Story | The Direction of Intention

Savor The Cake

Posted on December 1, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

632. 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 fairly certain that my waiter in café at the Seattle Art Museum is the devil. He had the laugh; you know the laugh that I mean. I’m not certain how to check that I still have a soul but I fear that I just signed away the goods for a plate of risotto and some heavenly chocolate cake.

I’d just spent 3 hours with Judy-Who-I-Revere. My mind was reeling with Judy-inspired-insight. I wanted to stare into space and recount our conversation. I had an hour before my bus so I decided to treat myself to lunch at the museum café. I sat at a lovely table and had decided on the roast tomato soup with grilled 5-cheese sandwich; it was the reason I went to the café in the first place. I had a yearning. I had a taste. So I knew what I wanted before I entered the café. When the waiter came to my table he did not start with a greeting or a “what can I get for you today.” No. He started with, “It’s not on the menu but I know you would kill to have the special today. It’s a risotto. Oh, my god….” I laughed and said, “Well, if I’m going to kill for it I guess I better have it.” And that’s when he laughed. And it was THAT laugh, the one that makes you suspicious that you might just be signing away the invisible parts of you.

I moaned audibly when I ate the first bite. The people at the table next to me raised their collective eyebrow. I think they’d been married for a long time so in sync and unified was their brow antics. I moaned again with the second bite to see what facial gymnastics I might inspire. I savored every bite. The disapproving couple paid their bill and fled.

The devil waiter returned and asked if I wanted dessert. I never have dessert and I said, “Yes.” After looking over the dessert menu I asked about the cheesecake and he was enthusiastic while shaking his head “no.” I asked about the Theos cake (I’m not kidding) and he said, “Oh my god, the chocolate…it is extraordinary.” Nodding his head I found that I too was nodding my head and he said, “Great choice! I’ll bring some coffee, with the cake.” I continued nodding my head.

If the risotto made me moan, the cake made me weep. With each bite I wept and pointed to my fork; I was beyond words and wanted everyone to know what they could experience if only they’d order the cake. I cleared an entire section of the café. I’m sure my weeping and babbling was less than attractive. My devil waiter did not seem to mind that I’d emptied his section of tables. He asked how I was doing and I sobbed and smiled and pointed at the cake. He laughed and I shuddered and ate another bite. I couldn’t help myself.

When the check came I had that still small voice in the back of my mind say, “Pay with cash; don’t sign anything!” I listened and slipped some bills in the folder, muttering, “Don’t sign…don’t sign…” and fled the café. My waiter called after me, “Have good day!”

Outside, in the rain, I came back from my stupor. I stood on the street corner, checked to make sure it was the same day as when I entered the café. I saw that only an hour had passed although it felt like a universe had come and gone since risotto. I checked my pockets to see if I still had my soul. My gloves were there but no soul! Suddenly I remembered that I don’t keep my soul in my coat pockets. And then I felt very alive, looked to the sky and felt the rain on my face. I was fully awake, and knew that I’d had it all wrong. I had it backwards. I turned and went back in for another cup of coffee and a chat with my waiter, knowing that I’d experienced my soul in that piece of cake.

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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 »

Story Yourself Vast

Posted on November 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Horatio lovingly takes me to task on my use of the word story. I use it as a verb. I write, “You story yourself,” and Horatio rolls his eyes, telling me, “I wish you wouldn’t do that.” I can’t help it. I believe the story you tell yourself about yourself is a creative act; it is something that you do. It is an action, not a thing. I believe we story ourselves every moment of every day. It is one of the fundamental actions of our lives and whether we recognize it our not, it is an act of creation. We are fundamentally creative, creating ourselves with every story we tell, every experience we interpret, every yearning we assume, and every memory we re-play. At the inception of every action we take is the story we tell ourselves.

We cast ourselves in this story that we tell; we play many roles in the course of a day. Some of the roles we like to play, some we do not. Whether we like them or not we agree to play all of the roles. We have great choice in how we play our roles; we have the capacity to bring life to every circumstance in our play. We can play roles of resistance to life; we can play roles of investment in generating life. It all depends upon how we decide to story our moments, the narrative we choose to weave.

A month ago I was sitting on a pier watching the sunrise and I realized that the narrative dominating most of my life was a story of “figuring it out.” So much of the story I tell-myself-about-myself is driven by a narrative of “needing to know.” Knowing provides safety. Knowing provides location. I asked myself the question that has always lurked behind the curtain, a much better question for me: what if I never figure it out? What if I allow that it can’t be figured out; what if it is a mystery? What if I am a mystery not to be contained or figured out, but a vastness to be experienced? What if I accept that I am a mystery and instead of telling a story of “figuring it out,” tell the story that I know to be more true: I am as fluid and unknowable as is the rest of the universe. Why don’t I treat myself as a dynamic question instead of a static answer?

