The Direction of Intention

Buy Terry A Beer

Posted on October 24, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Scuba diving is rife with life lessons. I learned to dive in Bali from an American ex-pat named Terry, a former surfer, drug runner, and underwater welder turned Buddhist. And, since I was the only person in the class, I had my own private life lesson delivered through the metaphor of diving. As Joyce would say, Terry was an old soul; he was comfortable anywhere in the world, above or below the water, in the west or the east; he’s one of the few people I’ve known who was truly at home in the world. I had to buy Terry a beer for every gaff I made on the way to ease in the water and I will go on record saying that there is not enough beer in the world to pay Terry what I owe him.

The primary skill for a diver to learn is neutral buoyancy. Regardless of depth, a diver wants to hover in the water, not sink or rise (unless he or she intends to change depth). Terry used to say, “Get neutral. Use the least amount of energy necessary. The skill is presence.” Re-reading that last sentence makes Terry sound old and wise and he was young and energetic, filled with crazy mischief and daring, so please insert your best brazen Hawaiian surfer gone rogue dialect into the previous sentence; my Yoda liked reggae and once said to me, “Let’s spin the ptomaine wheel!” as he strode into a smoky roadside eatery.

Neutral buoyancy is balance; it is the physical experience of perfect balance though you can’t achieve it without balancing your breathing as well, which balances your mind. When you become neutral, your breathing slows, you become efficient – and not the American puritan notion of efficient – as that implies work, sweat, hard pews and squeezing life out in a cubicle. This type of efficiency is the form that comes when you are most alive which means your mind is most quiet; there is no need to achieve or change or grow or do anything. Breathe, rest in balance, witness. No impulse to resist the present moment or to be elsewhere. In fact, when you relax into it, the colors suddenly heighten; there are amazing fish and creatures moving all around, and you can’t believe the shapes or the vibrancy of the world in which you find yourself. It is magic and you are magic (not separate from “it”). And, best of all, after a while it occurs to you that you don’t need to be underwater to practice being neutrally buoyant. It is a skill you can practice anytime, anywhere.

How much beer would you buy Terry to learn neutral buoyancy?

[to be continued]

Filed under: Awakening, Body, Transcendence, Truly Powerful People | 4 Comments »

Embrace Your Silly

Posted on October 23, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Racing passed me on the apartment stairs was little Jaden and his grandma, Espy. Jaden was wearing big tiger slippers; they gave him cartoon feet. Espy whispered, “The monster is coming! I hear him!” Jaden squealed. I said, “I won’t tell the monster that I saw you!” Jaden laughed as he and Espy disappeared through the hall door. Two floors below I heard Pete, using his best monster voice, rumble, “Where are they! I’m hungry!”
Pete is Jaden’s grandpa, Espy’s husband. I waited on the landing for Pete-the-monster to discover David-his-neighbor. It was a sneak attack.

He came around the corner in full monster mode. Roaring, “I’ll find you! I can smell where you are!” he saw me and said, “Oh, hi David.” Another adult might have been embarrassed or shifted out of play mode. Not Pete. He was carrying a large sack of groceries and, like Jaden, he was wearing an enormous pair of slippers, he had cartoon bear feet. “Do you like my shoes?” he smiled, showing off his larger-than-life fuzzy feet. “We just went to the store.” He roared once more to keep the game going while buying us some time to talk.

“I’m being a monster!” he smiled, showing me how he could walk like a bear with his cartoon feet. “We were just in the grocery store and people are so serious!” he exclaimed. “At first I was thinking about being embarrassed to wear these slippers and then I was happy I put them on. They are silly and they made people smile! People need to be more silly! That’s what I’ve decided. It keeps us young,” he declared. As an after thought he added, “Espy had to drive though, monsters feet are too big and they can’t feel the pedals.” Roaring and stomping he said, “Let’s have dinner next week,” and continued up the stairs. I heard Jaden squeal and Espy whisper, “Hide!”

Yoda lives next door and he wears slippers. There is magic everywhere, even in the stairway.

Filed under: Heroes, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: magic | 2 Comments »

Don’t Hit The Hole

Posted on October 22, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

This has been a week with a theme: limitations. All week, clients, friends, people on the street, have wanted to talk about their limits. Actually, they have wanted to talk about transcending their limits. And, although they think they have been talking about freeing themselves, their focus has been on the limit and not on the freeing (“Pay attention!” I say to myself. When conversations come in clusters there is a boat I need to catch and am about to miss).

