Eighteen months ago, my friend Avner Haramati and his family came to visit Bowen Island. Avner is a remarkable facilitator of dialogue working in Israel and elsewhere.
He travels a lot around the world, but his daughters were in North America for the first or second time in 2003. For his 18 year old daughter Michal, being in North America was a surprise. She had no idea that so many people had an opinion on Israel.
One evening while we were eating she flat out asked me why North Americans should care about Israel. I have to admit I was stuck for words. Michal is a bright woman who understands at a gut level the complexities of the situation in Israel. She lives in the middle of it and she struggles with what is going on. She found it unimaginable that people who had never been to her country were so certain about their positions on the conflict.
Michal challenged me to find another way to relate to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Since then I have been trying hard to practice a form of witnessing which means giving considerate and dispassionate attention to a situation and holding a belief in its resolution. As a facilitator this is exactly what I do with groups. To do something different with respect to the wider world seems inauthentic.
Today Nancy McPhee, a hosting colleague pointed me to The Third Side a website from “Getting to Yes” co-author William Ury. It describes these practices and the need for a “third side” in complex situations in order to hold open the complexity that both creates difficulties and holds the promise of their resolution.
Here is what Ury distills the practice to:
The Third Side offers a promising new way to look at the conflicts around us. The Third Side is the community – us – in action protecting our most precious interests in safety and well-being. It suggests ten practical roles any of us can play on a daily basis to stop destructive fighting in our families, at work, in our schools, and in the world. Each of our individual actions is like a single spider web, fragile perhaps but, when united with others, capable of halting the lion of war. Although the Third Side is in its infancy in our modern-day societies, it has been used effectively by simpler cultures for millennia to reduce violence and promote dialogue.
The site is still in development and some of the tools are forthcoming, but keep an eye on it. The resources and question sheets look promising.
Share:
Just back from my own personal blogwalk with Seb Paquet who popped over the Bowen for the afternoon. We went for a stroll down to Cape Roger Curtis, which is the soutwestern headland of our island sticking out into the Strait of Georgia. Surrounded by tugboats and logbooms, a lighthouse and a craggy arbutus tree, we talked about blogging, the shift from a socity of experts to a society of co-creative learners and other assorted and interesting topics. It was great to meet Seb, who joins the ranks of bloggers who have pitched up here on Bowen for a walk and a talk (including people like Rob Paterson, Ashley Cooper, Christy Lee-Engle, Jon Husband, Michael Herman, Cody Clark and Fred First’s son Nathan!).
Seb and I shared the observation that meeting bloggers we like in person has never been surprising. It has always resulted in an extension of our friendship into the real world, convincing us that blogging is not just an ethereal exercise but in fact a real world practice of trust building.
Seb has lots of interesting things to say and great ideas went shooting back anbd forth between us all afternoon But the one that is sticking at the moment is the idea of blogging as a new form of currency, which is something I haven’t heard or noticed before. He used the example of Suw Charman who is staying at Jon Husband’s place during Northern Voice and how, without the relationship established through blogging, it would have cost her a lot more to stay in Vancouver during the conference. This is not to say that blogging is a transactional activity but rather that it does have real world value, in the social and economic spheres. Micheal will groove on that idea.
I was sorry not to make Northern Voice but I wasn’t even supposed to be here this weekend, so when my job got postponed I seized the opportunity to stay home, watch Blackadder, drink tea and enjoy the spring-like weather with the kids. Having Seb around was a lovely bonus.
Ahhhh.
Share:
The Northern Voice blogging conference was going on yesterday just over the water from me in Vancouver. I’m not there, electing instead to stay here on Bowen Island and get a weekend of nothingness in. There has been a lot of travel lately.
However I kept up with the goings on through Nancy White’s blog which has set new standards for conference blogging in terms of pure output.
I’m also due to receive an oral report of the goings-on from Seb, who will arriving on Bowen this afternoon to join my family for a walk down at Cape Roger Curtis.
Share:
Apropos of my post a couple of days back on vision and action comes a nice quote from Flemming:
The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.
–Buckminster Fuller
That’s one to save for sure.
Share:
The Indian Rope Trick, whereby a “fakir” suspends a rope in mid air and has an accomplice climb it, provides a rich ground to examine the enduring nature of mental models and other stories we force ourselves to believe. The New York Times > Books >This whole piece is worth the read but here’s the money shot:
So…perhaps the true secret of the Indian Rope Trick is the way the supple human memory combines events we’ve really seen with legends we’ve only heard, and shapes them into the best possible story to tell our grandchildren.”
What’s interesting to me is to look at why we have need of such a story? What does a belief in that story give us?
Good questions for all the stories that imbue our lives with meaning and richness, true or not!