Working on a Team

from the classroom to the family: energy and communication

What are you building lately?

So how is Architecture 101 going?

This is the latest prototype for a sukkah that my team led by Marek put together based on his original design. It’s very sun and star-focused. Our team has 8 people on it. I usually don’t work on teams this large, and to be honest at the beginning there was a bit of chaos. How will we all figure out our task and purpose in the bigger picture? But we all put down our egos and were willing to brainstorm and not stick to a particular idea. We should be done by next week.

Communication takes energy. You have to take off the headphones and talk, or respond to a text in a timeframe sooner than 24hours. I’ve lost a friend or two because we couldn’t sync on what we agree is a mutually good way to go back and forth. There has to be space, but there also has to be a sense of importance.

While on a walk near some horse stables in Golden Gate park, I came across these yellow flowers. I’m pretty sure they’re invasive, but one of the biggest learning curves of my life is living in a new region with totally different plants. Plants that get their energy from the light, the ever-so-abundant light and make things brighter just by taking in photons and absorbing some water. I sometimes think about weeds vs native vs cultivated plants and what really makes one or the other more important or special than the other.

On my own little team, my family, we sometimes devolve into chaos if there are lots of events and things going on. I’m trying to teach my kids to respond to group texts, even if it’s just an ok to openly acknowledge that some tidbit of information was received and processed. My husband and I struggle to find mutually agreeable times to talk about “the serious shit” because after a long day we sometimes aren’t in sync about having the energy to talk. But eventually, we work it out.

I recently used Claude to ask what’s the difference in the way photons are used in plants vs solar panels. They both use photons. Photons don’t have mass. They’re energy and momentum. To put it simply, plants harness this photon energy with color (wavelengths) and solar panels use chemistry. We eventually benefit from those photons in the form of food and electricity. In this way the communication is reactions, but perhaps that what communication is, just a way to exchange energy from our brain to someone else’s brain via soundwaves, electricity and love.