The question comes in this form: How do I get beyond my limit? Or, how do I stop limiting myself? This is a very specific question that can only serve to reinforce the limit: it is a “how” question with the focus on a limit. The verb or action is rooted in wrangling with a limit. Wrangling with a limit will only make it stronger.

Recently, at a wedding reception, I met a woman who was recovering from a motorcycle accident. She said, “I know better! You go where your place your focus. I saw a pothole and thought, ‘Don’t hit the hole!’ and went right in it.”’

How you ask the question determines the possibilities you see or don’t see. How you ask the question determines the actions you take or don’t take; like the motorcycle woman told me, you go where you place your focus.

How would the action change if the questions were asked in this form: “How do I create more freedom of movement?” Or, “How do I fulfill my potential?” Place the focus of the question on the freedom or on the fulfillment and an entirely different field of action becomes available. Instead of wrangling, why not create?

We go where we place our focus. Pay attention to your language and you will see where you have chosen to go. Sometimes the only thing necessary for a breakthrough is to ask your question another way.

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

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 »

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 »

What’s The Motivation?

Posted on October 19, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Apples are not oranges and this would seem…well, obvious. But, it is not. The apples-oranges confusion is at the core (forgive the pun) of many of our most persistent challenges. For instance, we are in an endless political season and I’ve heard again and again that we need a government that runs like a business. We want efficiency, less bureaucracy, clearer process and better use of technology; if only the government ran like Netflix….

Yes. And, government is not business. The motives of government are not the same as the motives of business; to apply the language of business as the test of governance is to confuse the motives. It is to confuse the word “consumer” with the word “citizen.” One is driven by self-interest; the other is concerned with communal-interest. If government ran like a business we’d all get a pink slip and have to find another country to employ us; I understand the government is downsizing. Anyway, I like choosing the location of my cubicle and if government ran like a business I’d have to live with my assigned space. And, of course, there is this thing called democracy and I’ve yet to find a business that (honestly) embraces the notion of the voice of the people. Apples and oranges.

Education is not business. The motives of education are fundamentally different than the motives of business yet we are now applying the language of business to how we teach and learn. Children are not products and despite our wish to label them as such, there is nothing standard about children or the circumstances of the schools. Is it really the aim of our education system to produce better workers? Are we truly in that much of an imagination deficit? It is another form of the consumer-citizen confusion and this apples-oranges mess is not only limiting the possibilities we entertain it is stunting our growth.

We’ve tangled the motives. Clarity is not in the actions taken; clarity is in the intention beneath the actions taken. Why do we do what we do? We do not treat our families the same way we treat our co-workers because the context is different, the motives behind our relationships are different and yet we regularly cross wires with our institutions: the motives of health care are not business motives, the motives of prisons are not business motives, so what in us is so willing to confuse them? People are not bottom lines nor are they consumable.

Ask yourself: What’s the motivation? What’s beneath the action? Governing is a different animal than Google. Business best practices do not generate dreams; people do.

Filed under: Rants, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

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.”

Filed under: Perspective, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

Right Now Means Not Yet

Posted on October 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Language is beautiful and never precise. I can only assume that when I use a word or phrase that you, as the hearer, interpret the meaning as I intended. And I’m convinced that is hardly ever the case; I say one thing and you hear another. We think a single word has a singular shared meaning; we may bob our heads in agreement; the best we can do is approximate.

I often hear the word, “love” used to mean the word, “need.” We toss about words like, “data” or “statistic” as if they were absolute and unassailable. Data is collected by and for humans so it is subject to interpretation; it was gathered with a point of view in mind. Say the word “turquoise” to me and my associations will be personal, precise, tactile, and loaded with sensual experiences that you can’t possibly intend. In the airport yesterday I heard someone say, “Turquoise is common.” And I thought, “Oh, how sad. Turquoise is the color of desire, it radiates against the red earth and tanned skin; it floods me with memories of Santa Fe.” There is no way I can reduce any color or stone to something common. Or, perhaps I misunderstood their use of the word, “common.” It’s possible.

