 I‘ve been thinking more about my Mid-Year Intentions, the things I intend to get done in the next six months, and intentions I failed to realize in the last six months, in the context of some recent discussion about our obsession with doing rather than being. Viv McWaters said: Iíve been pondering the need to be seen to be DOING, the need to produce OUTPUTS or PRODUCTS and the dilemma of the intrinsic worth of simply BEING with others and having conversations. This situation often arises when I talk about or facilitate open space meetings. ìIt was good to talk, to have some time to explore, to slow down, but what did we achieve?î I wonder why talking, exploring and slowing down are not generally seen as achievements in their own right?
I think this is what was wrong with my New Years’ Intentions list six months ago — I was totally fixated on measurable results and achievement, on Getting Things Done, on getting there, getting finished. Those intentions were very ambitious — lifelong goals that were, mostly goals of direction (love more, live simpler, converse better, be more present, move more, be more self-sufficient, be bolder, help entrepreneurs more, have more fun). These intentions were, in fact, not really about accomplishment or objectives. Rather than intentions to do, they are intentions to change the way I am (what I’ve called Let-Self-Change) — intentions to be something different. To be what I was intended to be, to be more authentically myself. To be nobody-but-myself. In a remarkable synchronicity, Evelyn Rodriguez just twittered a link to her 2005 article about Conrad’s and Joyce’s comments on this same subject. She quotes Gandhi as saying “My life is my message.” (he also famously said “Be the change you want to see in the world” — Be, not Do). She quotes Joseph Conrad as saying that real art — infinitely present art, that is created for its own purpose, a simple representation of what is — has the enormous power to astonish, to extinguish the ego. By contrast, he says, ‘art’ that intends to persuade other people to feel or believe or do something is mere marketing, propaganda, pornography. Real artists, she quotes Tom Asacker as saying, “live worldview-disrupting lives”. And, she concludes, “if we draw from inspiration, our lives themselves can be works of art”. Regular readers know I’ve been conversing with Siona and Patti about this whole issue of being vs doing and what we’re meant to do and our responsibility to the world, and to ourselves. As I thought about all this, I suddenly had an Aha! moment: Is my Purpose, generalist that I am, to simply be a model for others of how to be, in this terrible world where there is only so much any one person can do? And if that’s so, I wondered, how can I be better? Then I began to completely rethink my intentions list and put them in terms of getting better, of being better. This would require that I engage regularly in practice to move towards being better. For the most part these things can never be done — there is only the striving to get better at them, a bit at a time. What’s more, practicing getting better at these things requires that I do less of something else (there are only so many hours in a day). So I decided to take a look at how I spend my time now, and how I would have to spend my time to allow myself enough regular practice to steadily get better at these things. When I realized that I currently spend almost no time practicing these things, and that my current workload almost precludes me finding time to practice these things, I realized why I have made so little progress in achieving these intentions. The chart above shows how, on average, my day is spent. Much of my time is taken up in the activities shown in grey, activities that do not involve practicing the things I need to in order to achieve my intentions. Embarrassingly little is spent in the activities shown in red, yellow, orange, blue, green and purple — the six activities that I get greatest satisfaction from and which will best equip me, if practiced regularly, both to achieve my intentions and to be more useful to others and the world in the years ahead. And to be more authentically myself, to be nobody-but-myself. My intention now is to increase the time I spend practicing these six activities from 5.6 hours a day to 11.6 hours a day, as illustrated in the chart above. Here’s how I might spend that time:
In practicing these things, I intend to learn to be more myself. These are long-term intentions, totally unlike a Getting Things Done list, and I intend to practice from now on, just keep getting better. The only ‘results’ will be the self-change in me (greater competencies, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge, presence, and happiness) and being more useful (perhaps even a model) to others. The very thought of spending most of my waking hours practicing these things is exhilarating. This is what I used to be, when I was very young, naturally. This is what, I think, I am meant to be. How did I lose my way? Category: Let-Self-Change
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June 16, 2008
Practice: Learning to Be Nobody But Yourself
June 14, 2008
Saturday Links of the Week — June 14, 2008
