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.
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This summer I have been gifting myself a weekly learning session with my friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk who are leading a TaKeTiNa workshop here on Bowen Island. TaKeTiNa is a moving rhythm meditation that provides a learning medium for dealing with questions, inquiries and awareness. In many ways it is like a musical version of the aikido based Warrior of the Heart training that we sometimes offer around Art of Hosting workshops. It is a physical process that seeks to short circuit the thinking mind and bring questions and insights to life.
We do this by creating difficult situations, polyrhythmic patterns using voice, stepping and hand clapping. This exploration of the edges of chaos and order is powerful, even in the short 90 minutes sessions we are doing.
Each session is offered as a learning journey, and so I have been coming the past two weeks with questions and ideas that I wanted to pursue. Yesterday I was think a lot about community and how people get left behind. In our group there were six of us, stepping, singing and clapping in ever increasing complexity. There were times when I lost the pattern and laid back into the basic drum beat, the basic vocal sounds and found my way back into the complicated rhthyms. It brought to mind a question: what violence do we do to groups of people when we have no heartbeat to come back to?
For any community or group, this heartbeat could be their deepest passion, their shared purpose or the thing they care most about. When those things aren’t visible, people get left behind, and chaotic circumstances lead to alienation and despair. So working a little with sensing the heartbeat, and arriving at a solid home place to return to.