I have an approximately $300 credit with WestJet for sale. It’s good until the end of April, and fully transferable. If you are interested, drop me a line (chris AT chriscorrigan.com) and I’ll make the arrangements to transfer it to you.
Just to plug WestJet for a moment: I made this booking back in the spring for a conference in Edmonton which I had to cancel at the last moment. WestJet’s transfer policy is this: your credit is good for a year. Transfer it to anyone you like, just call us and let us know. The whole procedure takes less than two minutes.
Is there any reason it has to be more complicated than that?
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Following on from the last posting on the labour of gratitude, I’d like to take a slight deviation back to the introduction of “The Gift” where Lewis Hyde is writing about how we receive the fruits of artistic gifts:
The spirit of the artist’s gifts can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition. Our sense of harmony can hear the harmonies that Mozart heard. We may not have the power to proffer our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come to recognize, and in a sense receive, the endowments of our being through the agency of his creation…When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts.”
This was foremost in my mind when I attended Jon’s session at the Giving Conference on art and mental models. The idea is that we are all gifted with resources to create and receive artistic expressions. When art really affects us (moves us, pun intended) it activates these resources. It makes us want to create, to engage in a form of the labour of gratitude that leads to further creative activity.
We don’t need to be great composers to understand Mozart’s harmony, and the more we listen to it, the more we recognize it and the deeper we respond. We may yet evolve into composers, but I think the real value of a creative response to a creative expression is that it triggers something of a poetic impulse in us to respond creatively to the world around us. Thus the gift of art is the unlocking of the key resource for democracies and thriving societies: creative citizenship.
You don’t need to make poems or create music or draw figures to put this creative impulse to use. Creative entrepreneurship, citizenship and responses to societal problems all become arenas for the expression of this impulse. Through those arenas, we share our gifts with others and perpetuate the cycle. We become artists engaged in the collaborative creation of the world we want.
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Here is a brief interlude from “The Gift” to give a real life case of how the gift theory at work.
Susan Kerr convened a session at the Giving Conference in Chicago on July 10 on the book “The Gift.” I attended the session because of a conversation we had during which she pulled out a copy of the book and read some passages about the gift creating bonds and commodities creating boundaries.
I was so taken with the book that Jill Perkins gave me her copy. I took that copy, cracked it open on the el train heading to O’Hare airport on July 12. On the flight home I read most of the first part of the book. I went directly from my home to Cortes Island to spend a week with my family and in-laws, one of whom, Peter Frost, was in the process of writing a chapter for a soon-to-be-published organizational handbook based on his book “Toxic Emotions At Work.” I tell him about “The Gift,” he cracks it open and gets taken with the ideas of gifts as bonding, commodities as bounding. Within a day he includes the line “Compassion is a gift, not a commodity (Hyde 1979)” at the conclusion of the handbook, which gets into the draft and submitted to his editors on July 18.
Within a week of this marvelous conversation, Susan’s gift to me has made it from Chicago to Cortes Island to some editorial office in New York where it becomes a small part of a widely distributed, soon to be published organizational management handbook.
Money hasn’t changed hands. None of us have engaged in any kind of transaction around this idea. As a result, the whole thing flowed quickly and effectively and graciously around North America and we’re all just a little bit closer.
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The Homeless World Cup of Soccer is about to start this week. The tournament brings together national teams from around the world composed entirely of homeless soccer players. Alongside the tournament are meeting on strategies to combat homelessness.
At an Aboriginal youth gathering I was at yesterday, this grabbed a little bit of attention. Some ideas got kicked around, including a British Columbia Aboriginal homeless soccer tournament and maybe the entry of a First Nations team in the 2005 Homeless World Cup in New York.
Check the rules section of the website, where you will find how soccer has been modified to fit in a street for this tournament. Has someone nominated this crowd for some kind of Innovative Social Practice award yet?
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Chapter three of “The Gift” is called “The Labor of Gratitude.” In it Hyde examines the nature of the transformative gift, the gift that works a transformation in the recipient. These kinds of gifts are very close to my heart, for they include teachings (received from Elders, mentors and other teachers) and, in a purely prosaic context, the kind of information received from people in processes like stakeholder consultations and organizational change initiatives.
Here’s Hyde:
In each example I have offered of a transformative gift, if the teaching begins to “take,” the recipient feels gratitude. I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is an act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms. Therefore, the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. Once this similarity has been achieved we may feel a lingering and generalized gratitude, but we won’t feel it with the urgency of true indebtedness.
This is wonderful way to capture what happens when Elders pass on teachings. We receive them in a sense as a challenge and an invitation to raise our own standards to the standards outlined in the teaching. We are also invited to find our own way of achieving the similarity that Hyde speaks of. The very best teachers, in my experience, give us something to aspire to and nurture our own discovery of the path to similarity. The labor of gratitude, the work of becoming transformed by the gift of the teaching, is ours alone. And if you have ever been a teacher, you will recognize the gift that a student gives you when she responds to your teaching by intentionally incorporating it into her life.
I think that these kinds of gifts are actually widely available to us. I do a lot of work with groups who are asking other groups for their opinions, input or collaboration. I facilitate consultation processes where stakeholder are asked for their ideas on things like policy development. I work with organizations who are creating processes to work with employees, clients and other stakeholders to effect organizational change. I work with communities that are seeking to involve more citizens in their decision making.
In every case I make a point of informing my clients that the processes we are crafting will work only if people show up and give to us willingly. (The first principles of Open Space Technology is “whoever comes is the right people” acknowledging those who show up to offer and contribute). We have an obligation to treat these people as teachers and to treat their contributions as gifts. Consultation processes fail without this depth of relationship, because if the relationship is commodified, people feel taken advantage of.
Advice given by people who are usually volunteering their time and effort, is an unrepayable gift. The only proper way to honour it is to undertake the labour of gratitude that creates a similarity between consulter and consultee. And if the fruit of that labour is not transformation, then we have approached people dishonestly and bought their trust, which is a betrayal of that trust.
This has huge implications in organizations and communities. Imagine if everyone was engaged in a way that honoured the gifts they have to offer. Imagine if people in power established a reciprocal gifting relationship with citizens, recognizing that people who contribute are doing so out of a place that cannot be quantified, but must instead be honoured with the gifts of support and connection that people in power can offer.
Hyde’s idea of the labour of gratitude gives me some nice language to deepen my own understanding of these processes.