The Direction of Intention

320.
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In life as in stories, sometimes you seek the adventure and sometimes the adventure finds you. Soldiers seek the adventure of war. Displaced civilians caught in the path of war would rather have stayed at home. Sometimes the adventure arrives when we get what we think we want and what we get is not what we expected: the world is full of lotto winners whose good fortune ruined them. Whether it comes in the form of good fortune, a yearning, or the arrival of your desire, the call to adventure (change) is supposed to arrive with enough force to knock you off balance. Divorce packs a wallop. A doctor can change your life in six words or less: “I think you’d better sit down.”

When the force of change roars down the road we ground ourselves in the known; we run to our comfortable patterns. Rarely do we seek discomfort as a first action. We plant our feet, bury our head in the sand and deny that the storm is coming. We clean our house, we cook a comfort meal, clean our cubicle – we reassure ourselves by moving through the routines we’ve established. That is one of the functions of ritual! To affirm who you are; to reinforce where you belong. Finish your breakfast. Sit in the sun and breath in the early morning air. It will not stop the hurricane but it will help you face it.

This is a necessary phase. It is akin to the homeowner, knowing that the sheriff is about to knock on the door to evict them, sweeping the rooms of their home, cleaning the kitchen – not because it needs cleaning – but because they know it will soon be gone. They must touch it to leave it. This is how we say goodbye to who we they are and prepare to step into the unknown. It is necessary for us, just as it is necessary for the characters in a story, to tell ourselves that everything will be fine even as we push the angst of the unknown into the back of our mind. It is necessary to touch base with safety and security one last time, to run our finger along the mantle of what we know, before we are pulled across the threshold and thrust into the adventure.

It is the visceral memory of what was that drives us through the trials and into the arms of the new.

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318.
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You can learn to tell a different story. Change your story; change your world. You can create new patterns and see your life through a clearer lens. In fact, you can learn to see through your story; you can learn to let go the drama and resistance, the struggle and the emptiness. This is not new news: for centuries people have known that wholeness is immediately available when they let go the story blanket that they’ve wrapped around their experiences. Wholeness is not found on a path to some other place in the future. It is here and now: we just can’t see it through the security blanket of story that we’ve wrapped around our lives.

When our ancestors learned to release their story blankets they were kind enough to leave us maps to guide us. Paradoxically, the maps are stories. They understood that a “how to” manual is useless (remember, no one has your answer); the specifics of how they did it will not help you do it. It is a personal journey, each route as individual as the person that lives it. However, they understood that there are universal questions in every unique life-story; to participate (stories are a participation sport) in how a character in a story wrangles with the big questions will help you wrangle with the big questions in your own life. Our lives are mirrored in the stories that we are told. We know what to do in our personal story because we identify with the heroine/hero in the story. Their journey of transformation is a guide to our journey of transformation. Their follies and foibles give coherence to our messy passage. Their death and rebirth is a map for our death and rebirth. Their story is a call for us to step more fully into our adventure.

The most efficient route to transcending your story is through engaging with a story. Another paradox!

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317.
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It is certainly possible to tell yourself the story that you are broken, that someone else has your answer, and that the universe is against you, that life is hard or unfair and the best you can do is survive it. It is also possible to tell yourself a different story, a story of choice, potential, opportunity and vibrant life. Either way, the story you tell is a choice so why not choose to tell a story of wholeness and true power?

The story you tell translates into the actions you take. Gather some information: for a single day, without judgment, pay attention to the actions of your life. How much of your day are you resisting or justifying or defending? How much of your life do you spend seeking fulfillment, for purpose, for what matters, for meaning, for happiness, for contentment – as if these aspects of life were some other place? How much of your life do you spend “just getting through it?” For a single day, pay attention to the choices you make; entertain the possibility that you choose how you react, how you interpret, and how you respond – regardless the circumstance.

What do you discover? Are you telling the story that you want to tell?

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316.
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“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” Niels Bohr

The steps in organizational growth are the same steps necessary to take in personal growth. We wrap different language around the steps but the steps are the universal. Like Hollywood blockbusters we weave different details through them, the characters have different faces and names, but the story follows a well-known plot. This has been true for centuries! We like to tell the same story over and over again and there is a very good reason for that: our lives are mirrored in the adventure. We know what to do in our personal story because we identify with the heroine/hero in the story. Their journey of transformation is a guide to our journey of transformation. Their follies and foibles give coherence to our messy passage. Their death and rebirth is a map for our death and rebirth. Their story is a call for us to step more fully into our adventure.

If there is one thing we’ve learned in the past century it is that change is the only constant. And, the subsidiary lesson: the pace of change is escalating. Whether we realize it our not we are always in a process of change. The Dream Society, a book published over a decade ago by the market futurist Copenhagen Institute, suggested that this dramatic escalation of the pace of change has thrust us out of the age of information and into the age of story. Information and data can locate us in a moment, describe a point in time, but the point is of limited use because we are living so close to the event horizon. The point that the data describes is obsolete before we can translate it into meaningful action. The best we can do is to use the data to story ourselves into an unknown future. In this sense, it brings us around to something our ancestors understood with certainty: true stability is found in the story that we tell, not in the things we possess.

