A Winter Reflection on Ghosts, Doubles, and the Self

by | Dec 12, 2025 | book review, Film Review, Geographical Imaginations, Potpourri

Every December, literature seems to return—almost ritually—to the scene of a man encountering himself. Perhaps this is why so many of us begin the season with Dickens. His tale of a cold-hearted clerk startled into self-recognition by the ghosts of Christmas past and future has long made the holiday into a time for temporal disturbance, when the boundaries between then and now, self and shadow, grow permeable. Scrooge’s journeys are encounters not with spirits alone but with the versions of himself he once was and the versions he fears becoming. Few stories remind us so strongly that one lifetime can contain multiple selves.

But once you open the door Dickens built, other visitors begin arriving.

A solitary bureaucrat in nineteenth-century Russia, for instance, finds himself haunted by a man who looks exactly like him, though more confident, more capable—a double who seems intent on rewriting his life. In another century and another city, a young aristocrat discovers that a second self shadows him everywhere, whispering warnings he refuses to heed. These doubles do not come wrapped in chains or dressed in Dickensian robes; they come instead as rivals, consciences, or inescapable mirrors.

Elsewhere, in the misty borderlands of German Romanticism, travelers report glimpsing their likenesses at dusk—uncanny figures who step out of dreams or reflections, as if the world briefly permits a rift in identity. And in the pages of early modernist fiction, men begin to suspect that they are composed of more selves than they can recognize, their identities scattered like fragments of glass.

Still further along the literary path, time itself loosens. A war-shaken man becomes unstuck from chronology, slipping from childhood to old age and back again, meeting himself in flashes like a traveler glimpsing his own cabin window from the train. Philosophers and novelists stage debates within the self: one man discovers that he exists differently in the mind of every person he meets, while another journeys inward to find that his “double” is less an intruder than an intimate companion.

Yet no author orchestrates this chorus of selves as quietly—or as astonishingly—as the one who waits at the center of this winter constellation.

On a bench beside a river, an elderly man meets a young stranger who turns out to be himself. Each believes he sits in a different city, a different year; each is certain of his own reality. Their conversation is gentle, speculative, edged with melancholy. One speaks from experience, the other from expectation. Neither can fully convince the other of the world he inhabits. What they share, tenuously, is the idea that identity might stretch across time like a bridge dreamed into being, holding two versions of the same life in momentary equilibrium.

When they part, neither is sure what has happened. Perhaps it was a dream. Perhaps it was memory. Perhaps, as so many winter tales suggest, the season itself allows encounters that ordinary chronology forbids.

And returning to Dickens, one begins to realize: the ghosts he invented are but one form of a much older visitation. Literature is full of these meetings—with doubles, with shadows, with earlier or later selves—each offering a chance to consider what it means to change, or to remain, or simply to be.

A story read in December reminds us: we are never entirely alone. Somewhere, the self we once were is waiting on a bench by a river. Somewhere else, the self we might yet become is pausing, turning, listening.

Reading List: Ghosts, Doubles, and the Many Selves

Charles Dickens — A Christmas Carol (1843)

Fyodor Dostoevsky — The Double (1846)

Edgar Allan Poe — “William Wilson” (1839)

E.T.A. Hoffmann — “The Doppelgänger” / “The Doubles” (early 19th century)

Kurt Vonnegut — Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Luigi Pirandello — One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (1926)

Hermann Hesse — Steppenwolf (1927)

Jorge Luis Borges — “The Other” (1972)

Jorge Luis Borges — “Borges and I” (1960)

Jorge Luis Borges — “The Other Death” (1949)

Italo Calvino — If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979)

Leading by Listening: Rhythm, Energy, and Positive Leadership

by | Nov 10, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Mapping, Pedagogy, Public Geography, Rhythmanalysis

There are days when leadership feels like a rush of motion — emails, calendars, demands, decisions. The pace accelerates, and we move with it. But beneath the surface of all this activity, there is always a quieter layer: a rhythm.

My recent Positive Leadership course at the University for Peace (UPEACE) helped me remember how to recognize it.

Leadership begins not with a plan, or a metric, or even a vision — but with presence.

