Becoming a Good Ancestor

A Field Note on Time, Place, and What Endures

There is a place I returned to again and again as a young architect.

The Salk Institute in La Jolla.

Louis Kahn’s form, silence, and light. The buildings are not the focus. They frame the courtyard opening to the Pacific - a place for contemplation, collaboration, and inquiry across time.

Each time I visited, I saw something new.

Not because the building had changed.
But because I had.

Details that had once been invisible began to reveal themselves -  proportion, materiality, craft. I began to sense the care embedded in the place. The patience. The intentionality of creating something meant to endure.

It took me years to understand what was happening.

I was growing into the building.

—

Recently, I came across a question that has been quietly working on me:

Are we being good ancestors?

The question is often associated with the writer Roman Krznaric. But its lineage reaches back to Jonas Salk - the scientist whose institute Kahn designed.

A building for discovery.
A question for humanity.

Both oriented toward a future the original makers would not live to see.

In these times - when so much feels accelerated and uncertain - the question lands differently.

We are pulled toward immediacy. Toward what must be done next.

And yet, beneath that urgency, something else is possible.

A widening.

A quiet awareness that how we move through our present choices is not only about us - that what we shape now will be lived in by others, in ways we may never see.

When that awareness arrives, the question shifts:

Not only What should I do?
but What do I want to leave behind?

—

In my coaching conversations, I sometimes offer this question gently:

What would it mean to meet this moment as a good ancestor?

When people sit with it, something changes.

The pace slows.
The field widens.
New possibilities begin to come into view.

We begin to sense ourselves not only as decision-makers in the present, but as participants in a longer arc of becoming.

—

Perhaps this is what a quiet studio is for.

A place set apart from urgency and noise.
A place to slow down enough to notice what is shaping us - and what we are shaping in turn.

A place where we can ask:

What is ending?
What is emerging?
What wants to endure beyond me?

—

Standing in the courtyard at Salk, your eye is drawn outward - along a narrow channel of water that runs toward the horizon.

You feel both very small and deeply connected to something that continues beyond you.

Perhaps this is what it means to become a good ancestor:

To stand in the present
with an awareness of what stretches beyond it,
and to shape what we can,
with care.

—

This reflection first appeared in my Substack, Notes from a Quiet Practice.
https://notesfromaquietpractice.substack.com/p/becoming-a-good-ancestor?r=ahjam