Why would I tell such a small story in such an immense experience?

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See Again

Posted on November 5, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

606. 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 got new glasses today. I had great vision until I was 45 and then, just as a prophetic optometrist predicted when I was 21, the world went fuzzy. I denied the existence of my first pair of glasses until one day during a workshop I thought a team wrote on their flip chart, “All new hires should have babies.” I walked closer to the flip chart (rather than put on my glasses…) and discovered that they’d actually written that new hires should have buddies, not babies. I was both relieved and distressed; what else was I misreading?

It amuses me when I bust myself in full-blown story attachment. In my brown-eyed family, I am the only member with green eyes. I was the only member gifted with perfect vision; not only do I have green eyes but I do not need glasses…that was the story. I do not need glasses. I am an artist with perfect vision and that is a gift. With glasses, I thought the gift was revoked. I must not have used it well. I was, with glasses, somehow less special. I knew that the story of my glasses was ridiculous and existed nowhere outside of me, but I told it anyway.

And then I learned through my new fuzzy sight that my gift was not my vision; it was my vision.

The first time Joe saw me wear my glasses he said, “Oh, thank god! Now you at least look smart!” Over time I grew accustomed to wearing them when I needed to read flip charts or drive. Pulling them from their perch on the collar of my shirt I’d put them on and think, “Time to look smart.” It became a game, like Clark Kent running into his phone booth and coming out as superman; I’d turn around and put on my glasses, spin around and be a few points smarter than before. “I need some more smarts,” I’d think, spinning around, and re-emerging wearing my smart eyes. And then, I realized that glasses work like a mask or a clown’s nose: they are transformational and allow an infinite number of new characters to come through: my glasses worked just like a clown car!

So, picking out my second pair of glasses today was an event. Since I now recognize that my gift is not my vision but my vision, and I have a unique opportunity for new characters to emerge through each successive pair of glasses, I went to the most special place, Eyes On Fremont, to pick my new look, my new superhero persona, my next clown car of personalities.

Watch out world! I can see again. And, with my new look came a new superpower though I must not tell what my new superpower is (hint: I am less smart in my new mask but speeding bullets have nothing on me now!); superpowers must remain incognito until needed.

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Dance In The Paradox

Posted on November 3, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

One of my favorite paradoxes lives in these two seemingly conflicting statements: 1) you can only know yourself through the eyes of another, and 2) what others perceive is none of your business; your business is to attend to what you perceive. I believe both to be true.

An infant that lacks touch and attention will die. An adult that lacks touch and attention might live but they will certainly twist, warp, and wither. They will wonder why they live; survival alone on a deserted island is untenable unless there is hope of one day seeing, touching, and knowing another human being. It is the desire to connect, the fundamental need to connect with another that gives us life and purpose. If you are seeking for greater meaning take pause and look at those miracle people that surround you. Everything else is an abstraction. On your deathbed you will review your relationships, not your portfolio.

We are, at the end of the day, a relationship, fluid and dynamic. We are the story we tell of what just happened. We are a story we tell of what we desire to happen. And the “happening” always involves relationship to someone. Think about it: who have you deemed it necessary to know that you are successful? Whose values do you carry forward?

Occasionally we are present with what is, not looking forward or backward but just here. And here, in this place beyond story, it is clear to see that there is only dynamic, flowing relationship.

Our folly is in believing that we are one thing, a fixed singular identity. A separate fixed singular identity. We are none of those things: separate, singular, or fixed. Choose one day this week and pay attention to how many roles you play. Beyond father, mother, daughter son, uncle, niece, nephew, friend, boss, commuter, there are roles you play as you dress, walk down the street; whose eye do you want to catch? What is the story you tell to strangers at dinner parties? Who are you in public? How does that change in private? What about in good days? How does it change when you are feeling down? Who do you want to be? Who are you afraid that you are? Answer six phone calls and pay attention to how you change based on who’s on the other end of the call. Our actions are driven relative to the others that we include in our story.

You are a dynamic relationship and the most mysterious relationship you will ever have is with yourself. And therein lives the paradox. No one can truly know you; no one will ever stand and see through your eyes or know fully what you really think – so their opinions about you have nothing to do with you. What they think is filtered through their lives and expectations. They can’t even really see you through their filters and role assignments. Only your opinions have to do with you because only your opinions originate in you. So, how do you choose to story yourself?

If it is true that you can only know yourself through the eyes of another it is also true that you can only know yourself through what you perceive. To know yourself you must at some point step into the mystery of yourself and on that journey there is no guide to hire. No one can tell you what to find, where to look, or what to believe. Virgil cannot escort you into that cavern. You must step into the vastness of yourself by yourself, and define the kind of relationship you want to have with you. You must see yourself from your own point of view. And recognize that even that is a story.

