In a self-described "rant" Rita Nakashima Brock takes aim at her own spiritual tradition. Despite its "rantish" nature, something in me was moved by this article. I think there were two things I appreciated:

• 1) the sense that even when engaging the rhetoric of creating a "new tomorrow" we are still so often tinkering around the edges. The idea that a significantly new paradigm is needed is not just a piece of psycho-babble. We WILL need to humbly challenge all assumptions and never sit comfortably with the status quo.

• 2) Despite profound action on many fronts, the anti-activist friction I mentioned in the last blog is intensely powerful. It is no good blaming others for that, we all cause it and our way of life is caused by it. We have to search deeper for the energy within ourselves and our communities to practise life differently.

If I was a fierce campaigner I think my next campaign would be to end "work/life balance".

Actually that's deliberately provocative because I don't have a particular problem with the concept that lies behind the term. It's the term itself that needs shelving. For don't we have enough dualisms in the world without creating the illusion that "work" is somehow different to/separate from/the opposite of "life?"

Clearly work is part of life and I suspect something resembling balance comes when we truly realise that integration.

In fact ,my hunch is that when we cease to create dichotomies that include the word "life" (such as "life v death" and "work/life balance") and realise that life can't be "separated out" and "it's all part of life" that we will have reached a profound new place in the evolution of human consciousness.

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I'm no expert on the art of humour. But maybe some of the sharpest acts of comedy arise when - through laughs - we are made starkly aware of a meaning deficit in our society.

This opinion arises out of conversations this week with my work colleagues. We now work in situation where we are connected to a large numbers of schools. And suddenly Chris Lilley's humour is bitingly funny to me in a way I've not fully understood it before. Or more to the point his parody of the schoolgirl with a plethora of overseas sponsor children alerts me to a crisis of meaning. For it seems that our schools have large numbers of students eager to sign up for clever charitable gimmicks. I mean the term "gimmick" clinically rather than critically here. For these charitable acts are purposefully designed for novelty and hence to generate a quantity of engagement.
 

And undoubtedly they contribute to specific, positive outcomes. But do they really tap into the student's passion, triggering questions within the student of what, uniquely, they are called to contribute? Can they take engagement from a quantity to a quality measure? For most students I suspect not. They are only ever production-line methods, designed to induce action out of our desire to "be good" -as poet Mary Oliver describes that behavioural driver. That's not a bad thing; it's just not the deeper stuff of life. And we get the idea of meaning confused when we think it's about the superficial desire to "be good." I suspect many students - and some school staff - are in that space.

And equally in that space might be many of our companies and their employees. As I've had these conversations with my UCA colleagues I've been simultaneously conversing with another colleague - this time a corporate consultant - about the very same thing. This time though the subject is corporate social responsibility. There are positive signs here, but still - my colleague thinks - too many "responsibility" efforts that are adjunct to core business. Too many droves of corporate employees unleashed on the world to plant trees, paint a fence or talk to a granny, acting at right angles to employee passion or corporate purpose.  It's action that doesn't hurt anyone but Oliver's words ring in my ears - a disjointed corporate attempt to "be good."
 

I am a big fan of Oliver's poem. It cut s to the chase of meaning for me. "You do not have to be good" she exhorts. She then answers the dilemma presented by this blog entry, with - in my opinion - stunning advice.

"You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

Practically, this means schooling and corporate life with high levels of integration. So sweet-sixteen schoolgirl doesn't aim to be child sponsorship champion. Instead she's led to discern her own deep concern about income inequality (or whatever it is) and to bring her "passion project" to life through tailored lessons. Science, humanities, arts, sport  - are all experienced through the lens of that student's particular gift. And because the "soft animal of her body is loving what it loves" every minute of the day she is engaging these lessons with a distinct level of enthusiasm (literally "in god").

