My dad is a smart guy (although he doesn’t blog enough!). His has been retired for a few years now, having paid his dues in middle management in the insurance business with a short stint in the provincial public service. As a retiree he has been more than active in his community in Ontario, building bridges on the Bruce Trail, chairing his local library board and generally being an active citizen in his village.
He has picked up a fair amount of wisdom over the years, and among his favourite observations is that every human endeavour, whether for profit or not, is essentially a volunteer effort. Nothing happens in organizations and communities without people stepping up and agreeing to do the job. No matter how much you are paid to do a job, the actual DOING of it hinges on the same thing that drives people to volunteer.
Today I note a post at Nipun’s blog (my new favourite read) that my dad will love:
Volunteerism is all personal effort. So, for me, it’s a no brainer that personal effort work is infinitely better than contractual work. But personal effort comes with baggage — personal laziness and personal ego. Lot of volunteers slack off and those that don’t are generally stuck in their egos; and the only way to counter that is a strong base of spirituality.
There is an article attached top that post about discretionary effort that rings true too.
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Help!
I love Firefox. But today as I was surfing, I closed it down and it crashed. When I went to restart it, it refused to start up and instead offered to tell Micrsoift about the problem.
So after trying that a few times, I thought I might take this chance to upgrade to 1.0. Downloaded that and did it, all set up, but get the same launch problem. It just won’t open.
Decide to do an uninstall. Get rid of all the versions (except that 0.9 now can’t find an uninstall directory) and I scrubbed the registry even of all the Mozilla directories there, following a tip I read about. Reinstalled 1.0 and no change. I can’t open it, and I fear I will never be able to run Firefox again.
I’m running Windows XP. So far I haven’t found any help online that has fixed this for me. How about you guys out there?
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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.
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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.
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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.