In my move to WordPress, this post went missing…here it is republished.
Jack on productive [tag]waiting[/tag]:
Waiting is a fact of life. We wait in line, on hold, for people to get back to us, for traffic lights to change, for parking spaces to open up, for solutions to appear, for consensus to be built, for projects to move forward.
What is unproductive waiting … and what is productive waiting?
Two pieces, for me.
First, there is the kind of waiting when our minds are not united with the task at hand, and second there is the kind of waiting when we are fully engaged.
On the first one, the waiting in lines, on hold and so on, we can choose to be mindful about that waiting or use that waiting to do something else. I think the question then starts to come apart, for there can be no such thing as productive or unproductive waiting. Only waiting in which we are present and waiting in which we are not.
For people wanting to meditate, but who find that they don’t have enough time in the day to do so, these periods of waiting can be true gifts. They can be like mindfulness bells, ringing us into awareness. When we are asked to wait or “forced” to wait, we can simply direct our attention to being mindfully present and practice awareness.
The second kind of waiting is the one that really fascinates me. This is waiting when we are fully engaged in the present. The most powerful experience I have ever had of this was when my children were born. Being with my partner through two long labours was a very interesting kind of waiting. Time starts to do funny things – it gets shifty and stretchy, and your awareness of it detaches and solely rests on the emergent moment. A child will soon be born, and the best you can do is to be fully alive to that possiblility. Distraction serves no purpose. In fact, with our second child, my partner commented that at one point it felt as if she was living in a ghost world. As we walked around with her living through this long and low grade labour (40 hours!) she noted that none of people we were walking past had any idea of what was going on between us and within her. She felt in the world but not at all a part of it – like a ghost. But she was deeply within the moment.
This is a deep [tag]presencing[/tag]. It is waiting for something to emerge, something life changing, possibly life threatening, and yet with no way to know how it will all unfold. Radical trust into the moment, radical readiness to accept what will come.
When Otto Scharmer writes about presencing, I think this is what he is talking about. We can practice for these kinds of moments by embracing the first kind of waiting, which gives us the capacity to appreciate the second kind on those rare occasions in our life when we are gifted that experience.
[tags]birth[/tags]
My buddy Harrison Owen has been writing like crazy a lot lately. He has been almost singlehandedly keeping the conversation going on the OSLIST, where Open Space practitioners gather to play. And the other day he launched a new paper into the mix: Opening Space for The Question.
The paper is about the concept of Nichtwissen, a German word that Harrison translates as “Unknowing”. Open Space for the Question means to cultivate a practice that has us sitting in the Unknowing, working to find where the contemplation of the question takes us. In a really good synopsis of the practice that gets us there, Harrison writes:
There is a phrase, perhaps even a practice, that comes I believe from the Quaker Tradition. It is “sitting the question.” The notion is a simple one, however hard it may be to implement for impatient knowledge seekers. When deep questions arise, Stop! Don’t move a muscle; keep your fingers off the keyboard and away from Google. Don’t talk to a soul and avoid the library. Just wallow in the question, savor it, and consider it from all angles. Go under it, around it, inside. And for goodness sake, don’t even think about an answer, for surely as the sun rises, any answer you think of will be premature. And a premature answer will not only be irrelevant, but it will also prevent you from experiencing the bitter-sweet moments that arise when sitting the question. And who knows, as you sit it may happen that the question evaporates into thin air, in which case you are spared the thankless task of finding an answer to a meaningless question. Then again, the question may become deeper and you will be consumed with the possibilities of not-knowing, and your Possibility Space will have expanded almost without limit. Nichtwissen will have given its gift.
This is what is required for emergence to happen if a large group of people are to generate innovative responses to the question before which they are sitting. It ultimately comes down to a personal practice of opening and a personal practice of grounding with a whole lot of communication and social trial and error in between.
[tags]open-space, facilitation, practice[/tags]
Merlin Mann found Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s secret to maintaining flow:
“The only solution to achieve enduring happiness, therefore, is to keep finding new opportunities to refine one’s skills: do one’s job better or faster, or expand the tasks that comprise it; find a new set of challenges more appropriate to your stage of life. Paradoxically, the feeling of happiness is only realized after the event. To acknowledge it at the time would only serve as distraction.”
This from an article in The Times called “The secrets of happiness.” Worth a read don’t you think?
I have experienced intense happiness and flow in the middle of an activity before. Once, playing at the launch of a CD of Irish music, in the middle of a set of reels (actually it was at the start of the B part of Over the Moor to Maggie) I was overcome with such intense happiness that I experienced a feeling like a star exploding in my chest. I began to weep with joy at the music we were making, and more importantly, the camaraderies of the musicians and the groove we were in. I had to stop playing and just close my eyes and experience the moment. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
Definitely a distraction to the task at hand!
A couple of stories about truth and stories. 
Yesterday on CBC Radio’s Sounds Like Canada, Shelagh Rogers interviewed Paul Rosen. Paul Rosen is the goaltender for Canada’s Sledge Hockey team, and is getting ready to head over to Turin to compete in the Paralympics.
Rosen is an amputee, having lost his leg to a persistent bacterial infection. Very early on in his new life as a one legged man he adopted a very positive outlook. His doctors were suspicious and sent him to a psychiatrist for an evaluation. At that consultation, Rosen took some water and poured it on his stump. He said to the doctor “I can water this stump five times a day for the rest of my life and the leg won’t grow back.
Faced with that reality, there were only two options: become depressed, or see the amputation as an opportunity to be a better person. Fully aware that neither option would bring back his leg, he opted for the second one.
You can hear the full interview with Paul Rosen here (opens a RealMedia file)
On the ferry coming home today I was talking with a friend who was trying to adopt a positive attitude but who thought that doing so was glossing over the reality of pain and suffering in the world. He said that he couldn’t see the glass as half-full, only half-empty. We talked for a while and I asked him what was actually true about the half full glass. We agreed that what was actually true was that an 8oz glass has 4oz of water in it. Whether you saw that as half full or half empty was entirely up to you. There was no more truth to one story than the other. Believing one over the other was not going to change the fact that there is only 4oz of water in that 8oz glass.
This is the difference between truth and stories. And so confronted with these two competing stories, why not choose the one that serves life?
[tags]paul-rosen, sledge-hockey, paralympics, stories[/tags]
Alan Watts
Listening to some wonderful podcasts from Alan Watts. In the current series, Images of God, which is made up from talks given during his lifetime, he is delivering all kinds of angles on the divine.
In the third installment of this series, he was talking about school, journeys and the dance. The point of a dance or a piece of music, is not the end, says Watts. If it was, then we would only have composers that wrote finales and audiences would only go to hear great final chords, or see people in their final positions.
No, the point of a piece of music is the way one experiences time. It’s all about the journey, the movement from here to there, the texture of moments that music or dances imparts.
From this he draws a parallel with schooling. We school in this society as if there is an end in sight, a point at which we are heading. In so doing, we teach people to sacrifice the moment for the delayed gratification of the end. And of course the end never comes. One grade finishes and the next begins. High school ends and university begins. University ends and work begins and work is simply more of the same, chasing promotions, until at some point one wakes up and realizes that one has arrived. And in fact one has always arrived and always been arriving, but we miss it constantly, and we school our children and ourselves into missing it completely as well.
Life as dance. Life as the middle phrase of the middle movement of a violin concerto, moving right on to the next one..
[tags] alan watts, unschooling[/tags]