 Cookie Monster No Want to Delete Cookies! by Gegen Den Strich Insane Profit Expectations: The Anglo Disease: Our economy’s unsustainability is due to an expectation that inflation and interest rates will remain forever low and hence corporate profits forever high. The fragility that we now face as a result has been dubbed “The Anglo Disease”. Here it is in a nutshell: Describing the interest rates set by the bond market as the ìcornerstoneî for valuing equities and other securities, [Albert Edwards, Dresdner Kleinwortís well-known global equity strategist] cautions that if the bond market has truly entered a new era of steadily rising long-term rates, ìall investment portfolios will be shredded to ribbonsî. Increasingly cheap money, underpinned by ever more optimistic prognoses about inflation and, more generally, future returns on financial assets, has fuelled the massive financial boom we’ve been in for most of our lives and which has so transformed our economic landscape. By making high returns possible, it has generalised the requirement for such returns in all economic activities, and thus the need for constant restructuring of businesses, for cost-cutting, offshoring and, often, for the wholesale dismantlement of whole sectors of activity that could not generate the required profitability. This is important. Read the first article, and then lots more on this frightening phenomenon. Put this together with the inevitable move to a steady-state economy, and you have an economic tsunami in the making. The End of the World As We Know It: Another astonishing poetic essay by Pohangina Pete, with the usual staggeringly beautiful photos. Teaser: When the rain passes, moving up the coast, we cross the creek on the pontoon, pulling ourselves across the slow flow on a simple, effective contraption of empty oil drums and steel grating, and walk to the beach. Sand after rain seems like hope or the promise of forgivenessóa reminder that after we’ve gone, when the last human passes, the world will continue, and will begin to erase the signs of our time on Earth. Like the maze of footprints on the beach and the excavations and constructions of small children with plastic spades and buckets, the traces of our activities will be erased by weather and time and non-human lives. When and how this will happen, I don’t know. I do suspect it will happen not catastrophically and globally but gradually and patchily. Human existence, already grim in much of the world, will become grimmer, then desperate, and the expansion of regions where humans cannot live will accelerate. There, in those deserted and ruined places, the record of human life will begin to fade. USDA Allows Factory Farms to Pose as Organic Farmers: Some of the biggest beef and dairy farms in the nation have been selling their goods to Wal-Mart, Costco, Target and other cheap junk stores as ‘organic’, when court documents show it isn’t, and that the operators wouldn’t even allow the USDA inspectors onto their premises. This is typical of what passes for ‘enforcement’ in the Bush Administration. Workers of the World Relax: “What if we used our gains in productivity to slow down? We could work less and produce less. It would also mean consuming less.” And less damage to the environment, our bodies and our souls. Thanks to Steve for the link. Or to Put It Another Way: Work Sucks: Two HR professionals want to abolish the standard work week. Their alternative is the results-only work environment (ROWE). But isn’t that what the dreaded labour-exploiting policy of ‘piece-work’ was all about? Thanks to Michael Serres for the link. The Myth of Work-Life Balance for Mothers: Penelope Trunk explains the danger of ‘mommie porn’ propaganda about women who have it all and do it all well. Thanks to Darren Barefoot for the link. Picture Your Listening History: Lastgraph creates time series for last.fm users showing visually which musicians you’ve listened to over the past few months. Absolutely fascinating. Thanks to Chris Lott for the link. The Importance of Being Not Doing: Two recent posts by Viv McWaters on how our modern preoccupation with Getting Things Done, and with immediate measurable outputs, interfere with learning, creativity, and discovery. “Iíve been pondering the need to be seen to be DOING, the need to produce OUTPUTS or PRODUCTS and the dilemma of the intrinsic worth of simply BEING with others and having conversations.” More on this in my article Monday. Thanks to Geoff Brown for the link. |
June 13, 2008
Friday Flashback: Three Important Life Questions
 Image: Suicide by Scandinavian artist Joakim Back. In May 2006, in a review of Nick Hornby’s book A Long Way Down, I concluded with a synopsis of three important questions Hornby poses in the book, questions that are critical for us all to ask and answer for ourselves:
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June 12, 2008
The Wal-Mart Dilemma, the Two-Income Trap and the End of Oil
 I‘ve written before about the Wal-Mart Dilemma: Less disposable real income for workers forces suppliers to lower prices and quality by offshoring production and service and laying off domestic workers, so they have even less disposable income. It’s a classic vicious cycle.
Its consequences — unemployment, underemployment, low wages, low product quality, and endemic poverty — are visible everywhere in North America, and the disease is spreading. The solution — duties on imported goods and services that can reasonably be produced locally — is enough to make globalists and ‘free’ traders foam at the mouth, and they have invested heavily in politicians to make sure it doesn’t happen. With the advent of $130/bbl oil and $4/gal gasoline ($5-6/gal in Canada and Australia, $8-9/gal in Europe, $3/gal in China) the Wal-Mart Dilemma is starting to be felt in many products that are made of or dependent on oil, such as:
What will the average citizen do when these goods become unaffordable? Here’s my take on how the Wal-Mart Dilemma will play out:
This is the Wal-Mart Dilemma turned into an entire self-defeating economy, and the vicious cycle of unemployment, underemployment, low wages, low product quality, and endemic poverty will become our way of life. It’s a consequence of (a) the structure of our dysfunctional economy and (b) human nature — to work around ‘problems’ with the minimum possible change to our lifestyle, rather than making long-term, sensible but difficult fundamental changes — like buying (and making) only expensive hybrids, revamping public transit, making our homes energy-efficient, buying durable, local, sustainable goods and “eating food, not too much, mostly plants“. We will, instead, become third-world nations. There are those that think $7/gal gasoline is just what we need, that it will bring about needed economic reforms and changes in behaviour. They justaren’t paying attention. Category: Understanding Economics
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June 11, 2008
Now What Am I Going to Do?
