Beware a rant.
I was in a conversation today with a friend of mine who is a true visionary. He is an artist who works with metal, rocks and even entire landscapes. He is a project manager and has overseen some of the biggest developments on our island, and some of the biggest ones in the Lower Mainland. He cares deeply about our shared home and sees all kinds of potential for Bowen Island to become a true innovative leader in the world. he knows the municipal tools inside an out, and looks at our official community plan and sees a joke. As an artist he sees our island in three dimensions, he sees our social landscape in terms of centuries, he sees possibility oozing out of every patch pf land, and every land use decision and every corner of the landscape, possibility that includes food production and long term restoration of old growth habitat and community cultural creativity and the chance to make a good, but modest living here.
Yet he isn’t bitter – on the contrary he is full of possibility AND he has a pretty good idea of how to get there. He understands chaos and complexity and living systems and how to create change without succumbing to control. As I listened to him speak about the small but very very deep shifts it would take to make our island truly self-sufficient, it occurred to me that without my friends visionary thinking and novel way of seeing, we are doomed as a culture. And the problem is that the kinds of tools that are available to us to plan and govern our futures are not about vision, they are about seeing.
Think about it. Most municipal governments are reluctant to say “let’s set aside that 200 acres of land for 300 years so that there will be old growth forest there in the future.” It seems pollyanna-ish. It seems like the kind of thing that is a good intention, but how could you ever do it, and what about the pressing needs of our people now? Never mind that it is actually easy and possible and wise, it is simply easier to look at what is around you now and manage what you have.
What does it take for organizations, communities and societies to recognize that a worldview based on vision is the way to secure a future, whereas one based on seeing is simply the one that got us to this mess in the first place. I note that the Liberal leader, positioning himself for an election victory, has chosen to make his campaign about restoring economic growth. With everything happening in the world right now, with the demand for leadership that takes us beyond the worldview that has mired us on the brink of economic and environmental catastrophe, Michael Ignatieff’s postion is that he will restore something that is bound to come around sooner or later in a cyclical capitalist society.
The reason he does this is because the mind set of measurable, observable short term results is king in this society. No one is going to get elected talking about stopping rampant economic growth and stopping the more is better mindset. Even if we are engaged in long term projects, someone always wants an indicator to know that we are on the right path. The management mindset has trapped us in the ever present short term. We are like a cigarette smoker dying of lung cancer who keeps having one last butt.
What does it take to do something with no expectation for gain, recognition or results? Just to do it because it restores more life to the future than we have now. A basic principle: leave more for the future than you took for the present. Could we be that mature? How much longer with this childish obsession with consumption and instant gratification go on?
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As summer begins to close here on the west coast of Canada, I’m starting to head back to work, digging into to 20 or so projects that will unfold in the next nine months, which will take me across Canada, the US, Hawaii, Estonia, Denmark and Australia. And as I look ahead to my work year that is restarting, I notice that this is the tenth time that I have done this.
Indeed ten years ago this day, as a precocious 31 year old fed up with travel (ironically) and the various despairs of working for the federal government, I quit my job and hung out a shingle. August 31 was my last day of employment. My first contract was a retainer with the BC Assembly of First Nations, working with Chris Robertson and the then vice-chief Satsan (Herb George). Chris and Herb were (and still are) both enamoured with Open Space Technology and were wondering how we could use it for various organizing around Aboriginial rights and title. That retainer – for which I will always be grateful – gave me a start in the freelance world that was all I needed to build a pretty solid little practice. Since then, I have facilitated literally hundreds of gatherings from two person retreats to international conferences using a variety of participatory methodologies.
In the ten years since I went out on my own, I have been anything but lonely. I have worked with people from various communities of practice, including Open Space, World Cafe, Genuine Contact and most deeply, the Art of Hosting. I have, in the words of song writer Dougie MacLean “moved and kept on moving, proved the points that needed proving, lost the friends that needed losing and found others on the way.” It has mostly been an incredibly rich journey,working with tiny communities and huge coporations, young and radical youth and wise Elders. I have friends and colleagues in dozens of countries on every continent, and count myself lucky to be in their embrace.
There is no way there was a strategic plan in place when I left my job ten years agao. I have mostly survived by holding questions, opening myself to learning, and reminding myself that I don’t have to be the expert all the time. I could never have said that where I started ten years ago would leave me here, typing a blog post outside my favourite cafe on my home island.
I have met and worked with literally tens of thousands of people over the past ten years and as I sit here and picture many of them, I feel immense gratitude for their patience, trust, support and deep friendship. Thank you to you all (and please leave a comment here saying “you’re welcome!”). My partner Caitlin and our two kids are foremost among them, for it was to spend more time with them that I originally left my job, and if there is to be one regret, it’s that travel takes me away from them too much these days. So that’s my edge to work on for the future.
And who can know what I’ll be writing about on August 31, 2019, in my 51st year, as I catch myself surprised at all that has happened.
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Check this quote:
Social scientist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971
IN an information rich world, the wealth of information means the death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence the wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
It’s just plain obvious that information consumes attention, but it is not always apparent how it is working on us.
Last night, I was at my weekly TaKeTiNa session with friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk, exploring what happens when we induce groove and confusion using rhythm, stepping and voice, and I was really struck with an exploration of the polarity between planning and doing.
One of the questions we were playing with was “What do you do with space?” The rhythmic pattern we were working with had moments of lots of space, and moments where several movements happened all at once. It was a kind of sprung rhthym, all carried over a steady beat. What I noticed was that in the spacious moments, I took time to get myself ready for the next burst of activity instead of resting in that spaciousness. The result was that, to the extent that my mind was living in the future, my body went there as well and I ended up often doing things AHEAD of the beat.
In other words there was so much information I was taking in, including information about what to do next, what to sing, how the polyrhythms worked, what else was going on in the room, that my attention to the present moment was erased and I had a hard time just DOING.
This polarity between planning and doing is familiar to me. When I meditate, and when my thoughts drift, they almost always drift to the future, to things I need to do or should be doing. I notice that this keeps me away from being in the present and actually paying attention to what is happening all around me.
In group settings, this imbalance can lead to me missing a whole bunch of information about where a group is at, if my mind is fixed on where we are going, or where we need to go.
By contrast, when I focus on the present, and on doing rather than planning, I am in balance. Balance in this case means that every part of my mind and body is HERE. Imbalance is when some part of your mind or body shifts elsewhere, and you very often topple in that case – physically or otherwise. Being present opens up the spaciousness of the present moment (what Harrison Owen calls “Expanding our Now“) and ironically opens many more possibilities and pathways for action.
So my learning from all of this is that information overload obscures attention, fills space and limits possibilities.
Think about that the next time you need to do a comprehensive environmental scan!
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“We do not find our own center. It finds us. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
— Richard Rohr
via whiskey river
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I love Bobby McFerrin, and I love what he does with music. Watch in this video how he pulls out of an audience their inherent collective talent. Beautiful!
Thanks to Thomas Arthur for the link.