Luckie-the-dive-master told me that, in Belize, when you say, “Right now,” you mean “not yet.” I laughed because Luckie has one of those smiles that leads you to think he is pulling your leg – and he often is – but this time he was telling me the truth. I listened to the guys on the dive boat say, “Right now!,” I heard people in the village say, “Right now!” and no one moved. It made me nervous because their “not yet” was my “right now” and I jumped to help every time. Luckie’s wife is Canadian; early in their relationship they got into a fight because she was helping him fix a motorbike; he’d say, “Right now” and she’s rev the motor. “No!” he screamed, “Right now!” and she’d rev the motor again. “No!” he screamed, “I said right now.” They were deep into the battle when they realized that they were using the same words for two diametrically opposed meanings.

I asked Luckie, “If ‘right now’ means ‘not yet’, what do Belizian’s say for ‘now?’” He looked at me with his grin of mischief and, as if I was an idiot, he said, “We say ‘now.’ I laughed and he shrugged his shoulders, saying, “Now means now, right now means not yet. It’s simple.”

Language is beautiful.

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

“When You Are Falling, Dive!”

Posted on October 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

586. 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 the dragonfly is once again on my mind. Earlier this summer I wrote about dragonflies and they have been hanging around in my thoughts since a hot day in August when I waded into a lake in New Hampshire and a cobalt and purple dragonfly landed on my shoulder. I was going to take a swim but recognized that I was having a sweet visitation so I thought I’d wait until the dragonfly left me. And the dragonfly stayed. For a long time it rode on my shoulder. I slowly waded parallel to the shore and for almost a mile the dragonfly sat on my shoulder. A few weeks ago I kneeled on the grass of Jill’s front yard and saw fiery orange dragonflies skitter just above the green; those playful amorous dragonflies were invisible from human height. When I kneeled and put my ear on the grass I saw an entire festival of dragonfly play.

I love symbol and metaphor so later I researched (again) the dragonfly as a symbol and what it portends. I learned that dragonflies come to you to help you break the illusions that prevent growth and maturity. They bring visions of power; they are swift fliers so are symbols of whirlwinds of activity. Dragonflies also foretell a time of change. In other words, when a dragonfly lands on your shoulder it is a good idea to put on your seatbelt. When an invisible community of dragonflies becomes visible, put on your hard helmet.

This summer was definitely a time for breaking my illusions, challenging my patterns and looking at my assumptions. The breaking continues: if my life came with a windshield I would have already gone through it. Airbags were not an option when my model came into the world and the seatbelt was less than useful. I read that dragonfly medicine works in a two-year cycle so the games have just begun. Since I am already in flight I will keep my helmet on for a while. I am investing in some large safety goggles. I am learning to keep my arms at my side for less wind resistance. Soon I expect that I will develop a cool set of wings. I wonder what color I will be when I have fully become a dragonfly? I prefer the cobalt and purple but the fiery orange was hot and might better serve my new style.

As an older artist friend once told me, the edges never stop coming; if we are alive we just get better and better at running toward them. We develop an unwavering faith in the leap, the fall, and the landing. I am going to like life as a dragonfly and will not spend much of my time reminiscing about my human shape. And, I am certain that I will spend much of my time seeking shoulders upon which to land. I will delight in being a colorful symbol for imminent change.

Filed under: Edges, The Direction of Intention, Transcendence | 1 Comment »

Choose To Be Powerful

Posted on October 15, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

[continued for 584]

This is what I wrote in my journal about strings to pluck when telling the students the Polar Bear King story. These were my 3 lessons about power as told through the story:

1. Power is something you can learn. And, because it is something you learn it is something anyone can create. Power is not something that happens to you; you choose it. You create it.

2. You can only create power with others. No one is powerful alone. Personal power comes from how you are with others. How are you within your circumstance?

3. It matters how you enter a space, just as it matters how you enter you life each day. You have the capacity to intend. How you come in, why you come in, determines what you do within the space. So, for instance, if you enter the classroom expecting the teacher to control you then you have already given away your power; you will wrangle for control all day and only feel the illusion of power when you think you have won control. The first confusion is to mistake control for power. Power is not control, control over others is not power. Enter the space in control of yourself. Decide to enter your day, each and every day, as a powerful person.

It’s so simple.

Filed under: Education, Power, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

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