The course invited me to listen again underneath the noise of tasks and timelines — to notice the rhythms that shape how we lead and live. We often imagine leadership as direction: setting goals, driving momentum, managing outcomes. But positive leadership asks a subtler question:

What energy do we bring into the systems we inhabit?

That shift — from managing performance to managing presence — reframed leadership for me. It is less about control than about rhythm:  the ebb and flow of awareness, connection, and meaning through time.

Listening for Rhythm

Henri Lefebvre, in his Rhythmanalysis, wrote that every space carries its own pulse — its repetitions and variations, its silences and surges. The city breathes through its traffic and stillness; the body through its circadian tides.

Positive leadership, seen through this lens, becomes a kind of rhythmanalysis — a discipline of attention. It calls us to attune to the living tempos of our work and relationships, to sense when we are in harmony and when we have fallen out of tune.

The course began with this act of listening. We mapped our values, charted our daily energy, and reflected on what gives us vitality and what drains it. Through Simon Sinek’s Start with Why, we traced the pulse of purpose within our professional lives.

Meaning is not an abstraction — it is what sustains motion over time.

When I began mapping my own day, I saw patterns I had ignored: the quiet hours when creativity peaks, the lulls that invite rest, the shifts between solitude and connection.

As one fellow student put it:

“Positive leaders look for lasting impact from sustainable energy, not constant effort.”

Leadership, then, is not about enforcing a steady tempo; it is about composing harmony among these rhythms — the personal and the collective, the urgent and the reflective, the doing and the being.

Leadership as Energy Ecology

Much of what we call leadership is really about studying energy distribution — how attention, trust, and motivation circulate through a system.

Psychological safety, for instance, is not only an emotional condition; it is an energetic one. When people feel safe, energy expands — ideas flow, collaboration deepens, risk-taking becomes generative. When fear or cynicism take hold, energy constricts.

This is where positive leadership differs from the merely productive. It is not about maximizing output but optimizing flow — creating the conditions in which energy replenishes rather than depletes.

The course grounded this in Martin Seligman’s PERMA model of well-being:

  • Positive emotion sustains hope.
  • Engagement anchors us in flow.
  • Relationships generate resonance.
  • Meaning aligns us with purpose.
  • Accomplishment gives cadence and closure.

Together, they form the architecture of flourishing — a living, breathing rhythm that holds both effort and renewal.

To lead positively is to become a rhythmanalyst of well-being: sensing where energy moves freely, where it stagnates, and how small, intentional shifts — a pause, a genuine question, a gesture of care — can restore equilibrium.

When Rhythm Is Broken

Of course, most of us do not work in environments where this rhythm comes easily.  Many of us have known workplaces where urgency overrides reflection, where performance outweighs presence, where people speak carefully rather than honestly.

This is not a failure of individuals — it is a failure of culture.

Psychological safety, we learned, is not simply “nice to have.” It is the precondition for creativity, collaboration, and adaptability. Yet it might be rare. To question, to dissent, to ask for alignment — these acts often feel risky.

Most of us have been in rooms where silence seems safer than contribution.  Where we sense a misalignment between the stated mission and the lived reality — and do not feel permitted to name it.

This course did not pretend otherwise.  It acknowledged that positive leadership often begins in tension — between how things are and how they could be.

To lead positively is not to ignore these fractures; it is to notice them — and then act in ways that widen the space for honesty, curiosity, and care.

Sometimes that means asking a different question.
Sometimes it means slowing the tempo when everyone else is speeding up.
Sometimes it means being the first person in the room willing to say, “We’re out of rhythm. Can we listen again?”

Positive leadership does not assume the rhythm is already healthy.
It creates the possibility for harmony to emerge.

The Sound of Integrity

One question echoed throughout the course:

Why should anyone be led by you?

It’s deceptively simple — and profoundly clarifying.  My own answer emerged through five values: communication, equity, service, kindness, and growth.  They form the chord through which I live and lead.

Leadership, I came to see, is not about volume but tone — not how loudly one speaks, but how well one listens.  Integrity, in this sense, is resonance: the alignment between belief, action, and presence.

When tone matches intention, people feel it.  The room steadies.  Energy gathers.  Positive rhythm returns.

Rhythm as Reflection

In Lefebvre’s terms, the rhythmanalyst is both participant and observer — immersed in the pulse of life yet aware of its pattern. The same is true of leadership.

