Take A Number

Posted on December 21, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

“A person without a story does not exist.” Shekhar Kapur

Recently, I had to deliver a tax document to the IRS building downtown. Over a year ago I received a letter saying, “Congratulations, you’ve been randomly selected for a special educational audit….” I turns out that it was not a helpful educational audit in store for me but a year of medieval torture. My personal IRS agent has been trying to break me on the wheel. He is new to his job and has something to prove. His investigation is proving fruitless – which has only served to drive him into an income tax fervor, a numbers induced fanaticism – he’s redoubled his efforts, turning over figures, dumping columns, reaching back into my infancy to find anything to justify his time. And through it all I have, despite the stated intention of the audit, remained fairly uneducated and am now distinctly ungrateful for my random selection.

Luckily for me I have an accountant with a sense of humor. She represented me in all of his demands so I’d not met my inquisitor. She told me, “I’ve been doing this for a long time but never met anyone so singly dedicated to a lost cause.” And then she said, “He’s just cold. I think he’s angry about his life and is taking it out on you.” After 12 months – a full year of rooting through my documents, issuing threats, fines, fines revoked, re-requests, forms and re-forms 1120s, 4828, 2848, 6525a, I decided it was time to meet him. He sent a letter demanding that I deliver an original document, the scan that he initially requested was not good enough so he wanted the original and gave me 24 hours to comply (he sent his request via US Mail and I received it 4 days after his deadline). His request for the original was my opportunity to meet this very cold man.

When I first passed through the metal detectors a security guard told me to start my quest on the 34th floor. Exiting the elevator I came to a desk with a “take a number” machine. No human was in sight so I took a number. I realized at that moment that I’d left normal reality and was in Dante’s Inferno. This was the first level of hell. My number flashed on a screen and I was directed to find cubicle 8. Walking down a row of empty cubicles (there were rows of empty cubicles) I came at last to a person imprisoned behind a glass partition. She would not look at me and instructed me to go to the 16th floor. I was descending to the next level. Where was my Virgil?

On the 16th floor, although there were long corridors, I found 3 wall phones next to a locked door. There were no signs. There was not another human. Picking up a phone a person came on the line, listened to my quest and advised me to pick up another phone. My second choice of phone proved no different so I finally found a person through phone number 3 who told me to go to the 24th floor. (note: I am not making this up). On the 24th floor I found an identical set of phones and a single locked door. I looked around to see if I was on Candid Camera; how could I be sure that I’d traveled to another floor? What if this was Ellen DeGeneres’s idea of a joke and I was on live TV and the studio audience was howling at my incredulity? Or, perhaps I’d been hit by a bus and died and this was my version of Sisyphus. It only took two phones to find my tax man. A monotone voice told me that he’d be out in a moment. I made sure there was no food in my teeth – just in case Ellen came around the corner to say, “Isn’t this funny?”

My special agent came timidly out the door. He was very young – someone’s little brother, a son. He was not yet a man and he was shaking. I suddenly realized that he was afraid of me, afraid that I’d yell at him or perhaps hurt him. I knew in that moment that he knew that his audit was unreasonable and mean-spirited. He’d hoped that he’d never have to meet me. The moment was awful for him; filled with shame. I was seeing the Oz behind the curtain and he hated having to reveal himself. He was playing a power-over game with me because he had no real power in his life. I saw it and so did he. I held out my hand and said quietly that I thought it was time that I met him and handed him the original document. As Ann Quinn taught me, I killed him with kindness. Like his counterpart in the cubicle on floor 34, he was unable to look at me. He took the piece of paper and, visibly relieved, he disappeared again behind the door. “I am not in hell,” I thought, “…this man is. This man must come here everyday.”

As I left the building, returning to the land of light and humanity, I felt sick at the system that requires a young man to be a bully in order to feel powerful. His shame was palpable and I am certain I will be hammered because I saw his truth. As a nation we are asking ourselves serious questions about what caused such a horrific act of violence at an elementary school. We look for causes instead of the daily rituals that leave a soul so empty and frustrated that he must flame out of existence and take others with him as the only act of meaning that he can imagine. It is a failure of imagination; life in an empty story. Our rituals have descended to the level of collecting stuff and there is no substance or support to be found there. The daily rituals of our lives are meant to open us to the greater identification with deep meaning and sacred connectivity – with each other and our world. Our daily rituals are meant to bring us to the recognition of the enormity of being alive. I turned back and looked at this building and mourned for the people that must take their hearts from their bodies to go to work everyday; we are a tribe that only pretends to have a story. My heart broke for the young tax man who so early in life has made the choice to not exist.