Of course, therein exists my favorite paradox: Our stories are both road maps for change and anchors of stability. We know who we are by the stories we tell. We know who we want to become through the stories we tell. We know what we want to create through the stories we entertain.

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308.
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Like all good actors who are in the midst of a casting dry spell, Chris had a project in his back pocket, a one-man play called Dirt that he’d always wanted to do. He was saving it until the time was right. He’d been fortunate since arriving in New York after graduate school; he was cast regularly in plays and independent films and then, as most artist’s experience, for no apparent reason, the well went dry.

As a young actor in his native Austria he’d seen a production of Dirt and was deeply impacted by the play. It is a dark complex play. It is relevant to the world and a challenge for an actor to undertake. It is not too dramatic to say that the play grabbed Chris’s imagination; it held on to him and would not let go. It is a play well known in the German speaking world but had never had a production in English. With no work on the horizon and no casting agents calling, Chris recognized that the time was right. The play was calling.

It is a herculean task to produce a play in the best of circumstances. There is a theatre to rent, money to raise, technical staff to hire, designers to engage, props, lights, costumes, directors, and rehearsal space. When you are an unemployed actor the mountain to climb grows higher as you climb it. He produced it, rehearsed it, and performed it to rave reviews. The success of the first production led to a second and a third. Then a fourth production called. And 4 years later Chris is working with a screenwriter to create the film version.

I talked with Chris today and he told me that he has the feeling that he was supposed to do this play. He had to do the first production. He had to do it. It was always with him and would not let go of his imagination. Somehow,” he said, “I have become its steward. This play and its message is his to bring to the world. He has grown through its challenges. He said, “I think the play chose me.”

Isn’t it true, looking back on your life, that sometimes the story chooses you?

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302.

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I moved to Seattle over a decade ago. My move was not planned. It was spontaneous, reactive, and felt like a leap into the unknown. It felt like a leap into the unknown because it was a leap unknown. I didn’t have a job or an intention. I didn’t know anyone and more to the point, no one knew me. There was no role to fulfill, no expectations, no identity that I had to uphold. It took me a few weeks to realize how much of my life was defined by the day-to-day relationships I had before my move. Suddenly, I was undefined. I was unknown to others. I was unknown to myself. It was both liberating and disorienting.

As I met new friends I was conscious of how I told the story of myself. I was amused and often surprised by story I told. What did I share of my past? What did I withhold? What did I need them to know? What did I want to scrub from my definition? What was true? What is truth? What is the difference between experience and interpretation? I was conscious of how my new friends told their stories and identified themselves, too. It was like a game. I began to understand how we story ourselves every moment of everyday: we tell ourselves and the people in our lives a story of who we believe we are. We tell the story of what we do or wish we did, we tell the story of what we have or do not have, of what we fear to do or have mastered. And, most significantly, I recognized that the story is not fixed, it is fluid, it is dynamic.

I recognized that the healthy people in my life knew that they were dynamic and not fixed. Their story was vibrant and relational. The powerful people were not investing great amounts of energy in claiming their identity like a miner claims territory. They did not need others to see the world as they saw it; they needed to engage with multiple perspectives not eliminate them. Growth to the truly powerful is expanding consciousness. Their energy is directed at the creation of life and not the perpetual creation of rules and boundaries. They were not fixed; they were fluid. The truly powerful people were not enabling others or themselves.

I’ve learned (from experience) that this quality of fixed or fluid story reveals the root: a fixed story is a story of fear. A fixed story is looking for power in others. A fluid stroy is rooted in love and knows itself as powerful; the story is not about need, it is about gift. It is a story  lived through what you bring to life.

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209.

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Grief is a funny thing. It scrambles all the stories, flips all of the perspectives, upends all of the beliefs, drains the batteries, and leaves you wondering who you are. It is the belly of the whale. You know you will be spit out at some point and you also know that you won’t be the same person when you are; you survive and die all in the same action. It is always dark in the belly of the whale. Loss invites loss and loss incites change.

Grief is like being scrubbed with a coarse brush in a hot bath. You leave a lot of skin behind, it hurts, and you are somehow clean when it is all over. There are new clothes and too much sun so you step into the day and say to yourself, “Now what.”

And then comes the moment when you let go of holding on to the past, of trying to keep the memory alive, the relationship from fading in your memory. In that moment the world looks new, simple, and clear. You see the energy. You are no longer attached to the story.

I remind myself today that growing is always a matter of working with the energy and not with the story. The feelings are nothing more than energy trying to move in a direction. The story prolongs the grasping and the gasping and the drowning. Today is a day for letting go. It is autumn after all.

