fiatluxnyc - Tumblr blog

fiatluxnyc · 4 years ago

Text

Everyday Is Sunday”, Part II: Evolve or Perish.

Rachel Darden Bennett is the first of the small business owners and freelancers to be profiled in this series.

May 17th 2020:

Whenever possible, her routine is to start her day with lemon water followed by coffee and prayer, and at some point, meditation. Once the cycle is completed, she is fully engaged to take on the task of therapy. She has done this innumerable times to begin the course of her work…

…Ten years into her practice, Rachel Darden Bennett is a yoga instructor with a supremely enviable client list.

In it, are several Fortune 500 companies, several hedge funds, and some of the most prominent artistic institutions in New York City, consequently the world. Most notably her practice is incorporated at Richemont, also known as Compagnie Financière Richemont, the Swiss parent company for noted luxury brands such as Cartier, Chloé, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Montblanc, Panerai,Vacheron Constantin, and Van Cleef & Arpels. A cursory description of her overall relationship to her various clients would portray her as something as a yogi Wendy Rhoades (actress Maggie Siff’s character), the corporate psychotherapist-cum-career motivator from the television show Billions.

As well-ensconced as she seems to be in her market segment versus as well-capitalized as those who are willing to pay for her services are said to be, what could be described as a quiet sea change of commercial death would soon shudder Gotham down to its basest economic and social foundations.

Not even to the resulting tsunami is she impervious.

Evolve or perish?

New York City, 1999.

Perhaps limited to New York State there exists a regional oxymoron whence coming from upstate and going “downstate” (New York City) is seen as going “up” somehow. This was a long-held ambition of a teenage girl who arrived in Manhattan at nineteen. From time she was a little girl she wanted “to go up” to New York City. The impression of New York City in Breakfast at Tiffany’s laid indelibly in her reverie.

Her move landed her at Saint Mary’s residence, a temporary home for women operated by the Daughters of Divine Charity located on East 72nd street between Second and Third Avenues. Her dream is to be a ballerina and singer like so many young girls that came before her and so many more that arrived right up until the day the city was placed under its current regime. The New York City of 1999 is radically different from the one in 2020, the former was a place where alertness and alacrity in the streets were everyone’s countenance. Rachel, the small-town upstate girl now took to carrying mace simply to get her bagels. Soon, her personal life would receive a double-barrel of tragedy and anguish as she would lose both of her parents to illness shortly after her arrival…

March 14th, 2020.

…The girl from twenty-odd years past and the previous century is now grown. The contours of her adolescent face reached the clear angular definition of maturity, yet the strawberry blonde locks remain. The grown woman is now purposeful and there are objects being moved to and fro, lifted and deliberately placed from the status quo ante to a newer, more compact location. At this moment, her neighbors in the Upper West Side are assisting in the load-in of her possessions into her rental car. Broadway is bereft of traffic, all the streets are quiet, the city as mausoleum.

Rachel Darden Bennett is conflicted, this city was Home long before she arrived twenty years ago from upstate New York and now she is a city partisan. She is a sharer of the privations of the city, from its occasionally brutal nor’ easters to the blackout in 2003 and to the financial crisis of 2008 to the present era. She isn’t supposed to be making her exit from this stage, she is supposed to be suffering with the denizens of the city. Leaving the city is making her feel in some way, a traitor. She came to the city to share in its struggles and in its wonders, not cut and run at this sign of trouble.

By now she is almost finished with her packing. Bennett still wrestles with the guilt of leaving the city behind. However, her reasoning is sound: New York City has become a hot zone, the locus of the majority of the reported cases of COVID-19 in the United States and she has a boyfriend in South Jersey; therefore, her Hegira is necessary.

An associate posts a New York Times article that garnered widespread attention on his social media and upon reading it, she is gauging the true depth of the calamity that has befallen others and concedes it is impressive in its reach. A sort of mental filter is erected from within, a kind of protective cognitive dissonance under which she must labor under to keep from being overwhelmed with various datapoints about the coronavirus: some true, some false, some contradictory, with the occasional red herrings thrown in between.

