My cousin Martha Mills died in a tragic car accident along with her fiancee and his business partner on Monday. Her funeral is today in Canmore, Alberta. If you’re so inclined, spare a prayer for her parents and her brothers, as well as the families of the others.
It’s funny how I never really knew Martha. When she was a baby I moved to the UK and when I returned I was in high school and she was beginning kindergarten. By the time I went away to university and then got on with my life, I saw her only very occasionally. But in 1996, when my father’s family sold my grandparent’s summer cottage, we all gathered there for a reunion. I was amazed to meet this confident young woman who, for all intents and purposes, had appeared out of nowhere. I had only remembered her as a baby, or a small quiet kid, and her transformation was amazing.
She had been living in Canmore for the past few years with her fiancee Sean. By all accounts they were soul mates, the best of friends and true partners. I wish I had known them better.
Sogyal Rinpoche, in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, counsels that because we are all going to die at some point, we should treat everyone with the compassion that you would normally reserve for a dying person. It’s events like this that really remind us how fragile life can be, and how much more mindful we should be in our daily relationships with each other.
My three year old son is a constant source of amusement and awe. Here are some of the questions he asked me today:
- How low is the earth?
- What part of the earth spins? – The outside, Finn – What part of the outside? Just the part we are standing on or the part that goes all the way to space?
- How did I get here? – a short form of the birds and the bees – Yes, I know that, but how did my aliveness get in?
Any answers you might have would be gratefully appreciated.
Open Space Technology works on passion bounded by responsibility. It’s about people finding what they want to do and assembling the resources around them to make that happen. It’s about support those people and their ideas with resources and openness. It really works, not just for meetings, but for organizational structures as well. It’s about redefining measurements of success and letting go of control.
Now a new book has come out about the practice of very Open Space-like principles at the Brazillian holding company Semco:
It’s our lack of formal structure, our willingness to let workers follow their interests and their instincts when choosing jobs or projects.
It’s our insistence that workers seek personal challenges and satisfaction before trying to meet the company’s goals.
It’s our commitment to encouraging employees to ramble through their day or week so that they will meander into new ideas and new business opportunities.
It’s our philosophy of embracing democracy and open communication, and inciting questions and dissent in the workplace.
On-the-job democracy isn’t just a lofty concept but a better, more profitable way to do things. We all demand democracy in every other aspect of our lives and culture. People are considered adults in their private lives, at the bank, at their children’s schools, with family and among friends–so why are they suddenly treated like adolescents at work? Why can’t workers be involved in choosing their own leaders? Why shouldn’t they manage themselves? Why can’t they speak up–challenge, question, share information openly?
What is it about this kind of model that makes people eschew it?
Thanks to Jeremy for the link.
Following up on my rant/question of yesterday. Today I met two doctors who I like alot, one of whom I count as a friend and one who is new to me and I was reminded again that what matters is creating conversations where parts of a system talk to one another. We can’t simply write off the whole system because there is wisdom within it that we need to draw us forward. There is also wisdom outside of it too, wisdom that really maters. In the bigger system, convening conversations, like what we did in Chicago matters a lot. In the body-as-system creating conversations with respect to one’s health means looking at everything holistically and inviting the healthy parts to talk to one another, be those cells, organs or caregivers.
Furthermore, Harry’s comments on yesterday’s post has me thinking about that edge I was trying to get at yesterday.
…I think she and her colleagues are members of a revolutionary, intellectual vanguard. The amount of influence they have for decency is miniscule in proportion to the ideological support they give, however inadvertently, to high powered snake oil salesmen and police state visionaries.
That’s a pretty direct statement. It’s why I am not a libertarian, willing to give over all of these areas to the kinds of forces that fill a vacuum with power and money. Instead, I want to enable communities and individuals to be able to care foir themselves and each other in a way that supports the capacity required to do that. I’m trying to be both optimistic, supportive and on guard against the kinds of people that Harry describes as “snake oil salesmen and police state visionaries.”
I feel like I’m rambling on here…something is niggling away in my brain, and I’m looking for words, ideas and metaphors to describe it.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Through Euan, I found out that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the author of On Death and Dying, herself died on Wednesday.
Her work on the grief cycle especially has been very influential in my own life in dealing with people, organizations and communities undergoing deep change. But her legacy, as David Weinberger points out, may be that she gave North American culture a language for talk about death and being with dying people.