The Direction of Intention

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Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Bob is on my mind today so I found this in the archives. It’s a snippet from a longer piece and I delight in sharing Bob with you:

Before his life as a gardener Bob was a movie executive. He was Icarus and flew too close to the sun. He lived a fast paced life and was enamored with the bright lights and the prestige of his position. He told me that his relationships were superficial and based on usury and status. He lived in that cocktail culture (you know the one) in which you smile and look over the shoulder of the person with whom you are talking to see if there is someone else more important at the party. The higher he flew the emptier his life became. One day while previewing a film in his private viewing studio he stood up, not knowing why, he fled his office, got in his flashy fast car and drove east until the car ran out of gas. He abandoned it on the side of the road and kept walking. He has no memory of how he got to Santa Fe or how he got to the nunnery. He remembers the sisters teaching him to prune and to weed the plants. They taught him to care for the garden and helped him process his grief and eventually reclaim his sanity. It was a long fall and a slow slog out of a muddy depression.

Having lived a life of wealth without meaning, consumption without substance – and having died to it – Bob had eyes uncluttered by the debris of excess that obscures most of our lives. He released his American-style attachment to lack and ceased trying to fill the gap with stuff and status. He stepped into the gap. He was powerful. Most people feared him so they wrote him off; “he was a loser,” he was “just a gardener.”

Recently one of the participants in a tele-coaching class asked, “Why don’t we do what we want to do? Why don’t we do what we know is good for us, when we know it is good for us?” In other words, why do we desire to be a writer but refuse to make time in our lives to write; why do we continue smoking even when we know it will kill us; why do we yearn for something more and turn on the television to blot out the yearning?

To do those things you have to let go of other things, you have to lean into something bigger.

I’ve come to believe that asking the question, “why?” often doesn’t matter. There is an action and there is the story you wrap around that action. In fact, asking “why” can be a dodge, a defense against making the change you want to make. It is to believe that if you can rationalize your behavior, if you can possibly understand what you do, you will change it. Despite what we want to think, there is no sense to be made of yearning, there is no rational explanation for passion; those impulses swim in pools deeper than the intellect can reach.

Bob asked himself the question “why” for years: “why do I feel so empty?” He had to fall to the earth before he stopped asking “why?” He was in love with the idea of success and traded away the essential for the superficial. He was crushed by his own social expectations. After Bob re-emerged he no longer concerned himself with questions of worth or the angst of wondering “why.” He made different choices.

Now, Bob leans into something bigger.

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325.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I came across this post today – from the archives of another blog. It belongs in the Truly Powerful People canon because Judy is among the most powerful people I know I delight in sharing her with you:

Judy and I were approaching the crosswalk on the far side of the Town and Country Market. We had coffee in hand and were heading to the park across the small avenue en route to the harbor to sit and talk. Judy is one of my favorite people, full of laughter and learning, and my opportunities to see her are rare and precious; I want to hoard every minute with her. A blue station wagon with a forgotten six pack of beer riding on the roof of the car, turned right out of the lot and the six pack, lacking fingers or suction cups, could not make the turn, took flight and exploded in a foamy mess, littering the crosswalk with shards of glass.

Like the many pedestrians and park-goers present for the explosion, I was thinking only of myself (after all, I was in hoard-my-time-with-Judy mode) so I pretended not to see the mess or the distressed station wagon driver that had pulled over after realizing that her beer never made it into her car. Judy was also thinking of herself but unlike the rest of us, her definition of herself includes being an active, responsible member of a community. “Can I help you?” Judy asked, handing me her coffee as she walked toward the station wagon. I was already across the street heading toward the harbor completely unaware that I now had two cups of coffee in my hands. The woman’s response to Judy stopped me in my tracks. She said, “Thank you for being so human.”

I turned around, set the coffee on the curb, and helped Judy and the woman pick up glass. Judy flagged down a city truck (she wanted a broom and, of course, the next vehicle to come along was a city parks truck with every tool known to human kind). Within a few minutes, the glass was swept up, the crosswalk was safe for crossing, and the woman, the park workers and I went our separate ways each feeling better about our selves and the world. More importantly, a playground full of children watched and I assume they, too, on some level, felt better about the world. All that was required for this bit of feel-good magic was for one person, Judy, to be human.

