Welcome to my fishbowl. Please feed me.
I’m going to write a book, right here in front of whoever wants to watch. Most of the time, I imagine you’ll just stare and maybe I’ll be able to make out an eyeball. While I suppose that might induce me to swim faster from time to time, I would like to ask more of you than that.
Here are some things for which I will no doubt rush to the surface:
- Share stories that support or detract from my ideas.
- Recommend people to me who are working with related ideas.
- Suggest reference material.
- Take apart my ideas. Put them back together.
- Invite other people to come to the fishbowl.
- Tell me how you might or might be able to use these ideas.
When you post your first comment, I hope you will devote a paragraph to introducing yourself, for my benefit and the benefit of other readers. Feel free to link back to your own site, if that will tell us more about you.
Posted: October 30th, 2006 under About Writing.
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Comments
Comment from Mathew Emery
Time: November 1, 2006, 5:02 am
Michael,
I working on the resurrection of an awesome program called the Community Spokes Bike Shop in Arlington, Virginia that was closed on paper last Friday due to an apparent lack of a champion up the chain of command in the county’s Parks and Recreation Department. As we revive and restructure this, I’m looking to imbed the DNA for a sustainable, authentic social enterprise. In the past, I have had several organizations shut down my project and I just found this one at the closing point and am drawing a line in the sand. Have formed a citizen team around this “Phoenix” bike shop. Look forward to the dialogue on what is an authentic organization and using that in our work serving teens and the community through this shop. http://www.savecommunityspokes.com
Best,
Mat Emery
Comment from Dave Allburn
Time: November 1, 2006, 7:03 am
Mine’s the usual. Industry outsider notices that the Emperor’s New Clothes guide policy in child sexual abuse prevention. He goes broke staking the nonprofit that designs real clothes that work but cost too much. Endeavor is kept alive by so many miraculous “saves” that he’s writing a book about about the saves themselves. Breakthrough idea arrives, making his solution affordable and saleable at last. Funding arrives too. Now comes your enlightenment: Along the way a “scarcity-culture” has set-in. Do we use up the funds bailing the boat, try to set-sail, or both? Seth Godin would advise scuttling the boat and renting a jet. It’s hard. The founder is a sailor, not a pilot, loves the boat he built, knows scuttling it scuttles him too. What now? (My answer: scuttle the boat, learn to fly.)
Comment from Larry Hanawalt
Time: November 3, 2006, 7:06 am
Michael,
I am a major gifts fundraiser for Boston’s safety net academic medical center. It is an organization that inspires me, as I begin my seventh year of employment. I have a passion for intimate conversations with people about what matters most to them. I have a passion for the possibility, for all people, of being powerful and free in relationship to time, money and love.
I see your enterprise as an inquiry into our model of life, our fundamental assumptions about how things work, about the nature of reality.
Starting with time, failure and relationships is very powerful.
I like starting with time as source or deep analogue of our relationship with scarcity/abundance of all resources: energy, money, love.
Our relationship with time is also our relationship with the eternal. Exploring my own relationship with time and eternity is a bottomless, life-long inquiry or practice.
At any moment I am either locating what’s important in the past, the future or the eternal now. It is human to “forget” that there is only the eternal now. The past can only be the past right now. The future can only be the future right now. The future isn’t in the future. The future contextualizes our thoughts and actions right now.
I can only have power right now. I can only demonstrate courage in relationship right now. I can only related to failure as feedback right now.
Making peace with time doesn’t happen once and for all, in my experience. It is a practice. It involves catching myself worrying (someone called worry a prayer for disaster), or observing myself feeling regretful.
Making peace with time means that I am generating/creating/envisioning a future that gives me power in the present, and that I am whole and complete with the past. I am free.
Anyone reading this who has done courses at Landmark Education will recognize that influence on my language. There are many other influences, like the writings of Thomas Merton (particularly New Seeds of Contemplation), or Brother Lawrence or hundreds of other poets and mystics and philosphers who have grappled with the core questions about the nature of being human.
Making peace with time is, for me, a spiritual practice. It is the way I go about my work each day. Pulling in another of your themes, this practice consists primarly in noticing my failure to be at peace with time. The “pull” of the workplace is to be in a losing battle with time.
One more thing. When I am being at peace with time, time becomes a powerful tool. It is no longer something outside of me that ticks on inexorably, something over which I have no power. I am at the source of time, as a human creation. Time as we know it exists only in language. Human beings made it up. In math and physics, there is no “arrow” of time.
When I am being at peace with time, my calendar becomes my most powerful tool. I schedule the outcomes that I intend and desire. Scheduling is an operative practice of for expressing and delivering on my commitments.
When I am at peace with time, all is well. There is no pressure. I am free to take the actions that will make the greatest difference. I am free to listen for the calling of my life’s purpose, and to respond authentically.
One of the most important lessons learned from many years of participation at Landmark Education is that integrity and authenticity are contexts, distinctions, not things. When I am standing in a context of integrity and authenticity, I will notice where integrity and authenticity are missing. I will notice where I am failing to be authentic. I will notice opportunities are “add” integrity.
For example, I notice that I am writing this during working hours. As much as I am drawn to this, integrity calls for me to be taking actions that contribute to the realization of my work goals.
Having said that, I declare that they way I have spent these minutes will contribute to the achievement of my current work goal, which is to raise an additional $4 million between now and the end of the year to endow cancer patient support services in a cancer center that opened this month at Boston Medical Center. That is my intention and my prayer. It is a challenge that requires being at peace with time.
Larry
Pingback from The Authentic Organization » Sustainability and Organizational DNA
Time: November 4, 2006, 4:02 pm
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Pingback from The Authentic Organization » Authenticity, Time, and Freedom
Time: November 4, 2006, 4:06 pm
[...] In a long, encouraging comment, Larry Hanawalt writes: Making peace with time means that I am generating/creating/envisioning a future that gives me power in the present, and that I am whole and complete with the past. I am free. (and much more) [...]
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