37days

Come, let's ride brightly painted inner tubes, you and I

If you have watched TV commercials for the new teeniny microscopic MacBook Air, perhaps you will recognize this song by Yael Naim. Come, let's ride brightly painted inner tubes, play cymbals in a field of sunflowers, sing with a gorgeous Israeli-French accent, and realize that there is a whole big world out there, ripe for the dancing and for the floating. That's real air.

Freeze

I just love this. Love it. Art everywhere.

[seen here first]

B is for "be FOR something"

There is no virtue in being uncritical nor is it a habit to which the young are given. But criticism is only the burying beetle that gets rid of what is dead, and, since the world lives by creative and constructive forces, and not by negation and destruction, it is better to grow up in the company of prophets than of critics. -Richard Livingstone

In 2008, I won’t be against something if I can’t offer something to be for instead.

It is so very easy to criticize. It comes naturally, quickly. “What a lousy conference,” we might say. It is harder to solve, change, make better, offer constructive suggestions. We don’t take the time to fill out the conference evaluation in the kind of detail that would offer suggestions for the next time around; we’d rather just complain. It's easier! More fun!

I worked for years for a man who expected I would tell him the real truth. When others kissed up to him, he’d more often than not appear at my office door and say, “well, what did you really think.” And I would tell him.

One day, he appeared in my office door to ask that question, but he started by jokingly saying, “well, I’ve come to ask our office cynic a question…”

Hmm.

I didn’t see myself as the office cynic, but I knew in an instant from the sharp pain I felt at his words that it was, in fact, true. Sure, I was creating more than I was complaining, but I did fall on the critical side of the continuum. I had to acknowledge that while I knew why I was being intellectually critical (that is, critical of ideas and not people, though, well, what the hell, I did plenty of that too)—to move the organization to greater heights—I began to realize that looking deeper and holding us all to a higher standard often sounded negative. I would sit in endless meetings that felt mindless and center-less and make pronouncements at the end, sounding like the Lord of Doom. I was right sometimes, but even so, I often only made pronouncements and not suggestions. I needed to be for something, and not just against things.

I is for inside looking

Man need only divert his attention from searching for the solution to external questions and pose the one, true inner question of how he should lead his life, and all the external questions will be resolved in the best possible way. - Leo Tolstoy

In 2008, I will end each day by inside looking.

Naikan (nye-kahn) is a Japanese word which means €œinside looking€ or œintrospection€--seeing oneself with the mind's eye. Naikan is a structured self-reflection developed by Yoshimoto Ishin, a devout Buddhist of the Jodo Shinshu sect in Japan.

Naikan offers three questions for us to ask and answer:

What have I received from others?

What have I given to others or given back to others?

What trouble and bother have I caused them?

J is for jijnasu

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan

In 2008, I want to be a jijnasu, a seeker of wisdom, an inquirer.

When I was preparing to talk with Billy Collins the other day (doesn’t that sound casual?), Mr Brilliant was holding the paper bag while I hyperventilated, metaphorically speaking, helping me think about what questions I wanted to ask the dear poet of my dreams.

“Ask him what his favorite word is,” he said, excitedly. Mr Brilliant is a great cataloguer of such information.

I blinked at him.

Tess ran by. “Tess!” he shouted as she sped by. “What’s your favorite word?”

“WHY!” she yelled without stopping, making a tiny circular path from living room to family room to dining room and back. Just as Mr Brilliant started to answer her, she shouted again: “WHY IS MY FAVORITE WORD!”

He beamed.

“What a fantastic favorite word,” he murmured, contentedly. “You should tell Billy Collins that ‘why’ is your four-year-old’s favorite word.”

I blinked at him.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll do that right after I pass out when he answers the phone.”

Start a diversity bookclub

In any community, there are diversity issues - the natives vs the newcomers, race issues that pit black against white, gay and straight clashes, classism - and often, we're not equipped to talk about them. Dialogue that approaches the issues head-on sometimes is too difficult, we avoid it, or we talk "at" rather than "with" those we perceive to be different from ourselves. We demonize the other and try to prove them wrong rather than understand their point of view. We don't bridge, but create both metaphoric and literal gated communities instead.

Can literature help?

Retreat to move forward

Sometimes we have to retreat to move forward.

The next 37days retreat is scheduled for September 28-30, 2007, and registration has just opened for it. Limited to 14 people, I hope you can be one of them. I'll be joined by my business partner, David Robinson, in facilitating the weekend retreat. He's magical and brings so much to the gathering. Plus, we laugh a lot.

September 28-30, 2007  / MIND THE GAP: The Power of Personal Stories

[A 37days Retreat]

“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” -James M. Barrie

If you had only 37 days to live, would you feel happy with the story you have lived thus far? How would you express that story, learn from it, leave it for others? Those are the fundamental questions behind this blog and the grounding for this unique, experiential weekend gathering focused on unmasking our personal stories to achieve greater creativity, healthier relationships, and fuller engagement in what poet Mary Oliver calls our “one wild and precious life.”