Filed under: Perspective, Random, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

Stand In The Cornfield

Posted on December 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Many years ago I painted a portrait of my father standing in a cornfield. It was an odd painting for me to do at the time as I’d stopped doing portraits years before. I just had to do it. I wasn’t working from a photograph; I just knew he had to be standing in a cornfield. It is a painting I never show. It is a painting of yearning fulfilled.

My father was born in a small farming town in Iowa and spent his adult life yearning to live in the place of his birth. He moved for work and then for love and although he knew where he wanted to be, he could not find a way to return. I put him in the cornfield because symbolically that was where he most wanted to be: in a small community, contained, where life made sense, where people knew where they fit and where people were not in so much of a hurry that they would stop and talk.

Yearning is a funny thing. Yearning is a necessary thing. Yearning is not what is missing; it is the space between where you are and where you want to be. Yearning can be fuel. It can help clarify what you want and energize your actions toward manifesting your desire. Or, it can twist your guts and make you bitter: unspent energy needs to do something and if it is not moving toward your fulfillment it will knot your belly and make your neck tense. Once in a class, I watched several people give speeches. Many put their energy into the speech and where poised, present. Many others were ungrounded and unconsciously pounded the podium or wiggled their legs; energy must have someplace to go.

Yearning can be proof of separation (“I don’t have what I want”) or proof of connectivity (“this is what I will create”). The difference lives in how you define yourself: if you are in this life looking for what you can get, your yearning will probably feel a lot like separation. If you are in this life living according to what you bring to it, your yearning will be an umbilical cord to what you will create and will nourish you in the creating.

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Write! Right!

Posted on December 11, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

5 times this fall I have been asked, “So, how can I get your book?” My inner high achiever wiggles when I say, “It’s still in my head.” That’s actually a lie. I have hundreds of journals, reams of notes, several hundred blog posts and 3 ebooks that constitute the armature for a book; it needs some organization and a bit of connective tissue but the pieces are all there.

“The trouble with my book,” I tell myself, “is that it is about too many things.” Is it for educators or business people? Is it for all people (I call people “artists”)? Megan rolled her eyes and told me that I was being dense. “Maybe,” she said, “Just maybe it is more than one book. Write the first one, choose the door, and later you can make it accessible to other audiences. Get out of your own way.” Right! Write. As I have blogged in the past, it is fire-aim-ready and not the other way around.

Diane offers courses in divine mastery and I just proofed her workbook. In it she asks a question: how will you match your greatest gift with the world’s greatest need. I thought, “Oh, that’s easy.” I think the world’s greatest need is a new narrative. Truly, the power-over narrative is miserable and is killing us. The new narrative (which is actually a return to an ancient narrative) is power-with. My greatest gift and my work for the past several years has been to help people live power-with narratives. Right! Write. Could it be any clearer?

Recently Alan said, “You really need to write a book.” I said, “I need time. I have the pieces and just need the clear space and time to assemble and connect the dots; I can’t afford it right now.” So last week, wielding the hammer of the universe, Judy said, “Do a Kickstarter campaign and buy yourself some time to write. I’ll help you!”

I am a slow study and really good at constructing obstacles for myself. What I recognize in my obstacle construction, if I hold it to the mirror, is a very specific path to writing the book: clear some space (I call it my “cabin in the woods), ask for help, and get out of my own way. Write. Right. Aiming and readiness will come after I fire the intention.

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Ride The Goat

Posted on December 7, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Judy was typing a quick email. She wanted to tell me which ferry she was taking into Seattle the next morning to meet me. Instead of typing “boat” she typed “goat.” Catching her mistake she deleted “goat” and tried again to type “boat” but instead she missed again and typed “boar.” She was so amused by her swimming menagerie that she told me of her mis-types so I could share in the fun. We decided she would take the early goat over and return on the late afternoon boar. Entire worlds change with alteration of a single letter.

Meaning making is a subtle yet powerful business.

Quinn was curious about perception and personality; he was a great studier of humankind. No experiment was too silly for him to try. Once, many years ago, he read an article in a magazine about personality traits and how character reveals itself in small children. It was a nature or nurture question. He had two daughters who in many ways were as different as night and day and decided he needed to create his own test and his daughters where the perfect subjects. At the time, Quinn was a banker so he wore nice suits and carried a briefcase. One evening when his oldest daughter was 5 years old and playing in the swimming pool, Quinn came home from work, tipped his hat to his daughter and walked into the deep end of the pool. His daughter laughed and laughed. Daddy went swimming with his clothes on. 4 years later, when his younger daughter was 5 years old, he repeated the experiment. This daughter cried and cried; something was dreadfully wrong with daddy.

