Ideals in Motion

The deconstruction of an ideal...

So, what's the purpose again?

What's so important about knowing your purpose in life? Maybe the following examples will help clarify this:

• Imagine that you're playing golf. What's the purpose of golf? If you say to put the ball in the hole you'd be wrong. If that was the purpose the game could be over fairly quickly. No, putting the ball in the hole is one of the goals of golf - as is grooving your swing, breaking par or beating your partners. Goals are not the same as a purpose. So, what's the purpose of golf?
  
• Imagine that you're an archer. What's the purpose of archery? If you say to hit the bullseye with the arrow you would again be wrong. If that was the purpose of archery why would one stand so far away from the target? Again, hitting the bullseye is one of the goals of archery but it is NOT the purpose of archery. So, what's the purpose of archery?
  
• Imagine that you're given a life to live. What's the purpose of that life? If you say it is to make money (or be successful, or be a doctor, etc.) you'd be wrong one more time. If that was the purpose of life there would be far more people on the planet with money than without - just the opposite of what we have today. Making money is a goal one can have in life but it is not the purpose of a life. So, what's the purpose of life?

What is it that gives the goals we set meaning? What is it that keep me coming back again and again? What is it that makes it possible for even the smallest of acts to bring joy and fulfillment?

Purpose is not a goal to be achieved. Purpose is not provided by the "rules" of the game. Purpose is created by thoughtful individuals living with and asking the question "for the sake of what" am I pursuing this goal? Purpose is what the attainment of a goal may eventually make possible. Purpose is what I greet the dawn with each day. Without it my life has no meaning. With it all is possible - and any of what I have is fulfilling. What's the purpose of your life?

What a strange machine man is!

You fill him with bread, wine, fish and radishes, and out of him come sighs, laughter and dreams.  - Nikos Kazantzakis

A life isn't about what it's about...

it's about how it's about it.

To resist the influence of others knowledge of oneself is crucial...

It is so easy to lose our ideals to another. To have our dream of who and what we aspire to become taken by those that would play on our fears of loss and our sense of vulnerability is the main risk we take when we don't continuously reexamine the integrity of our values and our purpose in life. Doing so is hard work. It requires introspection, it requires that we be willing to challenge what we grew up "knowing", it sometimes requires a journey into the "dark night of the soul" as written about by St. John of the Cross - a place where all is questioned.

As a people, as a country, and as a society, I worry that today we are on the verge of losing much. America was founded on ideals of freedom, tolerance and equality. In the eyes of the Founding Fathers, no person was beyond the law of the land and no person was to be denied the law of the land. America was settled by people fleeing religious and economic persecution and today those that have a different god - spiritual or secular - are at the very least looked on as untrustworthy and at the very worst persecuted by being denied the due process of the laws of the land. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right when he said that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". Roosevelt went on later in the same inagural speech of 1933 to say "In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors." With politicians today devising election strategies based on fear that separate us as a people into blue states and red states, conservatives and liberals, it becomes a challenge to respect the whole. It becomes easy to fear the "other side".

When fear becomes our dominant mood - as an individual and as a people - much is likely to be lost. Fear is not created by the absence of safety. Fear is created in the absence of love. The opposite of love is not hate. It is fear masking as hate. One of the most effective ways to not be influenced by the fear generated by others is to know myself - to know ourselves as a people - in such a deep and intimate way that I recognize one of the core truths taught by all of the great religions and philosophies of the world - we are all connected and that to harm another is to harm myself.

I am my conversations (Part 2)

In one recent day I was on phone calls, IM exchanges and face to face conversations with individuals in Helsinki, Moscow, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Seattle, Istanbul and Portland. In a very real sense I was in each of those places within a time span of no more than an hour - I was truly in more than one place at the same time. This is only possible - me being in more than one place at the same time - if I don't think of myself as defined by my physical being or constrained by traditional understanding of time and space.

When I left the physical conversations I was having did "I" leave? I don't think so. Part of me remained with the other person as a conversational memory - perhaps even as an emotion experienced by the other party. Who am "I" then? For most of us our sense of self is, in large part, informed by and limited to what our physical senses tell us about who we are - I am my body, my feelings and my thoughts. These artifacts of self go with "me" wherever "I" go and where "I" am is where they are. But what if I thought of myself as moving through the world in another way. What if "I" occupied time and space in a different way? What would be my approach to inteacting with others if I thought of myself moving through the world as a conversation.

As a conversation I become the stories others have about me. I become the internal conversations they have about the meaning of my behaviors, my actions, my mood, my words and my spirit. I become the the internal conversation they feel about me. These conversations contain me and they are the raw building blocks used to co-create our futures together. How congruent are these "conversations that I am" with the ideals I hold as valuable? In the beginning there was the "word" and from the word conversations began that created what we have and who we are today.

Shooting our children should be a wake up call…

When a society loses connection with its ideals crazy and tragic events begin to occur. Fear can be seen as the root cause of losing connection with what matters in life. The recent shooting of 15 year old Christopher Penley in Longwood Florida is a case in point. This tragic event was the direct result of fear being the dominant emotion in much of our public discourse today. Fear permeates our conversations, is the staple of the Bush Administration’s pronouncements and decisions, and fuels the evening newscasts. As a people, we have become fearful of other nations, other religions, other lifestyles, the intent of our elected leaders and, it seems, even fearful of our children. We are fearful of globalization, declines in the stock market, bubbles bursting and our lives changing.