 Now what am I going to do? That’s a question that millions of people ask themselves every day. In struggling nations the question is about how to get enough to keep the family alive for another day. In the working classes of affluent nations the question is often about how to cope with a layoff, an uninsured or underinsured illness or loss, or costs of living that are soaring. Among those who are educated but unemployed, underemployed, or exhausted by their employment, the question is about finding meaningful work. But in every case the answer is not easy, not obvious, and immensely stressful. A year ago I produced a list of Mid-Year Intentions, and by six months ago I had substantially completed them all. My book had found a publisher. I’d changed jobs to one that promised to let me make a living doing what I’d always wanted to do. I’d made a lot of self-changes for the better, and was healthier, happier, more loving and more productive. I was really on a roll. By intentions I meant more than resolutions…these were things I had already begun and fully intended to finish within six months. This list was my answer to the question Now what am I going to do? At the start of this year I created a second set of New Years’ Intentions, to be completed by the end of this month. But despite an incredibly busy and full six months, my success this time around has been much more modest. What went wrong? I intended to:
My accomplishments from completing the first six-month intentions list continue to bear fruit, and I’m very proud of them. Sustaining them takes some continuing work, but it’s worth it. I’m in the best physical shape I’ve ever been. The book gets better and better and will soon be in the bookstores. I’m doing more facilitating and less telling, and instead of telling people what to do I tell stories and let them draw their own conclusions. I’ve become 100% vegetarian and 80% of my meals are now vegan. My health is excellent. So maybe adding another ten intentions was asking too much? This may be partly true — I constantly feel I’m not getting everything done I should, constantly feel like I’m letting people down, and letting myself down as well. And I’m allowing myself to get sleep-deprived too often. But it’s also true that the second list was more ambitious — more of a stretch, a self-change challenge, including things that I have never been good at. In trying to love as many people as possible, for example, I’ve learned that I don’t even like most people very much. Thanks to Mia’s efforts, not mine, our Second Life Intentional Community is up and running, but I’m impatient with the struggle to find people who share our intention and are willing to invest some energy and time to make it work. And as delightful as the people I’ve met from real-life Intentional Communities are, I just can’t see myself in any of these communities — it’s not what I’m looking for. So I’ve decided to make my next list of intentions — my Mid Year Intentions 2008 list, which I’ll post in about two weeks — shorter, perhaps 5 items instead of 10. And beside each broad intention will be One Thing that I will do specifically in the next six months to realize that intention, to get at least measurably closer to achieving it. Each of these ‘One Things’ will be my answer to the question Now what am I going to do? So preparing the Intention List becomes a three step exercise:
So, for example:
In order to realize my top 5 intentions for the next six months, I’m going to have to be selective, and put my list in order of importance. And I’m going to have to be realistic about how many of those One Things I can expect to do, on top of all that I am already doing. Or else I will have to stop doing some things in order to make room for others, moreimportant. After all, we may only have 37 days to realize our really important intentions. What do you think? Could this simple three-step process help us to let ourselves change, and really realize our intentions? What is your most important intention, to be achieved in the next six months, in order to become more who you really are, and be and do what you were intended to? What’s holding you back? And what One Thing will you do to remove or work around that obstacle? Now what are you going to do? Category: Let-Self-Change
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June 10, 2008
Dave’s Dream
“What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age that advances progressively backwards?” — TS Eliot I dreamed that I lived in a place where an abundant variety of delicious foods grew naturally, and needed only to be gathered. I dreamed that I lived in a place where it was never so cold as to require a fire or heating, and never so hot as to require ‘air conditioning’. I dreamed that I lived in a place that was lush and green and wet, where I could just nestle in the trees, comfortably, to chat with the lovely people and other creatures around me, or to sleep. There was no need to construct elaborate or permanent shelter. I dreamed that I lived in a place where clothes were unnecessary, and ridiculous. I dreamed that I lived in a place where most of our time was spent in play, laughing, moving, splashing, grooming each other, and in conversation, reflection and exploration, doing precisely and only what we wanted to do. I dreamed that I lived in a place where I loved all the people and creatures around me, in our gravitational community, and wanted nothing and needed nothing, not even love in return. I dreamed that I lived in a place where there was nothing that I had to do and nowhere I had to go. I dreamed that I lived in a place where there was no government, no hierarchy, no property, no currency, no weaponry, and no secrets, because there was no need or desire for any of these things. I dreamed that I lived in a place where I could live, always, in the moment, in Now Time, attentive, aware, appreciative, astonished, connected with all-life-on-Earth. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will besimpler.