Her very small gesture came with an enormous impact. Her ability to “be human” opened others to be human (that would be me). Her capacity to engage generated engagement. This is why I love Judy: I become more myself when I am with her because I open to the relationships around me, the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, scary potential that comes from saying things to strangers like, “Can I help you?” Life becomes simple when engagement rather than denial or resistance is the rule. Time becomes less important than relationship – which guarantees that “time” will be meaningful.

Judy knows that her quality of life is directly related to the quality of life of all the members of her community. If there is something to be done, rather than ignoring it or expending copious amounts of energy blaming others or complaining about it, Judy acts on it. She lives in choice. She knows that community is not a fixed thing but a relationship and requires all the commitment, tolerance and dedication that powerful relationships deserve – it is messy and it’s hers to do. And, she wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

John is very present with me today. I haven’t seen or talked with him in years yet I feel as if he is sitting in the room with me. It’s odd. John is one of my heroes. I met him when he was 15 years old and he already knew the direction of his life path. He was going to direct plays and movies. He was fearless and capable of moving through obstacles with ease because he did not treat obstacles as reasons to stop; for John an obstacle is spice, a reason to engage.

John is dyslexic and as a young boy he was treated as if he were somehow deficient; he was placed in the “slow learner” classes and felt as if he were dying. One day he refused to go back to school until he was placed in the mainstream (whatever that means) and allowed to succeed or fail based on his work and merit. I’ve never known a harder working person.

When John was in his early 20’s he played Hamlet for me. I will always remember him, hours after rehearsal, sitting at a desk in a dark room illuminated only by a desk lamp, working with his script. For hours after the other actors had gone home, John was working his words. Years later, if I needed to know the worth of a script, I’d ask John; like Beowulf’s bees he’d transformed his nemesis dyslexia into his ally; he could see the structure of a script like no one I’ve ever known. He could see beyond the words.

The capacity to turn an obstacle into an ally is a skill all of us possess but few of us exercise. John has been a great teacher for me and I’m delighted that today he’s dropped in for a visit.

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246.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

There are two quotes that populate my old website. I love them both and together they are the bookends of what I value. Tonight I recognize that they are the acorns for this meditation on power.

The first is from Reynolds Price: “The need to tell stories is essential to us, second in necessity to nourishment and before love and shelter.” Reynolds Price was precise in his choice of language and it was not an accident that he chose the word “essential” in reference to our need for story. Story is how we make meaning of our lives; we story ourselves every minute of the day. Without the story we would wither and die just as surely as if we were deprived of water. The story that you tell yourself can be generative or toxic; it can support your growth or stunt your potential. Either way it is a story that you tell.

The second quote is from Glade Byron Addams: “Chase down your passion like it’s the last bus of the night.” Today, I spent the day in a high school and many of the kids (and teachers) have let the bus leave without them. They’ve forgotten that there was a bus to catch. I thought about this quote a lot today and wished I had the Promethean spark to rekindle their heart fire. I wanted to shout, “The bus is here and it is leaving, run now! You can catch it if you run now, bang on the door and force it to stop for you!” I wondered if they know that their passions are worth chasing.

I wondered if they know that there are passionate people in the world like Lisa, Jill and Megan that believe in them and are willingly throwing themselves in front of the bus because they think passions are worth chasing. They are amazing and carry with them that sacred spark, reigniting hearts and reminding students and teachers alike that someone cares about their passions more than their performance scores.

They know and live boldly the essential power of story. Those voices you hear as you chase that last bus of the night are these three incredible people cheering for you to run like the wind and catch your hearts desire.

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244.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Here’s a call and response from Judy. She took a look at http://www.trulypowerful.com and sent this thought: “Just a quick musing at this unworldly hour. Power in Spanish is ‘poder.’ Poder also means ‘to be able to’. So ‘disabled’ is ‘without power’… not a fair title when you look at the power within the disabled in our lives. Not sure how it all relates; perhaps you can finish my thought.”

And my idea back at her: “Do you know the term ‘label-libel?’ It is from Marshall McLuhan and means that once we slap a label on something we no longer need to think about it. Isn’t it true that we have a progressive history of labels leading to this latest word ‘disabled?’ Perhaps true poder is in the capacity to peer beyond the label, to see the potential, the possibilities, and the abilities in each and every unique human being.”

I’ve worked with and known many, many people who wear the “disabled” label on their lapels in the eyes of society. They are miracles of perseverance and power, love and gratitude, generosity and courage. They have a lot to teach the rest of us otherwise disabled folk about true power if only we have the eyes to see it.

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