As I recently read, “truth is not fact.” You are not a fact. You are a truth and truths can only be found dancing in the paradoxes.

Filed under: Identity, Story, Truly Powerful People | 2 Comments »

Dance For The Crows

Posted on October 20, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

The first real storm of the season blew in last night. It is raining hard, scouring the leaves from the trees. My nemesis crows are clutching onto branches, bobbing up and down in the wind, miserable with water running from their beaks. I am warm and dry inside and stand next to the sliding glass door so they can see me. Days like today are the only time I have the upper hand with the crows. And, since I just used the word “hand” I show the crows my opposable thumbs; I can open doors, steer a car, or hold a hand! HA! I take great petty delight in rubbing in my advantages, especially since my advantages are imagined and most especially since now I am currently safe beneath a roof and secure behind a closed door; they can’t dive bomb me here. Next season there will be hell to pay but I’m not worried about that now. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

The truth is that I love the crows. I love our game most of the time. It brings out the 3rd grader in me. They fire my imagination. That I am standing in front of a glass door dancing for the crows so they can see that I am warm while they are wet is a miracle of delusion. For all I know, the crows ride the bobbing branches like a rollercoaster, love the new rain like I love a warm ocean, and are looking at me thinking, “Look at that poor sad feather-less creature.” To the crows, I am an animal behind glass; they are at the people zoo all of the time.

I remember the day years ago, deeply angry at some perceived offense, when I realized that I was the only person in the story that was suffering. I was creating the angst, interpreting the story, invested in the drama. No one else in the story was in pain because no one else was telling a story of pain. I was. The fear was in my body, the tension was in my body, and the story that was driving the fear and the tension was in my mind. No one else was responsible for how I felt or what I perceived. That was all mine. I could choose to continue my suffering or I could choose something else. I was free to choose. And the moment I had that revelation, the drama dissipated. Drama and victimhood are misty fog that burns off in the light of choice.

The freedom choice brings allows for magnificent delusion; stories, when conscious, afford a playground of possibility. Today, I taunt the crows and pretend that they burn at my advantage, staring back at me with gritted beaks just waiting for the spring day when I will take a walk and expose my human head like a target for their aerial attacks. “Retribution will be sweet,” they think as the cold winter rain dribbles down their feathers, watching me wiggle and laugh behind the glass. I dance now so that I will deserve every sneak attack that comes my way when the seasons change and tilt the advantage in the crow’s favor. In the mean time, I will make some hot chocolate and be careful to sip it slowly, moaning with pleasure just to make those villainous crows bristle (didn’t you know that crows love chocolate).

Filed under: Story, Truly Powerful People | 3 Comments »

Create A Receiving Space

Posted on October 14, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

584. 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 week ago I went to several classrooms and told the Polar Bear King story. I intended to do an experiment: tell the story but approach it from many different access points, perhaps tell it through movement, engage the kids in a poetry exploration, etc. I bailed on my intention and simply told the story – or in most cases, only told a part of the story. I left the kids hanging, wondering what would happen next. In the morning, prior to going into the schools, I sorted my thoughts; I wrote what was important and why I wanted to tell this particular story. Here’s what I wrote in my journal:

“Long ago people knew that things like reading and writing and arithmetic were important things to learn but they knew something that we’ve forgotten: if the next generation does not know how to be powerful (personally and collectively), if each child does not know the difference between power and control, then all the other stuff is meaningless.

People taught this, and other things, through stories. They knew that to tell a story was an act of power. They would not simply begin telling a story, they would first transform their space to a place where power might be given and received. Sometimes that meant going to a special place, sometimes it meant creating a central fire or rearranging the existing space.”

Before telling the story to the classes, I asked the students to create a space – and enter the space – so that they were ready to receive a story. They knew just what to do; it is in our dna. They moved desks and chairs, they created inclusive spaces, they got under desks and tables; they made themselves comfortable. And then they listened. They gave their attention so that they might receive the story.

Each time I enter a school I think, “This is madness.” It is a forced march to content delivery, a test factory. As John would say, “We are a penny wise and a pound foolish.” Yet, in the midst of all the madness, the kids know how to create a space to receive – and their first action, in each classroom, was to blow apart the rows, get on the floor, and challenge me to bring something real to them. [to be continued]

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Burn Your Trash

Posted on September 29, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Tom’s grandpa, also named Tom – Pa Tom, owned a small country store in the little train stop town of Herald, California. Every Sunday morning when Tom was a boy he would make the trip to Herald and help Pa Tom burn the week’s trash. It was a great event each week, terrific fun for a small boy to burn stuff with his grandpa. When the fire was just right, not too hot, they’d whittle sticks and roast hot dogs for lunch.