In recalling her thoughts at approximately on that date, she recollects the shock of the city’s economy abrupt halt: Regarding the situation with her business, she offers testimony: “But then, when something like this happens — -out of the blue — your income…becomes ether,” says Bennett.

On March 11th, 2020, a corporate client cancelled a relationship with Ms. Bennett. The next evening, her eyes clear, she recognized the moment she was fitfully trying to make manifest on her own: the moment came for her to change tack and take her business in another direction. Upon the realization that the pivot was necessary, she announced to her clients: she was going to continue her practice and maintain the professional tethers via virtual classes.

An unexpected generational fissure formed between the Boomers and members of the other generations represented in her classes. The Boomers largely decided to quit while they were ahead and not follow Bennett headlong into the digital breach with her virtual classes and with them went a needed source of revenue. Bennett’s appeals to their reluctance was met with no success.

Passionately she states the hard reality of operating a business even in the best of times, “There’s no two weeks for [Me]��Nobody’s got your back but you. There’s no 401K, there’s no sick days…”. She also speaks of a scarcely noticed psychological cost of operating her business and of others: business owners need community otherwise they operate in a silo. Bennett has little idea how others in her field are faring due to a silo effect created by the urgency of the situation and the daily strain of having to be the chief executive for virtually every function of a business.

Discipline and Ingenuity Defeats Disaster

In relaying her experiences in the ballet schools, she evokes an image of a laconic yet powerful sisterhood training for difficult and subtly martial tasks in cloisters. Subsequently, this training imbued her with a surprisingly Spartan mindset and an appropriately stoic, almost Bene Gesserit mantra:

“Everything is a choice,”

Perhaps it is a recalcitrance forged by the iron discipline necessary to train as a ballerina, is why Bennett takes the position of defiance in the face of city-wide calamity. The purpose of the mantra is reflected in her saying, “you choose to be a victim”. She refuses to be that rounding error of coronavirus casualties.

Rachel added,“…the coronavirus is a contradiction…it’s horrific and it’s hurt my business, but in the exact same breath, it’s helped my business. Because for the longest time, I wanted to build an online platform because that is the way of the future.”

Recently, she taught a Zoom class for The Wharton Club of New York, a social club for alumni of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. It was attended by sixty people on her Patreon page and it has opened her up to an even broader audience in terms of geographic location. At times she is simultaneously teaching students in countries like Canada, England, and Los Angeles.

Contraindicative to the health of her business model she is a firm proponent of the tandem “social distancing” and “shelter-in-place” regimen; indeed the same protocols that rendered her business model virtually obsolete. This is likely another manifestation of a temperament now fully annealed to the social consciousness prevalent in large cities. Irrespective to how initially debilitating in concert they are to her business, she views both measures as part of a larger albeit painful responsibility. Bennett’s optimistic and defiant resolve is balanced by a pragmatism reinforced by the realities of operating a business. Ms.Bennett harbors no illusion of an end of “the new normal” and the idea of desiring a return to something approximating the world before March 13th 2020 as a sunk cost.

The yoga instructor also recognizes her advantages in the current climate. “I’m not impoverished,” she says with a tone of a muted defiance. She understands that many business owners in the city do not have her ability to temporarily relocate in the midst of a pandemic and still be able to run their businesses. For that, she is grateful.

When asked about her prognosis for the near-term success of her business, she says:

“People need yoga more than they ever did”.

Ms. Bennett can be reached at www.rachelbennettyoga.com or her Instagram @rachelbennettyoga

For “Everyday Is Sunday” Part I, click here.

We are Fiat Lux | NYC: A brand management/public relations firm from New York City. We provide brand management services such as social media management, creative direction, ideation, and event management to creatives and small businesses in the creative industries. To inquire about our offerings feel free to contact us at [email protected].

0 notes

fiatluxnyc · 5 years ago

Text

"Everyday is Sunday," Part I: The Canvas of the Aftermath.