The leader listens: to the tempo of meetings, to the pauses between ideas, to the subtle signals of fatigue or enthusiasm.

They adjust — slowing down where reflection is needed, accelerating when momentum builds, recognizing that renewal often begins in rest, not speed.

Leadership, reframed this way, is not control but choreography.

Toward a Rhythmic Practice

The course concluded with a Personal Leadership Plan — a living score for the symphony of one’s work.

For me, that plan centers on advancing The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute toward nonprofit status — a project that, like a rhythm, has unfolded over time, layering inquiry, storytelling, and community engagement.

Yet beyond that plan, what remains is a practice:
to manage energy, not time;
to listen before leading;
to treat each day as both composition and improvisation.

Leadership, I’ve come to believe, is less a position than a rhythm — one that must be tuned and re-tuned, like an instrument in ongoing rehearsal.

Coda: Leadership as Listening

Lefebvre urged rhythmanalysts to “listen — listen to your body, to the city, to the world.”

Positive Leadership is that same act of listening applied to human systems.

It is rhythmanalysis in motion: sensing where harmony falters, where renewal is needed, where silence itself becomes a form of care.

If Regenerative Leadership taught me to see systems as living ecologies, Positive Leadership taught me to feel their pulse.

To lead, then, is not to command, but to listen into coherence — to transform effort into ease, intention into flow, and attention into presence.

Leadership, at its best, is rhythm made visible: a steady hand, a compassionate ear, and the courage to pause.  The work is not easy — but it is necessary. Because every culture we inherit was once constructed, and every rhythm can be rewritten.

The Work Between Elections

by | Nov 5, 2025 | ASKing the World, Global Citizenship, Mapping, Political Geography, Public Geography, USA

In 1949, my grandfather, J. Lawrence O’Toole, ran for mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut. He was a bricklayer from Black Rock and a labor organizer who came into politics the slow way: through union meetings, community debates, and the kind of civic life that doesn’t announce itself as such. He challenged Jasper McLevy, the socialist who had governed the city for years and built a reputation for frugality and municipal steadiness.

My grandfather lost that election. For a long time, that loss was something my family referred to now and then, as if its meaning were already fixed. Yet as I watched Zohran Mamdani win the New York City mayoral race this week, that story opened back up. Mamdani, a democratic socialist shaped by tenant organizing and neighborhood mutual aid networks, did not win because of a sudden surge of ideology. He won because civic participation had already been happening — patiently, consistently, out of public view — long before Election Day.

This is the part of politics we rarely describe honestly. Campaigns are not really about speeches, slogans, or personality. They are about whether neighbors talk to one another; whether communities build institutions that last; whether people believe that participating in public life is worth their time. Elections are not causes. They are outcomes of civic work already done.

My grandfather belonged to a version of civic participation grounded in labor. Workplaces were where political life began. The union hall was a form of local government long before City Hall entered the conversation. Bargaining was not abstract; it was a daily negotiation over safety, wages, and dignity. To run for office as a labor leader was simply to extend the logic: if working people live with the consequences of municipal decisions, they should help make them.

McLevy’s supporters saw civic responsibility differently. Their version of public life emphasized stewardship — careful budgets, transparent management, and insulation from corruption. They believed that participation meant oversight and accountability. These were not opposing social classes. They were two different theories of how people should work together to govern themselves.

What connects 1949 Bridgeport to 2025 New York City is not the ideology of socialism. It is the recognition that civic participation is a process, not a performance. Mamdani’s win was not spontaneous. It was the product of tenant organizers knocking on doors year after year, of neighborhood groups coordinating across blocks, of residents building trust in one another long before they were asked to build trust in a candidate. The election did not create that civic infrastructure. It revealed it.

And this matters because of what comes next. Winning elections has a way of disguising how fragile civic participation can be. When a movement gains power, the work changes. Governing requires translation, compromise, patience, and the willingness to hold together coalitions that are not as unified as they once appeared. The meetings get longer. The disagreements get sharper. The stakes get more real. The romance fades and the work begins again.

This is where my grandfather’s story remains useful. His loss did not erase the civic networks he helped build. The labor movement in Bridgeport did not end with that election. It shifted, reconfigured, and continued to shape how working people engaged in public life. Losing did not mean disappearing. Losing meant the work moved into another form.