Years later Tom and I rode through the countryside in his truck. He was telling me the family history and showing me the places where the stories happened. He showed me where Thomas Lewins was buried; the man who brought his family west in a covered wagon. The journey took seven years. He showed me where Frankie was buried; one of the many lost boys in the story: Frankie, for some reason, was buried in a cemetery away from the rest of the family. His aunts suffered greatly knowing that Frankie was resting all alone. He showed me the Herald store – it’s still there though now is more of a convenience mart than a country outpost.

As we drove he shared his concerns for what he would do with the ranch and this history of his family. There was no one to pass them on to; the city was fast encroaching on his land. I think he knew even then that his time was short; he could feel the dementia descending. He didn’t want to leave a mess.

He stared straight ahead when he told me that he learned a lot about life during those Sunday morning trash burnings. Chief among the lessons that Pa Tom taught him was to take responsibility for his trash; it was wrong to leave a mess for other people to clean. I knew what he was telling me so I said, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Tom nodded and looked away.

Pa Tom’s lesson was a credo and something we should all embrace: your trash is yours. Do not leave it for others to clean up. However, there is one very important caveat: make sure you know what is trash and what is treasure. Each of us spends our lives wrangling with our metaphoric trash bag – this wrangling provides the spine and substance of our story. And our story is our treasure. Deal with the trash; please do not discard the treasure.

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Continue Yourself

Posted on August 29, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

In his TED talk, film director Shekhar Kaper said, “Without a story you do not exist.” It is such a simple phrase and yet flip it over and you glimpse the enormity of his implication: To exist is to story (my apologies to Horatio, I am using the word “story” as a verb). Some folks laugh when I suggest that if they would change their story they would change their world. “Pie in the sky!” they exclaim. They are still under the illusion that their thoughts are facts or truth or somehow happening to them. What I appreciate about Shekhar Kaper’s sentiment, what is implicit in it, is that the story you tell largely determines how you exist because the story you tell defines how you relate. Many years ago I worked with a woman who storied herself as a fraud and that made her peers and co-workers dangerous to her. Hiding was her major action. She fired people that got a peak behind the curtain. Hell is not some place you go after death when you’ve been particularly rotten, hell is what you live when you story yourself a fraud, or deficient, or needing to be perfect. The Greeks personified the monkey mind: when your thoughts were particularly tortuous they believed the Furies possessed you.

Organizations are particularly blind to their story. They are keen to have a vision statement but reticent to compare the vision to their day-to-day choices. A vision statement is a story of aspiration. Actions are a lived form of story (we act according to our story); to compare the story we intend with the story we live is usually bracing. It is also revealing and that is why the comparison is so often ignored. Organizations, like people, become healthy when they close the gap between what they intend and how they act. To thrive is requires a fundamentally different narrative than to survive. The language of thriving is very different than the language of survival.

Another phrase, I believe this one came from cartoonist Scott McCloud (don’t hold me to that – it could be from Joseph Campbell. I took too many notes on the page and they ran together): “We tell story to continue ourselves.” It is a variation on the first quote with this important addition: it acknowledges that our stories outlive us. We live into the future through the stories we inspire. I have been especially aware this week of this aspect of story as we prepare for Margaret’s memorial. We are telling and hearing many stories about her and how she lived. She lives on in our narrative; she is a vital part of our story and through our telling we weave her story into the ancestral quilt.

Filed under: Story, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Old Meets New

Posted on August 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

525. 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 believe we are living in a time when THE OLD STORY is colliding mightily with THE NEW REALITY. It is an opportunity for change but like most times of great potential change, we hold on with white knuckles to THE OLD STORY. Change is frightening precisely because it is unknown. It is easier to hold onto the monkey bar than it is to fly toward the next place. Our circumstance is dire because the pace of change is blistering so the immensity of the denial necessary to maintain THE OLD STORY is…profound.

As Marshal McLuhan wrote, we humans are great at stepping into the future with our eyes in the rearview mirror. It’s as if we live life in a rowboat, pulling for a future with our backs to where we are going. The occasional glances over the shoulder help us spot a destination but our eyes are fixed on the shore from which we came. Safety lives on the shore behind us (we think).

As Roger once said, “I believe among a human beings greatest capacities is the capacity for denial.” Denial often looks like this: “Things are okay just as they are,” “I wish we could return to the good old days,” “Let’s get back to basics, return to our values, do what we know works.” Just listen to our education, political, and economic conversations! Denial also likes to think that things are happening to us; waking up is simply the acknowledgment that we are the creators of the story.

[I’m be on the road and taking a break so I’m dipping into the archives and reworking and reposting some of your favorites. I’ll be back at it in the middle of August]

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

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