When fear replaces love, hope and appreciation all motion stops. Fear is a contracting emotion. Fear is the reason we lose connection with our ideals. Fear makes it oh so easy to lose our focus on what we say matters in our life. In the United States we founded a country on an ideal that espoused life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have enshrined ideals spoken by leaders past – Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream…” and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – as worthy of aspiration, worthy of sacrifice. Yet today we take the easy road. In a very real sense, for many people it is much easier to talk about our ideals than it is to live them. It's much easier to believe that those "in charge" will protect us. When we surrender our freedoms and our ideals to fear, when we abdicate our responsibility to do what it takes to live free of fear in an uncertain world, we have truly become immobile.

The challenge of sustainability…

Contrary to what most people think, sustainability is not about cracking some “code” in the hopes of continuing to replicate our success. Sustainability in practice is the process of developing the capacity to continuously start over. This is a fundamentally different way of approaching success in life.

For many, success is something we try to hold on to for as long as we can. This is a natural response and it is a response that insures failure. By holding on we keep feeding back into the system the things we think created the original success – the behaviors, the focus, the people, the goals and rewards. None of this will work because doing so presupposes that the success was achieved either despite of or because of a set of internal and external variables being in place. All we need to do is make sure the variables are accounted for in the same way as with the original attempt. In order to sustain success in this fashion none of the variables – internal or external – can change. And all of them must be known. Not a likely scenario.

Developing the capacity to continuously start over requires a very different kind of focus, it requires a different sensibility to what is going on in the system that supports and holds the elements contributing to success. This is the difficult part – understanding and appreciating that success occurs within a system of elements that are in relationship. In today’s businesses and organizations developing relational capacity is not usually focused on as an integral (I say critically essential) part of the business development strategy – let alone as part of a strategy for sustainable success. More often than not, business approaches its objectives by cataloging the various "parts" or elements of the system that are necessary to operate effectively and then works to assemble and direct them in the most optimal fashion with appropriate leadership and management functions. It's a Newtonian framework that focuses on building the most effective "machine" in a system with the most effective "parts". Sustainability requires a focus on relational capacity that is not just an appreciation and understanding of the nature of systems.

What is relational capacity? What is it that we need to focus on that enables our ability to continuously start over? These are the questions that the next few postings will answer.

It's the conversation stupid...

I am my conversation.

My conversations determine my actions in the world. They are the catalyst; they are the filter; they are the raw ingredients of all I have in my life and of all that I do in and with my life. My conversation shows up in my body, shows up in my emotions, shows up in my spirit. My conversation gives me access to life and aliveness...it also ages me and jaundices my view of the wonders of the world. My conversation connects or, more likely, it separates...it has the power to be inclusive and it is often exclusive.

How often have I really stepped back and listened to the conversation(s) that are my life? To the conversation that is me? How do I move through the world as a conversation? What is the story my conversation generates in others? What are the implications when I start looking at and for the core conversation that lives within? What is the 3:00 a.m. conversation I hold with myself that no one else listens in on? It's the one that everyone in my life runs into.

Think of idealism as the abandonment of practicality...

Descartes got it partially right when he said “I think therefore I am.” I've written in a couple of other postings that what limits me is not who I think I am but who I think I am not. This notion can be taken as a practical way of exploring and understanding the power of containment.

When explaining what I mean by containment I’ve also used the word boundary. I can also use the word context. With either of these synonyms – containment, boundary or context – I’m describing a framework or container that holds the content of my life. This “content” includes not only the physical or material content. It also includes the content of my being…such things as my behavior, my language patterns, my way of viewing the world, my beliefs, and my values and mores. These “things” are highly personal and their meaning, definition and power are determined by the frame in which they reside. It is the frame – the containment field, the boundary or the context – that is of interest for our growth and for our capacity for keeping our ideals in motion. My ideals are made up of a lot of content. Viewed from the vantage point of today, my ideals may seem impractical or even impossible. For them to become part of my reality something has to change.

I’ll give you a simple example of why paying attention to our containment fields are so crucial. About 14 years ago my wife and I were in the market for a new house. We’d recently been married and the houses we each owned weren’t suitable, for a variety of reasons, for the life we were creating together. Being prudent and fiscally responsible we (read “I”) quickly established the maximum price we could afford to pay and we (read "she") set out searching. That’s when reality reared its head. What our ideal was and what our budget was were seemingly as much of a mismatch as oil and water. The easy and practical thing to do was lower our expectations. Interestingly, for both of us that option wasn’t acceptable. This resulted in a bit of a dilemma and set in motion a fascinating process that resulted in me shifting my sense of identity.

Identity is one of the major containment fields for human beings. It is my sense of who I am and it's that sense that determines what content is practical and “appropriate” for me. By not giving up on our ideal I forced a change in my sense of who I am. I expanded; I stretched the containment boundary of my identity. Up to that point a portion of my identity was defined by me as including a certain income level. It was a comfortable level but it didn’t allow for the experience I desired to create with this new house. Buying the house wasn't practical. It was a huge stretch. I had no idea how we were going to pay for it - I just knew that it wouldn't be a problem. Expanding the boundary of my identity allowed me to include more of what my ideal represented. I challenged who I thought I wasn't.

Here's our challenge as a society: shift the question we've all lived with - "who do we think we are?"

The question we need to be asking is "who do we think we're not?"