Often, there is a gap between how we wish to be seen and who we really believe ourselves to be, between the story we meant to write and the one we’ve written so far. This gap mutes the colors of our lives and inhibits the quality of our engagements with other people—in our families, our organizations, our communities. Maintaining that gap diminishes our creative impulse and often splits our intentions. Why, then, don’t we do more to shorten that distance and mind that gap?

This unique Gathering will explore these questions:
How do we make meaning of our lives through story? What are the stories we tell ourselves about others? About ourselves? How do those stories reduce us? What learning and significances are right in front of us, in the stories of our days? How can we summon the courage to move beyond the limits of who we think we are into what we were meant to be? How can we relinquish our “role” in order to discover who we might be beneath the mask?  What treasures can be found in the in-between space between me and you, between perception and preconception, between my Self and the Other?

We’ll explore concepts such as:  Life as a finite or an infinite game, intention and direction, wicked problems & tame solutions, and naming our vicious and virtuous circles, those patterns that either reduce us or allow us to live expansively.

Learning Activities / We will: 

• Use improv theatre, ritual, metaphor, mask, story, writing, and other narrative tools
• Explore “role” and other expressive personal and organizational “masks”
• Be 85% experiential--not in the sense of simulations or role plays—but as unmasked engagement with others
• Invite participants to extract meaning from experiences as a collaborative learning community
• Use focused free writes to help participants frame experiences in their own language for deeper exploration
• Experience how changing ourselves can deeply impact our families, communities and organizations.

Here's what people had to say about the last 37days retreat:

“You created a safe environment for valuable learning.”

“I loved the gentle humor that developed in the group, the inclusive quality of the experience, and the practical writing techniques that I’ve probably encoded into my cells.”

“You don’t facilitate as if to say ‘we are the leaders.’ You’re great at taking cues from the group.”

“The story you wove through the whole weekend was masterful and amazing.”

“Your facilitation is beautifully collaborative.”

“Your ability to bring movement and play into the experience, and at the same time, relate that play to deeper concepts, was truly a pleasure to experience and to watch.”

“I appreciate all the thought, caring, and preparation you put into making the retreat weekend transformational for all of us.”

 Cost / To honor the impulse of giving behind 37days, this retreat is offered for a reduced fee of $475-775 inclusive of tuition, materials, housing, and all meals. Please pay what you can in that range.

Location / Our 2007 retreats will be held at the Bend of Ivy Lodge in Asheville, North Carolina. Go here for more information and registration forms for this and other 2007 retreats (PDF).

We'd love to have you join us there. It won't be the same without you.

Narrow your search

“A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.” – James Matthew Barrie

There is something about a new year’s eve that drives me into a cleaning frenzy, as if that one day of activity will excuse the whole previous year of dust balls like small cows and paper piles such as the world has never seen. It is a day that professional organizers must both hate and love, all those untrained plebes thinking they could create organization systems on their own. This year it was aided by a pouring rain all day and all night, forcing me inside to face the Mess That is Mine.

Draw circles

“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays -"Circles”

Let’s imagine that all learning takes place in a dense, primordial forest, like the one you drive through on the way from Forest Grove, Oregon, to Manzanita on the coast. Get off the highway and into the woods and every once in a blue moon, there is a clearing just big enough for a brilliant blue sky or glowing moon to shine through onto a miniscule circular spot on the forest floor, its translucence revealing flowers working hard to bloom between dark green trees. That tiny shot of light is learning, a double espresso of insight, light, then dark again.

That light has a big job, illuminating the way, one circle at a time.

I am spending a lot of time thinking about dense woods, sun, circles, lines, and infinite games these days.

Consider the flea

“And now let us welcome the New Year
Full of things that have never been.” -Rainer Maria Rilke

I started writing this on day 5 of a 3-day business trip.

[As an aside, I’m pretty confident that I uncovered a Big Universal Truth on this trip: travel brings out the absolute very best in people.]

Freezing rain and fog and fate forced me to endure decades in airports over those extra two days. Delayed in Chicago, I missed my 11pm connection which, it turns out, was cancelled anyway. Somehow, at the moment I realized it was cancelled, it seemed lucky since I would have missed it. When a cancelled flight feels like a lottery win, something’s wrong.

Desperate for sleep after many false starts (“The plane is in the air! It’ll be here soon so we can bundle you up in tiny seats and get you right home—just sit tight! Aww…it was diverted again so we’re bringing in a plane from Azerbaijan and a crew from Cape Verde—stay in the gate area because I’m sure they’ll be here soon”), I bought a book and headed to the Marriott sitting on the runway, a veritable landing strip of a hotel.