1. Personal Update: I'm starting the Thriving Leader Blueprint
My
work is to help people connect more deeply to their purpose and mission,
so they can live it out with confidence and passion in a way that helps others and also works for them. I'm currently working with a group of people in a virtual learning lab, helping them do just that. It's called "The Thriving Leader Blueprint." I'm hoping to start another group in this program soon.
The newsletter this week is focused on the theme of taking action. What are we doing to live out our purpose? What are we doing to make the world a better place? The things we do don't have to be big. But we do need to take action.
One of the core insights of Bill W and the other early founders
of AA was that for someone to recover from addiction, they must help other people with their recovery. In other words, the experience of helping someone else to recover is not just helpful for them, it's essential for my own well-being.
This changes the dynamic of service. Giving service is not simply about altruism ... it's not something I do from
a place of superiority and privilege. I need to do it for my own recovery. It doesn't just help someone else, at my own expense. It's something that helps us both.
2. Tony Kushner on despair being a lie
Many people I know
who are doing works of service -- whether it be community activism, church work, or helping others in their recovery -- feel overwhelmed by the needs they face. It can be discouraging. It's true that there are many problems around us today. But nothing will change if we don't start somewhere. The following quote from Tony Kushner focuses on political change, but it's applicable to many settings. Is it applicable for you?
I believe our despair is a lie we are telling ourselves. In many other periods of history, people, ordinary citizens, routinely set aside hours, days, time in their lives for doing the work of politics, some of which is glam and revolutionary and some of which is dull and electoral and tedious and not especially pure -- and the world changed because of the work they did. That's what we're
starting now. It requires setting aside the time to do it, and then doing it.
Not any single one of us has to or possibly can save the world, but together in some sort of concert, in even not-especially-coordinated concert, with all of us working where we see work to be done, the world will
change. And we have to do it by showing up places, our bodies in places -- turn off the computers, leave the Web and the Net -- and show up, our bodies at meetings and demos and rallies and leafleting corners.
Because this is a moment in history that needs us to begin, each of us
every day at her or his own pace, slowly and surely rediscovering how to be politically active, how to organize our disparate energies into effective group action -- and I choose to believe we will do what is required. Act. Organize. Assemble. Oppose. Resist. Rind a place, a cause, a group, a friend ... and start.
I think some
form of contemplative practice is necessary to be able to detach from your own agenda, your own anger, your own ego, and your own fear. We need some practice that touches our unconscious conditioning where all our wounds and defense mechanisms lie. That’s the only way we can be changed at any significant or lasting level
3. FEATURE ARTICLE: The question is not why you have so little
power. The question is what are you doing with the power you have?
Grandiosity and despair are evil twins. When you see one of them, the other is around somewhere. When we think about changing the world, making a difference, doing something about the problems
around us ... what so often stops us short is the sense that what we do needs to be big and great, or it's not worth doing. The needs of the world are so massive, and our contributions seem so small. So we convince ourselves that we need to make big, grandiose gestures. Anything less feels insignificant. Next stop: despair.
Enter Danusha Veronica Goska. Listen to her story, as recounted in the wonderful book, "The Impossible Will Take a Little While."
It was September in Bloomington, Indiana. As part of the conference on Spirituality and Ecology: No
Separation, a group of concerned citizens was gathered in the basement of St. Paul Catholic Center. They were thinking and talking about living their ideals. Some had planted trees in Africa. Some described ways that they honor the indigenous spirit of a place, and their own ancestors. Elderly nuns and young feminists recounted their part in women's struggle. One frustrated woman voiced the nagging worry of many. 'I want to do something, but what can I do? I'm just one person, an average
person. I can't have an impact. I live with the despair of my own powerlessness. I can't bring myself to do anything. The world is so screwed up, and I have so little power. I feel so paralyzed.'
I practically exploded.
Years before I had been stricken by a debilitating illness. Perilymph fistula's symptoms are like those of multiple sclerosis. On some days I was functional. On others, and I could never predict when these days would strike, I was literally, not metaphorically, paralyzed. I couldn't leave the house; I could barely stand up. I had moved to Bloomington for grad school. I know no one in
town. I couldn't get health care because I hadn't enough money, and the Social Security administration, against the advice of its own physician and vocational advisors, denied my claim.
That's why I imitated Mount Vesuvius when the conference participant claimed that just one person, one average
person, can't do anything significant to make the world a better place; that the only logical option was passivity, surrender, and despair.
I raised my hand and spoke. "I have an illness that causes intermittent bouts of paralysis," I explained. "And that paralysis has taught me something. It
has taught me that my protestations of my own powerlessness are bogus. Yes, some days I can't move or see. And the difference between being able to walk across the room and not being able to walk across the room is epic.
"I commute to campus by foot along a railroad track. In spring, I come across
turtles who had gotten stuck. The track is littered with the hollowing shells of turtles that couldn't escape the rails. So, I bend over, and I pick up the still living trapped turtles that I do find. I carry them to a wooded area and let them go. For those turtles, that much power that I have is enough.
"I'm just like those turtles. When I have been sick and housebound for days, I wish someone -- anyone -- would talk to me. To hear a human voice say my name; to be touched: that would mean the world to me.
"One day an attack hit me while I was walking home from campus. It was a snowy day.
There was snow on the ground, and more snow was falling from the sky. I struggled with each step; wobbled and wove across the road. I must have looked like a drunk. One of my neighbors, whom I had never met, stopped and asked if I was okay. He drove me home.
"He didn't hand me the thousands of dollars I
needed for surgery. He didn't take me in and empty my puke bucket. He just gave me one ride, one day. I'm still grateful to him and touched by his gesture.
"I'd lived in the neighborhood for years, and so far he as been the only one to stop. The problem is not that we have so little power. The
problem is that we don't use the power that we have."
Why do we deny that power? Why do we not honor what we can do?
4. Quote of the
week:
"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic." —Anais Nin
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