of your day to day experience in this city like any other is grossly affected by just how tightly we hold on to our value of real human experience. Give it up for a life lived via social media platforms, apps instead of going through the motions and ear plugs instead of your senses awake to what’s right before you, and real life will pass you by before you know it and there’s no rewind or play back for that.

So put down your phone, I’m getting off this lap top, pull out your earphones and look up and into the eyes of another human being and see what you’re missing.  In their eyes you exist and as in yours do they. Hold onto your humanity, your civility and that deep seated desire that spurs you on to connect and disconnect, seek out, suffer and enjoy, develop and grow with your fellow man in ways that no virtuosity could possibly replace. Its an evolutionary journey that needs to happen from the inside out and one that requires a need for each other and the natural world.  There’s nothing bad about that, its just a fact and one that thankfully separates us from the robots in ways that are far more mysterious, magical and awe inspiring than any machine could possibly calculate. No need to give technology up, but like your mind decide to be its master and not its slave.

Just then, in the midst of jumping to all sorts of awful conclusions, the biker to my right turned to me and kindly said, “beautify night for a ride isn’t it!”.  No hey baby, wanna race, insults or intimidating threatening of any sort, just a friendly exchange from one two wheeled rider to another, appearances be damned.  My initial reaction couldn’t have been further from the truth; this was no biker gang, it was just four friends on big bikes out for a night’s ride enjoying the early spring weather.  Like many a casual conversation in the city, they wanted nothing more than to engage in friendly biker banter and satisfy their curiosities about the little contraption I was riding.

Now while not all casual conversations need involve anything to do with a bike, not a bad ice breaker mind you but the point is, appearances can be deceiving and what could have been just any ordinary ride home turned into an extra special one that I won’t be forgetting any time soon.  While it was a fleeting exchange, what it did create was a positive interaction and connection where none previously existed and wouldn’t have if  one of the two people involved hadn’t mustered the nerve to turn to a stranger, open their mouth, defy perceptions and say a few few simple words.  Nothing grand, just natural and simple in delivery and highly effective as such in its ability to garner a similar response from me, like it would I believe from most others.

You don’t need to dawn leather chaps or ride a Harley to have the kind of confidence it takes to break the ice and share a few words with a stranger.  There are so many similar opportunities to meet someone in this city and nothing truly valid keeping you from doing so.  All you have to do is pull those disconnecting headphones from your ears, put your prejudices aside, forget your insecurities for a moment and plug into what’s right before you before it passes by.  It really doesn’t take much more than that, just being awake to the opportunities constantly presenting themselves to engage with another fellow human and co-inhabitant of this city.  If its not welcome, oh well, at least you tried and let the grouchy response be on them.  Not all will welcome a friendly exchange but some will and the more we stand up for such acts of engagement, the better off we’ll all be.

Respecting each other’s space in such close urban proximity is a valid reason to want distance from those riding the rails squished next to you at rush hour, but we are actually all in this together whether we like it or not so might as well make the ride a more pleasant one in the ways possible.  Constant chit chat or intrusive banter isn’t what’s being proposed here, instead its about the little ways a city becomes a community, becomes a place you call home and find yourself engaging, getting to truly know the place and care.  A city disconnect and afraid of its fellow citizens is one highly vulnerable to easily breaking apart. One strike of the hammer and the ties that bind it are so frail it shatters into a thousand pieces taking us all with it. One that is open to and continues to feed its connections and community in even the simplest of friendly ways strengthens its foundation and feeds its soul which in the end renders it stronger and a far more livable place over the long run, for each and every one of us.  So here’s to acting with the awareness that each of us has the power to affect the feel on the street with just one smile, just one friendly word exchanged.  Where might your next exchange be?

Far too long considered a frivolous indulgence, a non-necessity by societal standards, we’ve undermined and diminished artistry to the point of scarcity, crippling it almost completely.  Blind to the attributes that lay right before us in the places it still manages to survive, we’re searching in all the wrong places for answers to how to inspire more innovation, how to spark more enthusiasm for who and what we are as a city and how to get the enviable aliveness that lights life up on the streets of other cities?  The answer – art and artistic/creative expression in whatever form it may be, indulged in, valued and reintegrated into as many aspects of our modern world and personal lives as possible.

When you do so, you can’t help but begin to interact with the world around you differently, respect for the natural environment changes, things take on a different shade of brighter grey and connections between people shift in positive ways.  Its not just a side effect of sniffing too much paint, art and creativity have the ability to slow us down, notice what we’re otherwise too busy to see and give us the breathing space to take in and appreciate what’s right before our very eyes.  Its in this space of greater stillness that the sparks of possibility, innovation, ingenuity and inspiration take place.  As such, the ability that creativity has to dig deeper, reveal truth, unravel or inspire chaos, move us and force us beyond our current boundaries into something far more that what we imagined we could possibly be, is critical to our evolution, our development, cohesion and sense of self as a city in process.  No matter what the marketing, without the substance that art fosters and helps sustain, we’re just another urban space trying to be something we’re  not.. at least not yet.

From the public spaces we create to the artistic activities we engage in, art is a life line feeding our collective sense of identity. Without it, a shared vision of who and what we want to be as a city becomes a struggle when it could be a masterpiece in progress.  On top of that, its a process we all have the unique ability to take a paint stroke at.

the interesting thing about not being able to see clearly is it forces us to feel your way around and engage all those other 5 senses we don’t normally use to get around the city.  It challenges our ability to wiz by and take for granted what is otherwise just  backdrop to our commute.  There a hidden opportunity in this, a chance if taken up to allow ourselves and what’s around us to come alive in different ways and be seen as if for the first time, all over again.

Close your eyes quickly, the fog is lifting and there remains only minutes to truly experience the covered over beauty of the city.

Having dropped by to check them out, we’d say the Academy of the Impossible is a new one stop shop meets community forum for lofty ideas, new age creatives, the innovatively inclined and the digitally oriented.  This is a place that exists in the space of the cutting edge new and about to break revolutionary.  They’re open, interactive, more interested in their content and offerings than their egos (first impressions good) and sincerely interested in dispersing know how and gathering others around what grabs them to begin to create a whole new kind of community of boundary pushers in the city.

It may be more high tech/multi-media oriented in content than it is in do good social innovation or urban betterment but we like where they’re headed all the same and will keep a hopeful eye on their progression.   The genuine interest and exploration of the (im)possible presents a real opportunity for revolutionary forward thinking and boundary pushing approaches to take root in the city or find greater refuge in the least.  Only time will tell if they stay true to their initial calling and remain grounded and genuinely engaged in matters close to their heart.  As noted before, passion counts and these guys exude it with subtle enthusiasm the comes across as know-how and wanna-get- to-bottom-of-it curiosity.   Thus far they’re off to a great start; resisting the marketing over content trap of  trend chasing and tag lining in favour of pursuing what truly moves them, all the while open enough to invite others along for the ride of new world shaping and city scaping.

Our rating  - Academy of the Impossible = Old City Breaker and New City Maker.