This is the first in a series of articles chronicling the aftermath of the coronavirus shutdown on small businesses and freelancers in New York City.

13 April 2020:

This is the seminal entry in a series describing what charitably could be called as an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences; thus resulting in a localized form of what John Michael Greer, author of How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse, would term as a “catabolic collapse” of New York City itself.

In the opinion of the writer, the title of this article actually undersells the relative vacuum of activity in the city since the average Sunday in any season presents more activity than what is occurring at the time of this writing. The result? A tapestry of interconnecting businesses and professions rent threadbare by the exigencies of the COVID-19 pandemic, initiating a slow-motion daisy chain of failures.

It is expected that most of the readers of this article are familiar with the creation and enforcement of the “social distancing” policy that consequently led to the decimation of the service industry via gubernatorial fiat. Bars, restaurants, movie theaters, nightclubs have all been mostly shuttered throughout the city; in rare instances, reduced to being dispatch points for takeout deliverymen to points yet to be determined. The “Social Distancing” policy, in conjunction with a seemingly advisory set of “shelter in place” orders in effect throughout each portion of the Tri-State area, rendering sufficient foot traffic to these businesses prevented from ever forming.

Even once well-trafficked storefronts in the Upper East Side (one of the neighborhoods whose residents were the most likely and able to keep their monies circulating in their local economies) are now shuttered and some storefronts boarded up. There are reports of an uptick in burglaries of these vulnerable storefronts since the issue of these overlapping executive orders.

Borrowing a turn of phrase from a recent post by New York Post columnist John Podhoretz, the “rolling dormitory” that is the average subway has truly settled into the description, as the homeless rest largely unmolested since the drastic decline in ridership. They too, seem to sleep in sync with the slumbering city — mostly unbothered at night.

There exists a strangely natural quiet in the city, one would be tempted to believe that Peter Minuit’s original negotiation centuries ago probably had a kill clause activating in 2020. Absent of noise and gas pollution generated from automobiles, the sounds and smells of nature are now reasserting themselves close to and high up with the concrete edifices towering over the trees.

The few intrepid bicyclists left in the city find they have no natural competitors in their habitat. The automobiles they had competed for road space are mostly gone, spare the buses that will still travel up and across the city’s meridians and parallels. Now the avenues reveal an impossible emptiness, as if the human race had suddenly vanished at once, a feat reminiscent of Tom Cruise’s Vanilla Sky.

The date of this article is the 13th of April of 2020, a full calendar month from that fateful Friday the 13th of March 2020, two days preceding the Ides of the same March in the same year and little has remained the same in “The City That Never Sleeps”.

This is because it has been sleeping for 31 days straight.

From a casual gleaning of the focus of the local media, one can scarcely find the stories of the small business owner or the freelancer. They are largely anonymous in the morass of the faces who count themselves abruptly disenfranchised by the response of the city, state, and federal governments. Hitherto 2019, it was they who had to operate largely without the benefit of a government-sanctioned backstop in the form of unemployment insurance and whatever cover private business insurance could provide.

However this is not a story about and/or analyses of policies.

This is going to be a story about Pain.

This an aperture to the emotional and mental costs incurred onto those who are ultimately responsible onto others and others solely responsible onto themselves but bereft of the safety nets afforded to the majority of the population. It will likely be a string of diary-like admissions of the dark side of leadership, of being a parent figure to vulnerable employees and the reaction to the Leviathan that is a national lockdown. The following will likely be the stories of people absolutely crushed almost from a Biblical retribution exacted from on high.

It is likely there will be stories of great altruism, of great compassion, of deft ingenuity in the face of disaster.

Lastly, the series will possibly convey even Triumph.

In the interim, Fiat Lux | NYC is seeking requests for interviews with small business owners and freelancers in the Tri-State area to continue this series. We will give priority to those industries adjacent to the service industry. Please forward your submissions to [email protected].

#social distancing #new york city #new york #coronovirus #everyday is sunday #small business #freelancer

0 notes