The Direction of Intention

Be A Mystery

Posted on October 27, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Sitting on the pier watching the sun come up, the temperature already 85 degrees, I had an epiphany. I realized that I have spent much of my life trying “to figure it out,” which, in essence, is an attempt to figure out myself. Watching the sky erupt into orange and fiery red, I thought, “What if I am mystery? What if I was meant to be a mystery? What if all of this “figuring out” was really an attempt to control or contain the uncontrollable? How would I be in the world if I stopped trying to figure it out and instead reveled in the mystery? I think I’d play more than I do currently. I’d run in circles and roll down hills. I’d be less concerned about things making sense.

I know this. I give meaning to the world I inhabit. The meaning is not “in” the world; it is “in” me. The perpetual search for meaning stopped when I ceased to seek meaning as something separate from myself. This shift of perspective is a quality of empowerment: we become power-full when we own our choices and the epicenter of choice is where we decide to place our focus. In other words, what do you choose to see and how do you choose to interpret (story) your experiences.

Even knowing this, it came as a surprise when I recognized the need to surrender my control and containment imperative: figuring it out is a fool’s errand. We can discover how to split an atom but we will never discover what it means. It means nothing without our participation, how we use it, what we intend. With that sunrise, the world regained its scope and infinite variety. My assumptions dribbled away with the dawn. The truth is that I don’t know. I don’t really know anything. It is too vast for me to know. The best I can do is close my eyes and feel the sun on my face. I can smell the salt sea air, I can listen to the waves and the birds and the distant voices. I can make a story of it all. Ask me what it means and I will ask you what it means to you. Ask me what it means to me and I just might tell you, “Nobody knows! It’s a mystery.”

Filed under: Awakening, Identity, Navel Gazing, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

Fly Back Together

Posted on October 26, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Lately, I have this image of myself that makes me laugh. I see it in sleep, sometimes while daydreaming, and today I found myself doodling it. It is as surprising as it is welcome. It is one of those images that I did not manufacture; rather it came to me. I see it so often now that I re-run it, enjoy it; I am playing with it.

It is as if I am seeing a film running in reverse, like a jalopy losing pieces all over the road, when seen in reverse, the pieces fly back together. That is the image. I am standing very still in a meadow and all of my pieces are flying back together. I did not realize I’d lost so much along the way!

I giggle when I see this image. Rather, this image is visceral and it tickles – all of those pieces coming together delight me and literally tickle me.

Because inquiring minds want to know and I have one of those inquiring minds, I’ve tried to identify the pieces; I want to know what I dropped on the highway of life. Yet, the moment I pay attention to the individual pieces I lose the image. The tickling stops, the image dissipates. Apparently I am not meant to focus on the fragments; it is the whole that matters.

In class today we talked about the verb “to heal.” It has roots in an old English word, hælen, which meant, “to make whole.” To heal is to make whole. As I close my eyes and see myself standing in the meadow, all of my pieces flying back together, I giggle, arms extended and say to myself, “Welcome home.”

Filed under: Metaphor, Surprises, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Find Your Pivot Point

Posted on October 25, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

595. 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 from 594]

It is a full decade since I learned to dive with Terry. Until last week it had been 6 years since my last dive. Although I live on the Puget Sound, near one of the world’s great dive spots, the water is cold and I am skinny; I hate to shiver and all I need do is look at the divers preparing to enter the frigid waters outside my door and I start looking for a blanket.

A few weeks ago I flew to Belize for a dive vacation. Apparently I was ready for my second master and the next level of the lesson. And, lucky me, since it was time for the second master, I actually had two masters show up: the first was the dive master, named Luckie (note: I am considering a name change; how cool is it to be a dive master AND to be named Luckie). Luckie, above the water, is a trickster and filled with laughter; beneath the surface he is easy, clear, and neutral. He radiates trust. I would follow him anywhere. Luckie dives without any weight. Most divers need a small amount of weight to take them down and to assist with neutral buoyancy. This is too big of a metaphor for this small post but just consider the implications: how much weight do you need to carry to become neutral? Luckie needs none. He is neutral all the time and like Terry, that does not render him without personality, it does the exact opposite: Luckie is a riot of laughter and joy. He is a magnet for life. He is hungry to know and engage and experience. He is the embodiment of what it is to be neutral and efficient. Luckie has fire and he burns clean.

The second master is Luckie’s boss, Declan (okay, another cool name. Apparently you can only live in Belize if your have a cool name). He came with us on our second day of diving. The first time I saw Declan in the water I almost cried; I have never before seen a human being that easy and present. He was so…beautiful…in the water that I was stunned: the absence of struggle. I had to swim behind him. I wanted to know what he knows, I wanted to mimic what he did. And, remember, I know Terry. I was amazed and inspired by Luckie. Declan in the water becomes the water; he is not easy in it, he is it. He teaches a class in mastering your buoyancy and I will go back to Belize to take the class. Like Terry or Luckie, diving with Declan is not about diving; it is about how to be in the world; it is how to be the world.

I told him that I wanted to take his class and he said, “Oh, it’s easy! It’s not the same for any two people. It’s all about the right amount of weight and recognizing that balance comes from your hips. Find your pivot point, it’s in your center and feel your way into it and then practice. There’s no other way.”

So, crib notes from Belize: you can’t think your way into it. Neutral knows how to laugh. I now know what the absence of struggle looks like. Embodiment. Perfect balance. Practice, practice, practice. There’s no other way.

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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.

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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 »

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