The Direction of Intention

284.
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 look forward to my conversations with Joe. He thinks about interesting things. He wrestles with titanic questions. Today we were talking about how I intend to best serve people through this meditation on power and he asked me this question:

If truly powerful people are dedicated to inspiring true power in others, if empowered people empower others, what is power used for? Is it to create a better world, to create personal fulfillment, what is power for?

Earlier this weekend I had a conversation with Duncan. He is a composer and is wrestling with all the questions that come with being an artist in a consumer society. He asked a question not unlike Joe’s question: what is art for?

It is the holidays and I’m reconnecting with some people that I’ve not talked with since this time last year. We’re condensing a year’s worth of life into a phone call. We’re catching up. This has been a year with many deaths; death of a parent, a spouse, a friend. Twice in these conversations I’ve heard this phrase: “It makes me wonder what my life is about.” What is life for?

I have many different responses to these questions about power and art and life and my responses depend upon the circumstances and my intentions. There is not one answer. One of my lessons from Bali was that the way a question is asked reveals the consciousness of the asker: I saw things there that I will never be able to explain and repeatedly asked my guide, “What was that for?” or “Why?” He would always smile; a Balinese rarely asks “why” in the face of a mystery, they dance with the mystery because they know they are part of the mystery. Budi would say, “There is no why. There is no what for.” And then he would laugh.

The question, “What is if for?” reveals the belief of separation: power, art, and life are resources to be used, love is something you find instead of something you are.

Power, art, life, and love are for helping you realize that alone we are meaning seekers; together we are power, art, life and love.

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278.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Today I have been thinking about the word Separation – it was a thread of the conversation that wound its way through both coaching classes. Alan pointed out to the group that somewhere in the 18th century we western thinkers separated thought from impact on reality; in other words we stopped believing that our individual thoughts in the moment had any effect on the world outside of our noggins: thinking only has punch if the body is engaged. Essentially we found a way to cleave our Being from our Doing which is particularly absurd when you consider that most of what you do in a day is think thoughts, and the thoughts you think create the world you believe you inhabit. It is not a stretch to recognize that thinking IS creating. That we managed to embrace a philosophy of compartments (head is separate from heart) and reduction (what’s the bottom line?) leads me to believe that it is our just desserts that we wander the earth looking for meaning and wondering what is truly valuable.

Of course, the being/doing separation that intrigues me the most today is the separation of the present from health and/or fulfillment. Here’s how it works: convince yourself that if you just do x,y, or z someday you have health (or wealth or success or meaning,…fill in the blank). It is life lived as an outcome. Life lived someday, achieved out there in the future. If you just have more money, more time, more friends, more wine, more clothes, more technology, you will arrive and be complete (this is lack in disguise)

It is a miracle (I use that word consciously) what happens when you release the story of separation and, instead, tell a story of connectivity: health/wealth/happiness is something you create now; it is something you choose in this moment, and the next moment. It is your story. Your thoughts create your world. You are powerful. Your thinking is not neutral in impact nor is it passive. Separation is an illusion.

How would you live if you believed that your thoughts mattered? How would you live if you believed that your actions mattered and were an expression of your being (your doing reveals your being)?

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271.
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 an interesting phrase that came up twice today: soul searching. This is not a new phrase. In fact, I’ve heard it a lot. I use it myself sometimes. I heard it anew today because I had two conversations and the phrase was used in two remarkably different ways (I have permission to share this with you):

• “I have a soul and I am searching within myself for my truth.”

• “I have lost my soul and I’m looking for it.”

The first usage is healthy. The second is tragic. What is it to feel as if you’ve lost your soul? I am not asking a religious question. I am asking something fundamental and practical that applies to us all.

Here is the context from the person who feels as if they have lost their soul (I’m generalizing a much bigger conversation): In business (and government) there is often an invisible scale – like the scale of justice – in one tray is the word “values” and in the other tray is the word “interests.” How often have you heard someone in a position of authority say, “We had to weigh our interests against our values,” as a way of justifying the action that betrayed the stated values? My conversation was with a man in authority who recognized that he makes that statement a lot. Today is the day he realized what he was really saying. He said it this way: “I have no values that matter. The bottom line, what we’ve been calling interests are in practice, in truth, what we really value; interests trump values every time. I’ve been making excuses, pretending that I’m serving a set of values. I’m not. It’s a lie.” Strong words! That’s when he used the phrase “soul searching.” Today, he is my hero. I do not underestimate the power of his revelation and the bind that he now faces.

I think his dilemma is the dilemma of our times. There is not greater expression of values lost in service to interests (there was no weighing) than a government that collaborated with its financial institutions to rape its people and bring down the world economy. And the people (that’s us) are not innocent either: shoppers stampeding and pepper spraying each other to get a bargain are certainly in service to their interests and completely void of any greater value set.