And winning will require the same perseverance. The civic networks that carried Mamdani to office will need to stay intact, not for celebration but for governance. If they become symbolic instead of practical, the victory will be temporary. If they remain functional — if participation continues when the cameras are gone — then something more durable will have been achieved.

The easy story would be to say that democracy spoke clearly last night. But democracy does not speak clearly. It speaks in fragments, in efforts, in partial agreements, in structures people build piece by piece. It speaks through the slow work of organizing, showing up, listening, arguing, and returning to the same room the next week.

If there is a lesson that connects my grandfather’s loss to Mamdani’s win, it is this: Democracy is not what happens on Election Day. Democracy is the work that makes Election Day matter.

The vote is not the end of participation. It is the evidence that participation happened.

And it has to keep happening.

The work is not the victory. The work is the participation.  And the work continues.

 

Regeneration as Leadership, Leadership as Regeneration

by | Oct 9, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Pedagogy, Public Geography, Rhythmanalysis

Some courses give you tools. Others give you perspective. This one offered both — but, more importantly, it offered a pause.

In studying Regenerative Leadership with the University for Peace (UPEACE), I came to see that regeneration is not, at its core, about projects, outputs, or even systems. It begins somewhere deeper: with consciousness. With how we see, how we listen, how we relate.

We tend to equate leadership with direction: setting strategies, assigning roles, measuring results. These matter, but they are not the heart of regeneration. What regenerative leadership asks is different:

  • Can you slow down enough to see the whole system?
  • Can you suspend assumptions long enough to imagine alternatives?
  • Can you listen deeply enough to hear what is not yet being said?
  • Can you act with courage, not just certainty?

This shift in emphasis — from controlling to cultivating, from planning to perceiving — is what makes regeneration different from sustainability. It calls us to work not only on external structures but also on the inner operating system of people and communities.

Regeneration as Spatial Practice

What struck me most is how this work is not only temporal but spatial. Regeneration requires creating the spaces — physical, social, and symbolic — where new ways of seeing and acting can emerge.

Henri Lefebvre reminded us that space is not neutral; it is produced. Regenerative leadership echoes this insight. It is less about imposing blueprints and more about co-producing spaces of possibility. Spaces where trust can form, where silence can hold meaning, where imagination can stretch.

A workshop circle, a classroom, a village square, a Zoom call — these are not just “settings” for regeneration. They are living spaces, continually produced and reproduced through dialogue, practice, and power. To lead regeneratively is to attend to how these spaces are held, how they invite, how they constrain, and how they can be reimagined.

Regeneration as Liberatory Pedagogy

Here, critical pedagogy offers a vital reminder: education is never neutral. As Paulo Freire argued, it either domesticates or liberates. Dialogue, in this view, is not a technique but a stance — an encounter that affirms human dignity and makes space for learners to name their own reality.

Regenerative leadership, understood through this lens, is a liberatory practice. It resists the “banking model” of leadership — where solutions are deposited by experts — and instead insists on co-creation. It seeks not only sustainability but emancipation: to free people and communities from the limiting stories and structures that keep them from imagining alternatives.

Liberatory pedagogy also reminds us that spaces are contested. Who speaks, whose knowledge counts, whose silence is overlooked — these are questions of power. Regeneration cannot ignore them. To practice regenerative leadership is to surface these dynamics, disrupt domination, and create conditions where power is shared and agency is restored.

Weaving Quadrants, Co-Producing Space

One of the frameworks we studied suggested that regeneration unfolds across four quadrants:

  • the personal interior (mindset, values, purpose),
  • the personal exterior (behaviors, skills),
  • the collective interior (culture, shared vision), and
  • the collective exterior (systems, strategies).

Leadership, then, is the weaving together of these quadrants — tending to both the inner and outer, the personal and collective.

This weaving is a liberatory act of space-making. Every dialogue is a space produced. Every story is a re-mapping of possibility. Every collective reflection is a chance to reimagine power.

To lead regeneratively is to practice leadership as both spatial and pedagogical: shaping the conditions where people can not only adapt but also liberate themselves — from limiting mindsets, from unjust systems, from imposed futures.

