In the spring of 2005, I walked into the office of the Planning Director for the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission and told him he could count on me. I was newly appointed by Mayor Kathy Taylor, and I wanted him to know, right away, what kind of commissioner I intended to be. Reasonable. Cooperative. Not a troublemaker. A team player.
I meant it sincerely. I had spent my working life believing, without much interrogation, that new development was good, that growth was good, and that the people who showed up at public meetings to oppose a project were mostly NIMBYs with too much free time and too little understanding of how a city actually functions. I was pro-business. I assumed that settled most questions worth asking.
It did not occur to me that I had just made a promise I wouldn’t be able to keep.
A Man Named Jamie
I met Jamie Jamison a few months into my term. He’d come over from England, and he’d been trying, with the patient stubbornness of a true believer, to convince Tulsa’s planners and policymakers that there was a better way to build a city than the one we’d inherited. He talked about something called form-based codes — an alternative to the auto-centric, single-use zoning that had reshaped nearly every American city since the 1950s. I didn’t know what any of that meant when I sat down with him. I assumed it was one more well-intentioned outsider with an opinion about how we ought to live.
Then he showed me a video he’d made.
It was built almost entirely of photographs — image after image, comparing the two approaches to building a city. Streets lined with small, distinct shops under a canopy of trees, sidewalks close to the storefronts, the kind of place you’d choose to walk even if you didn’t need to be anywhere. Then commercial strips on main arterials, big-box stores set back a couple hundred feet behind an ocean of asphalt, sidewalks running past them like an afterthought nobody expected anyone to use. Over and over, the pattern repeated. No narration was necessary. Each pairing made the case a little more completely than the last: one kind of place you wanted to be, the other a place you couldn’t wait to leave. The difference wasn’t chance. It was policy — decisions made decades earlier by people who never imagined they were choosing between two different ways of being human.
The difference wasn’t chance. It was policy — decisions made decades earlier by people who never imagined they were choosing between two different ways of being human.
I understood it immediately, in the way you understand very few things immediately at sixty-five years old. No one, in my entire life up to that point, had ever suggested to me that there was a proven, better way to connect how we build with how we live — a way that had worked for generations of city dwellers all over the world, long before we paved it over. I hadn’t rejected that idea before meeting Jamie. I had simply never been offered it.
Public Enemy Number One
I wish I could tell you the reversal was gradual, that I weighed the evidence for months before coming around. It wasn’t like that. It happened fast, and it happened completely, and within a year the man who had promised to be a team player was, by any honest account, the opposite of that.
There had been a fight already underway when I joined the Commission — a contentious, months-long controversy over a large multi-family development proposed on a hillside above an upscale single-family neighborhood. It had been decided before I arrived, but the bitterness of it hadn’t faded, and once I understood what Jamie had shown me, I understood exactly which side of that fight I would have been on, and it wasn’t the side the Director had been counting on.
I became a frequent dissenter — not occasionally, but as a pattern, meeting after meeting, often alone. I want to be honest about something here: I wasn’t tortured by it. I didn’t lose sleep over losing favor with commissioners who’d expected loyalty from me. Once I believed something was true, the social cost of saying so stopped mattering to me the way it once might have. I’m not sure that’s a virtue. It might just be what happens when conviction finally outweighs the habit of agreeableness. Either way, it was a version of myself I hadn’t met before.
It didn’t stay contained to zoning, either. The same scrutiny I’d turned on land use, I eventually turned on everything else I’d assumed about myself. I had called myself a conservative Republican since college — fifty years of identifying that way, mostly, if I’m honest, because I believed myself to be pro-business, and pro-business seemed to require it. Jamie’s presentation taught me something I couldn’t unlearn: that being pro-business and building places that serve human beings were not in conflict. They were, in fact, the same project, done well. Somewhere in the years that followed, I changed my party registration. I look back now and wonder how I carried that identity for half a century without ever really examining it.
I don’t tell you that to make an argument about politics. I tell you because it’s the truest measure of how completely one video and a Tulsa afternoon rearranged the furniture of my mind.
Proof It Wasn't Just Talk
Conviction is cheap if it never costs you anything or changes anything. Mine did both.
Other commissioners started listening, even when they didn’t fully agree, and by the time the city adopted a new comprehensive plan during my tenure, some of what I’d been arguing for had made its way into the final document. That wasn’t a personal victory so much as evidence — proof to myself that the reversal had been real, not performative, not a phase.
Later, outside the Commission entirely, I threw myself into advocacy work with Smart Growth Tulsa, part of a broader coalition pushing the city toward the kind of walkable, human-scaled development Jamie had first shown me on a screen. That work outlasted my term. It became something closer to who I was, rather than a position I’d once held.
What's Still Being Tested
I last served on the Planning Commission in 2015. It’s more than a decade behind me now, and I’m eighty-one. And I find myself asking a version of the question I imagine you might be asking as you read this: is that kind of reversal still possible for me? Psychologists have a term for what happened to me that day with Jamie — they call it openness to experience, one of the core traits researchers use to measure how willing a person is to consider new ideas at any age, including this one. The conventional wisdom says that trait hardens as we get older, that beliefs calcify along with everything else. I used to assume that was true. I’m no longer sure it has to be.
I don’t think the test looks the same anymore. I’m not likely to have another Jamie Jamison moment — one video, one afternoon, one complete unraveling of a lifelong assumption. But cognitive flexibility, the capacity to change your mind later in life, doesn’t have to arrive that dramatically to still be real. For me now, it shows up in smaller, more daily disguises. It shows up every time I sit down with a new piece of technology I don’t understand and choose curiosity over irritation. It shows up in learning tools I never expected to need at this age, because staying open-minded in retirement — really staying open, not just saying you are — requires practicing on small things so the capacity is still there when something large comes along.
Cognitive flexibility, the capacity to change your mind later in life, doesn’t have to arrive that dramatically to still be real.
That, I’ve come to believe, is the real measure of personal growth after retirement. Not the size of the reversal. Not whether you ever again get handed a single video that changes everything. It’s whether you’re still willing, every single day, to be wrong about something small — so that you remain capable, if the moment ever comes again, of being wrong about something large. Call it reinvention, call it a second adulthood, call it whatever the research wants to call it. I just call it staying alive to the possibility that I still don’t know everything.
I made a promise once to be a team player, and I broke it within the year. I’ve made a quieter promise since, one I renew most mornings without quite realizing I’m doing it: to stay open enough that somebody, someday, could still hand me something that changes my mind.