I met his daughters when they were adults. The oldest is filled with laughter; the youngest feels deeply the world’s pain. Both smile and recount with great love the day their father came home and walked fully clothed into the pool. Both are dedicated to helping create a better world – they just do it in two entirely different ways.

Quinn served as my personal Viktor Frankel: he taught me that meaning is something we make, not something that we find. He also demonstrated, again and again, that some of us will cross the Sound riding a goat, others will take the boar, and still others will make the crossing on a boat. Some will see mischief and whimsy, some will see suffering and misery, and some will never see the magic beyond the ordinary filters that they’ve chosen to wear. And, that has nothing to do with the world and despite our natural orientation we have great choice in how to see it.
He also taught me that life is much more fun if you sacrifice the suit to the moment rather than try and protect it. He understood that we too often sacrifice the essential to maintain the superficial; it takes a wily trickster to alter a single letter and open our eyes to the amazing possibilities available in the small moments of life.

Filed under: Gratitude, Perspective, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Honor Your Choices

Posted on December 6, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

On my drive home I listened to a story on the radio about several thousand former football players suing the NFL because they are now suffering the ill effects of repeated impacts to the head. This is confusing territory for me because I am certain that no one plays the game of football without knowing that there will be repeated blows to the head. So, who is culpable for the injury? Who is responsible for the choice to play? Part of the discussion was about the improvement over the past few decades in helmets and the attention to the rules of the game to minimize head-on collisions and the inevitable injuries that follow. The science now confirms what we’ve known (I hope) for millennia: repeated blows to the head are not good for you. So, if you choose to play, and you know the risks involved, who is responsible when you are injured or suffer the long-term effects of your choices?

Of course, there are other forces at play. The money in football is huge. Entire university athletic programs are floated on the revenues from their football programs. Sport is a route to a better life for many young athletes; the risks are apparent and the rewards are very high. Who doesn’t remember high school and the reverence afforded to the football players – especially during a winning season! Warriors in our culture are revered in all their forms and it is nice to be revered. To a young person, reverence is a high commodity.

My question is ultimately not about football players but about choices and responsibility. Despite our desire to believe otherwise, awareness does not equate into better choices. If awareness led to better choices there would not be a single smoker on the planet. We are not the rational creatures that we pretend to be. Feeling and emotion are the drivers.

Ownership of choices leads to better choices. Responsibility for actions leads to considered choices. This is hard to see in a country defined by ubiquitous litigation and that asks us not to claim responsibility. It is an expression of the separation mentality inherent in power-over stories (see my rants from the previous 2 days): no one is responsible when everyone is a victim. There is a vast difference between, “I didn’t know” and “I knew and decided to do it anyway.” Power is found in choice; power-with is available in a community that values and supports the choices that its members make.

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See The Story

Posted on November 27, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

628. 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 haven’t a thought in my head. It’s late and I just finished teaching a class on story to entrepreneur’s preparing to make pitches to investors. They’ve created apps and need capital to fulfill their business vision. I helped them to stop thinking of their apps as “things” and to start thinking of them as “motion:” a pitch is a story of a yearning meeting an obstacle, just like any story they see on a screen. Yearning initiates motion. They were amazed when their focus shifted from selling a product – a focus that limits – to the recognition that telling a story always opens possibilities – a focus that expands. Motion.

It is funny where life takes you. Not so long ago I was a pariah to the business community; I am an artist and, therefore, non-essential. It occurs to me that I spent a long time being a pariah, going where I knew I would not be welcome, saying what I knew no one could hear. Apparently I am clearing some karma or I’m an odd sort of masochist! At this late hour I can’t even remember why I thought it was a good idea so long ago to go into businesses hocking my story wares. I knew I could see what they could not and what I saw was useful and beautiful (I’d never use the “b” word in business, it makes their ninnies twist and eyes bulge). I’d attempt to get them to look through the lens of story and they’d roll their eyes.