Mindset as the Deepest Space

Donella Meadows reminded us that the deepest leverage point for system change is not policy or money — it is mindset. The stories we inhabit shape the spaces we live in. Change the story, and the space shifts.

This is where regeneration becomes both ecological and liberatory. It is about restoring ecosystems and economies, yes — but also about restoring the freedom to imagine, to name, to act. It is about cultivating relational spaces where people can encounter one another differently — and from that encounter, act differently.

Regenerate

I leave this course with new tools, yes — but also with a renewed sense of responsibility: to practice leadership as a regenerative and liberatory act of space-making.

To restore, reconnect, reimagine — and to liberate.
Not just for organizations.
Not just for projects.
But for the very spaces in which we live, learn, and become together.

St. Francis of Assisi and the Making of a Global Citizen

by | Oct 2, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Hagiography, Pedagogy

On October 4, communities around the world celebrate the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. He is often remembered as the gentle friar who preached to birds, wrote songs to Brother Sun and Sister Moon, and lived with radical simplicity. But St. Francis’s legacy reaches far beyond the pastoral images. His life embodies values and practices that we might today call the marks of a “global citizen.”

At a time when education is grappling with how to prepare young people for a fractured, interdependent world, Francis offers a surprisingly relevant guide.

A Vision of Interconnection

Francis saw the world as woven together in kinship. He sang to the sun and moon as siblings, called fire and water his companions, and treated all creation as family. In a modern context, this worldview resists the fragmentation that divides people from nature, and one community from another. It reminds us that global citizenship begins with the ability to see connections: between our choices and distant consequences, between our communities and the fate of the planet. To live as a global citizen is to recognize that “my life is bound up with yours.”

Empathy Across Boundaries

Francis’s embrace of the poor and the outcast was not charity in the conventional sense. He chose solidarity, stepping down from privilege to walk alongside those pushed to the margins. In doing so, he modeled a form of citizenship that is not defined by status or wealth, but by shared humanity. Today, when societies wrestle with inequality, migration, and exclusion, Francis’s witness speaks urgently: the global citizen is one who crosses boundaries of fear or indifference to stand with others.

Dialogue in a Time of Division

Perhaps the most radical moment of Francis’s life came in 1219, during the Crusades. While armies clashed, he traveled unarmed to meet with Sultan al-Kamil in Egypt. The meeting did not end the war, but it created space for dialogue where violence reigned. This act of courage reveals another mark of global citizenship: the willingness to enter into dialogue across difference, to risk encounter rather than retreat into hostility. In an age of polarization, Francis’s example calls us to imagine citizenship not as allegiance to one side, but as a responsibility to seek understanding across divides.

Living Simply in a Complex World

Francis’s radical poverty is often misunderstood as mere asceticism. But at its core was a conviction that endless consumption and the pursuit of wealth distort human community and devastate creation. His choice to live simply speaks directly to today’s crises of climate change and overconsumption. To live as a global citizen today is not to replicate Francis’s austerity, but to embrace sufficiency, sustainability, and care. His life invites us to ask: what do we truly need, and how can we live in ways that allow others, human and nonhuman, to flourish?

Education for Belonging

What does it mean to bring St. Francis into education today? It means more than teaching facts about global issues. It means nurturing habits of empathy, reverence, dialogue, and responsibility. A classroom inspired by Francis might ask students to trace the story of their lunch across continents, to listen to migration stories in their own community, to debate with civility across difference, or to imagine sustainable futures together. The point is not to memorize the world, but to belong to it.

Francis as a Guide for Global Citizens

Francis’s life was not easy. He was criticized, misunderstood, and often pushed to the margins even of his own movement. But he persisted, guided by a conviction that the world is one family, that peace is possible, and that humility is the path to freedom. In our own fractured time, his witness reminds us that global citizenship is not an abstract ideal. It is a way of life—seeing kinship, practicing empathy, crossing divides, living simply, and caring for the world we share.

On this feast day, then, St. Francis should not only be remembered with pet blessings or environmental prayers, as meaningful as these rituals are. He should be remembered as someone who embodied the virtues our world needs most urgently: a citizen of Assisi who lived as though the whole earth was his home, and all creatures his companions. In that sense, he was not just a saint. He was, and remains, a model global citizen.