The Enduring Strength of Upstream Choices
Today, we shipped a Soul Seat to a new customer in Minneapolis, MN.
It lifted our spirits knowing that we have a small part to play in helping someone stay focused and healthy in that epicenter of resistance to tyranny. Just the week before, members of my church had traveled there to join hundreds of other faith leaders being trained to be effective and supportive bystanders in the face of ICE raids.
During these turbulent times here in the US, as we fight the return of a native fascism we failed to confront in our country’s roots, we here at Ikaria Design feel so much gratitude for the support we’ve had over the years from you, our customers. A day doesn’t go by that we don’t appreciate the sentiment you all have voiced for choosing to purchase from us because of the values we strive to live out in the way we design, source, and recirculate each of our products. Please know that as a customer of Ikaria Design, you are participating in birthing a new future. A future organized around equity, sustainability, a circular economy, and workstyles that help our bodies end a day’s work healthier than they began. You’re also part of the future being championed by the entire B Corp community of businesses.
Here in the US, the rhetoric that comes out of the regime in Washington and the boardrooms of the oligarchs is that merely acting on these values is a threat to their illegitimate power. Congratulations! Your simple choice of how to sit puts fear into fascists.
“Who Decides How You Sit?”
As one of our earliest taglines, that phrase spoke to how much of the physical discomfort we tolerate day in and day out, the money we spend to rehab sore necks and backs, comes from decisions made well upstream of the choices presented to us for eight hours of each working day. The notion of consent wasn’t much of a factor in chair design. Building the first Soul Seat was my attempt to alter the many upstream decisions made without consulting us. Many young people, my yoga students, physical therapists, knowledge workers, and artists, had a chance to provide their consent to the design you enjoy every day. As a customer, you are extending that thread of consent far into the world. We’ve heard from so many people that simply seeing you or another Soul Seater has given them permission to “sit weird”. Before that moment, they didn’t know they could exercise their own consent. In this way, each Soul Seat customer is practicing good bystander behavior in the arena of sitting culture.
Recently, someone quoted our Declaration of Independence. “..deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” It occurred to me that this is an upstream design principle right there in our Declaration of Independence. This little design choice by the authors didn’t even intend to include anyone other than landowning white men. But over time, through the amplification of complex systems, just as a butterfly can be part of the causal chain of a hurricane, so these words can echo into our own time with more power than they were originally intended. The argument underlying American originalists on our Supreme Court would have the butterfly’s flapping and those powerful words about consent to stay locked in amber and isolated from the rest of the evolving cosmos.
We will continue insisting on expanding the pool of those who are included in the consent of the governed. The value commitments we make now will continue to serve us downstream, just as our fellow citizens are echoing our country’s core principles as they choose where to collectively place their bodies in the face of this current wave of tyranny.
Thank you for being part of the resistance.