So you can imagine how delightful and existentially curious it was for me to live long enough to witness the swing of the pendulum: my business pals are now routinely asking me in to help them learn to thrive in ambiguity. Tonight a class full of MBA candidates listened to me like I held the key to obscene wealth (I do, by-the-way). The key to better business is story. Consider this: a world of absolutes needs stasis: black and white thinking is useful to folks that refuse to change. So is a hierarchy. In our world, where change is the only constant, it is useful to know how to shape shift, it is essential to learn to dance with what is there, not what we think should be there. Assumptions are routinely popped in this fast moving stream. Hierarchies need a bottom-up energy or they move to slow to be useful. Motion, shifting forms, ambiguity.

Prior to class I went to the Apple store to pick up a new printer and the man that helped me told me the most difficult (and rewarding) part of his job was staying on top of the changes. “Things are obsolete the moment they hit the shelves,” he said. “I’m constantly learning and adjusting to the next innovation.” I wish I’d recorded him so I might play this fundamental insight to the public schools so they might recognize the mismatch. This economy is not their grandfather’s Oldsmobile.

Tonight, a student in the class said, “Seeing our app as a story has made me realize, much to my surprise, how human our work is.” I smiled a crooked tooth smile. She hit the nail on the head: “product” is anonymous; story is personal. Business is not business anymore.

Filed under: Art, Business, Perspective, Story, Truly Powerful People | 2 Comments »

Step Into The Dark Night

Posted on November 21, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Two quotes collided right in front of me and there resonance took my breath away. First, from a television series on culture, the amazing Wade Davis met with Gretel Ehrlich in Greenland. In the interview she said, “Despair is a sin against imagination.”

Saul Bellow wrote, “I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos – a stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”

I am never so quiet as when I paint. I am never so present as when I create. And I am certain that my culture no longer understands the power and role of its arts. It has confused art with distraction; it has relegated its primary mechanism for transformation to the basement of entertainment. Only the artists still recognize the door to the quiet holy.

Despair is noisy. It is urban and abstract. It is the chaos of an untethered mind, the heart gone dry. It is what happens when electric light blinds us to the stars.

Imagination is stillness. It is our most natural state, cousin to curiosity. My friend Carol once told me that, when going to Alaska, you reenter the food chain. If you think you suffer from a lack of imagination, step into the dark night and walk into woods. You will learn that it is not imagination that you lack but contact with anything that is real.

Filed under: Art, Awakening, Perspective, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Understand My Confusion

Posted on November 20, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

621. 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’m not getting you anything for Christmas. It’s not that I don’t want to give you a gift. I do. It’s just that I’m having a crisis of value; I’m not sure what is valuable anymore.

For instance, I was unplugged from the news last week so I missed the disappearance of the Twinkie. Honestly, I probably would have missed it had I not been unplugged from the news. What I didn’t miss was the profiteers that raked clean the Twinkies from store shelves only to sell them on eBay to panicking Twinkie fans for a hundred times the market price. And they are selling, thus establishing a new market price. I recognize the rules of supply and demand, the demand-fever produced by a limited supply and all of that; I can even entertain the appeal of Americana, the passing of the Twinkie era and the emotional crisis that might evoke. But, truth be told, I am shaking my head in disbelief.

Just for kicks I googled the list of endangered species and wondered where is the frenzy over the limited supply of Assam Roofed Turtles or Australian Sea Lion’s? If we have the energy to horde and save Twinkies, where is our verve to protect the Bactrian Camels? I understand there is a very limited supply. Of course, it is a rhetorical question; according to the law of supply and demand they have no value. No demand. No market. Best to just let the supply disappear. You can understand my confusion. For kicks, google the list, read it, and see how long it takes you to get to the bottom. You might want to sit. You’ll certainly want to brew some coffee; it will take you a while.

And then there is the day we set aside each year to give thanks. We gather with our families. We make a big meal to demonstrate and celebrate our abundance. Given enough time we might even sit around and tell stories of the people who came before us that lived hard lives so that we might enjoy our abundance. But, this year the stores open at 8:00. I hadn’t recognized the shortage of stuff – or perhaps it is a shortage of time to get stuff; either way, somehow we’ve managed to turn our ritual of Thanksgiving into a festival of lack. I’d ask you to explain it to me but I think that might only serve to depress me.

Given the clear value message displayed by my community, I have learned that the best gift I can give to you this year is a Twinkie. And, I can’t do it. I value you more than that. You can understand my confusion.