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195.
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The sunrise today was glorious. The sky exploded with pink, purple, blue and orange. It took my breath away and it brought my mind to creation stories and mythologies. When nature moves me to awe I often go right for the story!

Someone once said that a mythology is someone else’s religion. If it is not yours you read it as story, if it is yours you still read it as story but you invest the story with power, you look to it for guidance, you consider it to be a source. Even if you think you are an atheist, even if you have no investment in the metaphoric or literal interpretation of any story, it would still be worthy to recognize that mythologies matter. They are more than dusty tomes sitting on library shelves, stories from another time and place. They are living things and impact how you perceive and construct your world.

Consider this: if you live within a culture that worships the controlling, angry god, your mythology – whether you embrace it our not – is based upon the notion that nature is corrupt, particularly your nature. Nature (your nature) is to be controlled and transcended; thus the emphasis on reason and the denunciation of body, emotion, intuition, the feminine,… and all other aspects of your self that smack of nature. Compartmentalization is a notion that only has traction in a people needing to divide the head from the heart. Mythology gives context to your perception and provides your orientation to the world. Seeing the world as a resource to be used, a possession to be claimed, moving through life looking for what you can get out of it, trying to distinguish yourself as separate from the rest (while dressing to fit in) are all expressions of this basic story – this mythology.

In this mythology I can appreciate the sunrise, I can feel awe, but I can never truly believe that I participate in the sun’s reappearance.
There are other mythologies and therefore other orientations and some are stories of participation. I often wonder, when nature shocks me into silence with its beauty, what it might feel like to be part of the beauty instead of a witness to it.

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183.
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Random thoughts on a morning walk: Without my eyes translating it into a story, the earth (the universe) is action, pure fluid motion without distinction. It is energy in motion.

The birds chase. The waves roll. The fog lifts. The sun breaks through. The jogger waves at me. The cop sits in his car, the engine idling, he reads the morning news. A break? Hooky? The osprey hunts. The gulls complain.

This is what the old masters and gurus mean when they say, “we create the world.” Without my eyes translating, there is no bird chasing, wave rolling, or fog lifting. There is a single motion. There is no bird separate from wave as distinct from fog. I give it coherence. I give it separation and story.

How does this help me? I am certain that I will continue to story everything I see. It happens in a nanosecond. I believe it is what makes us human: a story telling animal. It helps when I see the extent to which I tell my own story – and have infinite choice in the story I tell.

The man can walk in gratitude. He can walk with anxiety. He can lose himself in thought and miss the day entirely. He can be mindful. Mindless. He can be late or just be taking his time. He can try to please or simply do his best. He can try to change the world or recognize that world is motion, pure fluid energy.

Maybe, just maybe, the world is fine without my story. Maybe what needs changing is how I see.

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180.
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’ve been driving a shiny black Cadillac this week because our little old Saturn is in the shop. Since Saturn went down the drain in the GM debacle, the closest Saturn service shop is a Cadillac dealership. This shiny black loaner car aspires to become the bat-mobile!

You’d be amazed at how my status rocketed the minute I pulled off the lot in my loaner. For the first time in my eight-year membership, the good folks at the gym called me, “sir.” Do you crave attention at the art gallery? Just pull up in a black Cadillac. My neighbors are all a’twitter thinking I hit the lotto or perhaps sold a big painting – a really, really big painting. I am feigning indifference, as if nothing has happened (because it hasn’t); oddly enough my aloofness has lifted my status even more.

Keith Johnstone writes that all people have a preferred status – high or low – and they will always try to maneuver themselves into their preferred position; status is a role you play. He writes that both high and low status are essentially defensive postures. A person playing high status is effectively saying, “Don’t come near me, I bite.” A person playing low status is saying, “Don’t bite me, I’m not worth the trouble.” Both status positions can be very powerful and everyone becomes expert at their preferred position. In the Keith Johnstone construct I am a low status player so driving a shiny black Cadillac thrusts me into the other camp; I’m not used to people treating me as if I might bite them. It amuses me to be seen as someone who could pull a wad of cash out of my pocket and buy a Picasso on a whim – so I play along.

And that’s the point: the status I’m being granted has nothing to do with me. It is how people are choosing to see me based on…what? I drove up in a status symbol. That is true with or without a shiny black Caddy. My car, the one in the shop, is also a status symbol, a different kind of status that exists entirely in the eye of the beholder. The cars hold no meaning that we don’t give them – that is how we create the world we see. It is an investment in an illusion, a story we spin that equates privilege with power (power over), the road to fulfillment is through having shiny stuff.

It is within this illusion that I ask, “What is it to be truly powerful?” Is the car giving you the feeling of status? Can it really give you that? Is the way others perceive you at the center of your self-esteem? As Patti asks, “How’s that working for you?”

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