And a junior technology analyst joins the corporate energy provider, not to be nice to a granny, but because he wants every technical solution he develops to make sustainable energy more and more available to a greater diversity of people. He's not "having to be good." He's just doing what he "couldn't not do."

Inspiration for this last phrase we owe to Martin Buber. I think the Jewish mystic was really tapping into the heart of life with his suggestion that life is not about the "have to's, musts or shoulds." Marshall Rosenberg  - in his work on non-violent communication - showed us that, these are words of violence. That's because the action that results from these words is driven from somewhere outside the inner-most design of our being. Instead, returning to Buber, life is about that which you cannot, not do....a deep, inner sense and the place where compulsion and radical freedom meet. The resultant action is experienced as deeply meaningful.

No ...you do not have to be good!

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Words are being created at a reasonable clip in the culture change/philosophy/ spirituality space. Usually such words are the result of adding a simple affix to a term that's already deeply important in the particular approach being explored.

"Inclusionality" is the most recent example I have found and I quite like it, given my sincere attachment to the root work - inclusion. Inclusionality is another way talking about the journey beyond the separation/dualism that comes with heady pursuits, but as I look at the "inclusionality" website there are some pretty "heady" concepts being explored.

Nevertheless I did resonate with the ideas in their MS PowerPoint presentation about the concept - another way to appreciate this journey beyond ego.

I particularly liked the comment on slide 12a (yes, there are quite a lot of slides) ...viz: "Don't declare self independent from neighbourhood, because to do so is cancerous."

The resonance here for me is that as I read David Servan-Schreiber's excellent book "Anti-Cancer - A New Way of Life" - ostensibly about the human/physiological understandings of cancer - I kept thinking "this is really a book about community, and the cancer that develops in society (read: any number of societal ills) when we lose connection amongst its parts."

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This opinion item relates to the use of appreciative inquiry for business reframing. It mentions the use of the "leader framework" from the Forum for the Future. That's not a well know organisation here in Australia but my viewing of their website created great excitement in me around the idea of a learning community for sustainability. I love this excerpt from one of the pages on sustainable leadership:

We have observed that strong leaders who incorporate sustainability into their thinking display three key characteristics. They look further into the future, they engage widely with a range of stakeholders, and they embrace meaning from a personal perspective. We call this three dimensional leadership.   

Three dimensional leaders:

look further - leaders need to identify and understand future trends and issues so they can prepare for new challenges and opportunities;

engage widely - leaders need to understand how everything is connected so they can respond to a wide range of issues, perspectives and stakeholder concerns;

embrace meaning - leaders need to be authentic; and harness their personal values and beliefs in sustainable development to achieve the greatest impact.

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I have just planted my carrot seeds for the southern summer. I wonder what proportion of early teen children in the overdeveloped world know where carrots come from? 

I have just planted my carrot seeds for the southern summer. I wonder what proportion of early teen children in the overdeveloped world know where carrots come from? I wonder what proportion is "appropriate" or "acceptable?" I wonder whether 100% is the only acceptable number - almost as a "right of the child" to be able to picture where their food comes from and how they are connected to food? I wonder - in the tradition of positive deviance - how so many children do come to know about the origin of their carrots, and how that knowledge can assist those who don't?

Why this whimsical but wonder-ful questioning? I was looking at this wonderful site (related to one of the burgeoning number of projects that set out to financially encourage creative problem solving) and found this project and a related article here too.

As the first article says:

It's so fricking simple it's brilliant. The need was so clear. Cooking for a private household in a wealthy neighborhood in Connecticut 8 years ago, I brought home carrots with green tops and the kids had no idea what they were. What? You mean carrots aren't those one inch things that come in plastic baggies? At first I thought, "Come on, these kids are fooling me." But nope, since then I've been on a crusade to get kids reconnected to their carrots. To the source of healthy food - the healthy earth and family farms. And that food pyramid, and all that TALK about healthy food just ain't doing it. The kids have to get their hands and their MOUTHS on this food if we want them to start eating it.

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