Filed under: Perspective, Random, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Eat At Tina’s Kitchen

Posted on October 21, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

591. 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 am having a twilight zone moment. I’m sitting in the reception area of Doctor Knapp’s office staring at a very large aquarium filled with vibrant green plastic seaweed, colorful plastic shells, fake corral, a bubbling aerator, and several tropical fish swimming. It’s all so clean and well constructed, designed and contained. It is meant to be peaceful and calming for nervous patients and in another context I might see it as it is intended. However, I just spent the last two weeks diving off the coast of Belize on one of the world’s great barrier reefs. The only real things in the tank are the fish; everything else is plastic, constructed. I’m watching the fish swim within the limits of their container. They circle; they touch the top and dive to the bottom, again and again and again.

Because my mind can’t see a doughnut without equating it metaphorically I am staring at the aquarium as if was a symbol of contemporary life in America. I am horrified. The colorful magazines on the table next to me declare that, Jen is being unfaithful, Christian has a broken heart, there is a lovechild, a shocking divorce, a deathbed confession! The receptionist is sitting behind a counter, wearing a headset, answering calls as she simultaneously asks a patient 101 questions about insurance coverage; the patient is wracking her brain trying to remember the minutia of her coverage. How many parts of Medicare are there and have you already fallen through the doughnut hole?

There is an elderly couple sitting behind me and they are talking about the episode of a television show they watched last night. They are deeply concerned about the safety of one of the characters. Their conversation for a moment became heated as they argued about whether the character should have opened the door or not. “That was stupid!” the man exclaimed. “No! He had to do it!” she retorted. He crossed his arms not liking to be challenged on his perception of a character in imaginary circumstances. I suppress the urge to flee.

As I look around the office I realize that, other than the people and the fish, everything is constructed, designed, assembled, and fabricated. There is a wall of charts, rows of chairs (not too comfortable), art on the wall meant to compliment the color scheme but otherwise says nothing (or, perhaps, that is exactly what it says about us), textured wallpaper that is not vibrant nor listless; people walking within the limits of their container, testing the top, diving to touch bottom, and circling again and again and again.

I know this moment will pass. I am suffering from travel re-entry and am prone to twilight zone moments. Last week I entered a shack, sat on a plastic chair and watched as Tina made for me rice, beans, and a fish just pulled from the river. Tina’s kitchen was also constructed but it wasn’t hiding anything, it was a human place, functional and gritty and barely qualified as a structure. Her 6-year old daughter, Darcy, strummed a guitar that only had two strings and sang songs. No one tried to shoo her away or was concerned about decorum. We laughed, clapped and were grateful for the breeze off the ocean that cut the heat. There was no need to talk about imaginary conflicts because life in Tina’s Kitchen was real and so was our conversation. The culture of comfort had not yet seeped into her village; insurance was the relationship she had with her neighbors and the hard lives of the people in her world were far more tangible and compelling than anything screaming from a magazine. She had no time for Jen’s faithlessness or Christian’s broken heart. Her world might have looked poor but I could see no glass containing her and all of the plants were refreshingly rooted and real.

Filed under: Perspective, Truly Powerful People | 4 Comments »

Exit The Grey

Posted on October 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

588. 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 many upsides to modern air travel. Namely, you can get someplace really fast. No more wagon trains, no more pony rides across the prairie. No more months or even days of going only as fast as the wheel can roll.

And, no more transition time. The downside is the same as the upside: you get places really fast. You enter into a grey space called an “airport” and exit from a similar grey space into an entirely different location. Yesterday I began the day walking on the beach while the sun rose over the coast of Belize. I waded into the warm ocean waters of the Caribbean. I swam. And then I packed my bag. 12 hours later I stepped out of the grey Seattle airport into the freezing rain.

My mind can make sense of this rapid change of environment but my body struggles to comprehend it. How can I be in warm summer in the morning and freezing winter by midnight? Enter the grey and things can change very fast. It is a metaphor for our time. While in Belize Lora turned 59, she looked at me and said, “How did that happen?” I thought, “We are always in the grey.” One day you are twenty, you enter the cubicle and emerge 60 on the other side. Whoosh!

I was amused in Houston to hear my fellow travelers huff and gruff about how long their flights were going to take. Another 3 hours! Tom told me that once he flew across the country looking down at the immense expanse that his ancestors crossed in a wagon. He said, “I don’t have that in me. They were made of much sturdier stuff.” When you left your family, it was a good bet that you would never again see them. The word “distance” had an entirely different meaning than it does now. The word “dream” rarely came with an expectation of immediacy.

While away I turned off my phone. We were in a place with a sketchy internet connection so after a day I recognized the boon and stopped trying to be connected. I created distance. All my abstractions fell away, the pace of my expectation slowed to a more human rate, and my dreams took a lung full of air and sighed. “What shall we do now,” I asked. “Just this.”

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