The Direction of Intention

151.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Today I began cataloguing these posts and revisited post #1. It starts with these two phrases:

Truly powerful people are dedicated to inspiring true power in others.

It goes like this: empowered people empower others.

The other day when I was visiting Judy on Bainbridge Island we had a conversation about perception. I told Judy that I’ve recently been thinking that notions like “survival of the fittest” are concepts that only make sense to a culture devoted to the individual. Survival of the fittest is a construct of a human mind, like time, and not a “reality” describing how nature works. From another set of eyes I could describe nature as collaboration or cooperation, an exercise in balance. We see everything as a competition because our mythologies are filled with warriors, heroes and angry gods fighting for power and control over this pie that has a limited number of slices.

In her book, Wild, Jay Griffiths wrote that most indigenous cultures have no word for or concept of “wild.” When nature is not seen as something to be tamed, everything is collaboration. Nothing is wild; there is no separation between nature and not nature (civilization?). No fences needed. This applies particularly and most importantly to inner nature. Your inner nature is just fine without all the control you impose; it needs no compartmentalization. You require no taming if you believe you are part of nature and not the master of it.

Empowered people have no use for power over others. Empowered people have no use for taming their inner nature; they desire to know themselves not control themselves. Empowered people empower others because they are collaborating, participating, and not so dreadfully invested in putting up fences.

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149.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

It’s an odd image but go with me. Lately I’ve been looking at people as if they were empty cups that fill themselves according to the story that they tell. For instance, yesterday I watched a man fill himself with angst and frustration. He stood in front of a photograph muttering, “I could never do that,” and I watched as his body began filling with frustrations; it began to rise from his toes, filling his legs and his belly, seeping up into his heart, clogging his voice and drowning his brain in a thick liquid, “I can’t.” His story thwarted completely his desire to be a photographer. What liquid story might have filled his cup had his story been, “Cool! I’m going to learn how to do that?”

According to the research 90% of what runs through your mind is the same stuff that ran through it yesterday. The story you tell yourself is on a loop. The story you tell yourself comes from a specific point of view. I don’t need the research to know that I tell myself the same story loop each day from the same point of view. Consider, for instance, if you assume the universe is against you, your cup will fill with a story of resistance, hard luck, and victimization; no matter what you do, the universe is against you. Every traffic jam, every paper cut will reinforce your story and keep your cup filled with liquid negativity. And, you will fill every relationship, every choice and opportunity, with the negative liquid in your cup because that is what you bring to the party.

I don’t know about you but if 90% of what runs through my mind is the same stuff then I might as well make that 90% a story of opportunity, choice, and support. I’m seeing others as story-cups because I feel within myself how easily I can fill up with anger or blame. “Look how I just filled myself,” has become an awareness tool, a mantra as I literally fill myself with a story of poison or a story of pleasure. Either way, it is my choice and that is the point. I have choice about the story I tell. I have choice about the point of view from which I tell the story. I have choice about where I place my focus (what I choose to see, to emphasize, how I choose to interpret every experience).

How are you filling your cup?

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145.
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.

Government is not business. It has fiscal responsibilities, yes, but the intention of government is fundamentally different than the intention of a business. Government is how a state (state = a group of people who share a common identity) manages itself. A group of people, even with a common story, has multiple points of view and has to have some mechanism for maintaining a healthy commons. Government concerns itself with what a community values. It is the functional layer of the question, “who are we?” Business is not in the least concerned with values. Business would have you believe that is provides something of value. This is sometimes true and sometimes not.

Education is not business. While it also has fiscal realities the purpose of education is not to make money. The purpose of education is to support a new generation of citizens, expansive, curious, dynamic, human beings capable of critical thought, constructive debate, capable of sharing and perpetuating a common narrative. Education is not about answers. It is about this question: Who are we (and the individual variation, “who am I?”)? If education is not about self-knowledge, then it is about nothing. The era of education-as-factory is collapsing on itself.

The arts will never make money; art is not business. The purpose of art is to hold, maintain and renew the identity of the culture. Artist’s hold the necessary sacred space for exploring the question, “who are we?” When the purpose of art in a culture becomes the making of money, the culture is already dead: despite its appearance the core of the apple is rotten.

News is not entertainment. The purpose of news is to report without bias the events of the world. Hopefully, news informs the community, it provides the necessary information for good decision-making. When the purpose of news becomes to attract the most viewers (make money), to influence opinion or to promote a point of view (make money), it is no longer news. It is something else.

In the collision between old world ideas and the reality of the world in which we live it is increasingly more difficult to discern between apples and oranges and it is more and more imperative that we remember how to do so. Confusing the intention of government, education, art, news,…, with the intention of business is to forget the essential in pursuit of the superficial. It becomes the default answer to the question, “who are we?”

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143.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Patti Digh and I have very few hard fast rules but one that is sacred above all is this: you must stop at a lemonade stand and buy whatever passes for lemonade from the kids. No exceptions. Lemonade stand = immediate thirst. A few months ago we stopped at a stand on the way to the store and, because we took the same route home, we stopped again. No exceptions.

Last night I took a walk to unwind the knot in my mind. I turned the corner and saw the lemonade stand to beat all lemonade stands. Had I never stopped at lemonade stands, had I been the lemonade Grinch, I would have stopped at this one; the 3 young girls operating the stand gave passers-by no choice. They were 100% in.

It is important to know that I heard the stand before I saw it; before turning the corner I thought there must be horde of teenage boys cruising the streets to show off their cars: the music was loud, rowdy, heavy on the base, hip hop. Instead of boys peacocking, I turned the corner and saw three little girls, perhaps 6 years old, each in pink ballerina tights and skirts, dancing with full heart and throttle a choreographed piece, punctuating every 8th downbeat by shouting “LEMONADE!” Cars careened to the side of the road as if caught in the magnetic field of these three dynamic girls channeling the spirit of Tina Turner. Invisible hands grabbed unsuspecting evening-strollers and pulled us into line.

The lemonade and Dixie cups sat on a table stage left, it was serve yourself and put your money in the jar. I spied a dutiful mother waiting behind a hedge, ready to refill the pitcher when it ran low; the line was long and slow and no one wanted to leave.

Like other patrons, I left an extra dollar for the privilege of having our lives so enthusiastically and abundantly affirmed: no holds barred living! They gave me a new image for making BIG offers and those little magicians danced that knot right out of my mind.

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