The question posed by my hero-of-the-day is this: aren’t our interests supposed to be in service to our values and not the other way around? We could all use a bit of soul searching.

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256.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

It is 1984 and I have moved to Louisville, Kentucky to support my girlfriend, Linda. She has been accepted into the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville’s intern program, an elite intense year of actor training, all day, everyday, seven days a week.

We’ve been in Louisville for several weeks and our money supply is running dry. I apply for jobs all day, everyday and I am either too educated or not educated enough, too skilled or not skilled enough. I’m doing temp work, unloading semi-trucks filled with mattresses, digging holes, raking leaves, painting houses and still we are falling behind. We have very little furniture. In fact, the stuff we call furniture was never meant to be furniture: cinder blocks and saw horses. We are now rationing our Ramen noodles.

One night Linda snaps. She is angry and tired and frustrated. I come home from a day of waiting in lines and being summarily excused from potential jobs. I pick up the landlord’s newspaper as I come up the walk, look up and Linda is waiting for me, arms crossed. She unloads her exhaustion on me and I am too young to realize her anger is not meant for me so I take the bullet and return her anger with some frustration of my own. I fling my arms up in protest, the newspaper slips from my grip and like a pop fly at home base, it soars straight up above my head and down again, retracing it’s path, bounces once off my head with a supplemental bounce off my shoulder before I reflexively catch it.

She is a master of comic timing and waits just long enough for me to recognize that I’ve just clobbered myself with a newspaper before she bursts into gales of laughter. I try to continue my protest but cannot through the storm of her glee. My black mood cracks and I chuckle too, claiming that I meant to do it. I assure Linda, now overcome with her laughter, that I am an excellent shot and although I may not be qualified to do many things in Louisville, Kentucky, I am very qualified to humiliate myself publically.

The newspaper helped open our eyes. Her fear and exhaustion was hers. My fear and anger was mine. As is always the case, the bullets we shot at each other had nothing to do with the other person. It would be years of public humiliations before I’d learn the lesson: it is never personal; my stuff is mine to navigate, theirs is theirs to navigate, no matter how angry or ugly I have the choice to take the bullet into my body or let it pass me by. More importantly, navigating my stuff means to speak my truth, to say what I need before I start with the bullets.

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252.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

It was a lazy autumn afternoon and we sat in a coffee shop for a few hours talking about art and life and travel. Our conversation was like a winding path that slowly went deeper and deeper into more personal and meaning-full territory. He asked a question, more to himself than to me, “If I value my family, why is it that I can never let myself just be with them? Why is it never enough to just be?”

A great question!

He was quiet for a moment as the question hung in the air between us, then he continued, “Why the judgment? Why the need to achieve all the time? I can never just be – and this need to achieve things every moment of every day is driven by this voice on judgment! There is no resting in the moment. Why can’t I feel contentment?”

His questions are ubiquitous; I hear people asking the same questions everywhere. Why can’t we feel contentment? Why the judgment?

Here are some questions to ask about these ever-present questions: What are you actually achieving? What are you actually judging? Do you know what you are trying to achieve or is it some abstract idea that is impossible to attain? What do you gain by giving away your life and relationships to something that is impossible to grasp, like sand running through your hands? What does doing enough look like? What does being enough feel like? Who in your life is the keeper of “enough?” Whose voice is in your head judging you? Why do you listen? Do you need to listen to the judgment?

As Viktor Frankel wrote, “Happiness ensues.” Contentment, like happiness is not something you attain, it follows. It is in the meaning your give to your day and your life not in what you achieve. Your life is like sand and it runs through your hands each and every day. What would it take for you to decide to be present and content in it?

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248.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

As I clean out my files I am discovering notes and stories that I have no memory of writing or receiving. Here is a piece that I found tucked in the dark corners of a file marked Perspective. Someone must have sent it to me a few years ago because they knew I’d pass it along someday! Today is that day:

One day a father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to
the country with the firm purpose of showing his son how poor people
live.

They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of a very poor family. On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, “How was the trip?”

“It was great, Dad.”

“Did you see how poor people live?” the father asked.

“Oh yeah,” said the son.

“So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?” asked the father.

The son answered:

“I saw that we have one dog and they had four.

We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they
have a creek that has no end.

We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at
night.

Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon.

We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that
go beyond our sight.

We have servants who serve us, but they serve others.

We buy our food, but they grow theirs.

We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends
to protect them.”

The boy’s father was speechless.

Then his son added, “Thanks, Dad, for showing me how poor we are.”

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