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Reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow and soul and I came across this great quote which speaks to all this philanthropy I’ve been running across lately:
When you look at the pre-Christian version of “soul,” you see that what they meant wasn’t so much a soul that was a different substance infused or injected into the body. It referred to a quality in a person who was able to use surplus energy for the benefit of others, not needing to get it all for himself. I came to the conclusion that “soul” is really our way of thinking about not devoting all of one’s psychic energy to maximize oneself in any form, whether it’s getting comfortable, rich, famous, or wealthy. Some of that energy is also devoted to somebody else’s or something else’s well-being, or advantage, or goal. So that kind of thing is “soul” as far as I’m concerned. That’s the leading edge of evolution, where you don’t need to consume all your energy for your own purposes, but you can devote some of that energy for something that will benefit others, including the planet.
Working with Aboriginal youth, and with the Giving for Civil Society Open Space Conference in Chicago has me thinking along these lines too. Ginger Gosnell, one of the youth who was working with us in Open Space over the weekend pointed me to the project site for the Urban Native Youth Centre in Vancouver. That centre is being built be the Urban Native Youth Association, which is a group soaked in soul and passion and smarts. And they’ve just attracted a $1.2 million corporate donation to get things going.
These are the people I get to hang out with. Lucky me.
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