– Thoreau (delightful bird photo from Kevin Cameron at Bastish) Category: Intentional Community
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June 9, 2008
How to Prevent a Revolution
 Ten easy steps to forestall an uprising from outraged citizens:
Category: The Political Process
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June 7, 2008
Saturday Links of the Week — June 7, 2008 — The Thoughtful Edition
 Why You Don’t Want a Personal Brand: William Tozier explains how personae are a useful shorthand for explaining who you are and what you stand for, but a personal ‘brand’ is just an indelible and expectation-creating oversimplification that none of us needs. Survey Shows IM Saves Time, E-Mail Wastes It: A new survey suggests that, despite corporate executives’ and IT departments’ aversion to IM, it is a far superior communication and knowledge transfer tool to e-mail. But then anyone in Gen Millennium could have told you that. Disconnecting Distraction: …and if you want to get anything done, Paul Graham explains that you must first turn off all those distractions that are deliberately designed to tear your attention away from what’s important. Mirrored Speech: Pearl Pirie reminds us of an indigenous practice that helps ensure all participants in a conversation are heard — require each speaker to begin his/her comments with a brief reiteration of what the previous speaker said. “Yes, and…” Could Blogs Be the Ideal Online Courseware?: A number of online courses are now structured through blogs (see illustration above), with an ‘article’ for each ‘lecture’, and the categories replaced by syllabus sections. Here’s a working example. Thanks to Chris Lott for the link. What the World Needs Now: Jen Lemen, blogging from Rwanda where she’s doing some remarkable volunteer work, paints a portrait of the incredible bravery and spirit of the people of a failed and desolated country.
How Agribusiness Has Taken Over Organic Foods: The chart above is one of several by Phil Howard explaining how Agribusiness, smelling profit in organics, has taken over most of the larger organic companies and launched their own greenwash brands. Thanks to Rachel Cullar for the link. What You Really Need to Learn: A brilliant slideshare deck of critical competencies from Stephen Downes (thanks to Michele Martin for the link); the 10 things are:
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Unschooling: From Chris Corrigan, the best of Illich, Gatto, Holt and others on the benefits of un-institutional, self-directed education. I did it for one year, my last year of high school, and went from C student to scholarship winner. What I learned most in that year were the 10 competencies in Stephen’s list, above. MÈxico Becomes a Failed State: I wrote last year that Jeff Vail had convinced me that MÈxico would soon become a failed state, due to its horrific overpopulation, resource scarcity, corruption and inexperience with democracy and constitutional liberalism. It is now clear that organized crime is so powerful in Mexico that the police and politicians either do their bidding or die. Expect another right-wing military dictatorship soon. World’s Most Polluted Cities: All in struggling nations…not in my back yard. Thanks to Candy Minx for the link. Thought for the Week: From Barb Klaser, in comments to one of my posts earlier this week: I had a colleague once whose favorite joke when things didn’t go right on a project was, “I feel so much better since I gave up hope.” But in fact I think there’s a point in our lives when we realize that acceptance of what we can’t change is wisdom, and then our lives change gears for the better.
Those who haven’t seen the wisdom in that might call it laziness. I have a problem with the word “lazy” in that it’s a catchall and nearly always seen as negative. More and more I wonder if there’s really any such thing as laziness, other than the ability and wisdom to slow down and take life in — which I view as a positive trait, a kind of thrifty respect for life — one’s own as well as everyone else’s. Most of the other people society looks at as lazy are dealing with dysfunction or challenged in some way not in their control. Those who’ve made a conscious choice to slow down and value each day — not for what they can produce to make someone rich or to “fix” the wrongs of the world, but for what life means in the greater scheme of things — are likely in the “boomer” age group. Younger people think they have to put up with an employer’s self-absorption, ambition, or greed, but many boomers have wised up and see it for what it is, and they aren’t going to wait for years to “prove” themselves to yet another of this kind of employer. Life’s tooshort… It’s also the reason I try to take my business, as a consumer, to where I see contented employees. |
June 6, 2008
Blogroll Updated
 King Parrot by Boron Homewood, from our Second Life Intentional Community’s art gallery. It took about 30 hours’ work, but I finally got my blogroll updated, with 170 broken links fixed and defunct blogs eliminated, and 130 new blogs added. The resultant list of 302 blogs has been sorted into 38 categories, re-presented as my Blogroll and Online Reference Library, and moved from the main home page to a backup page. These are the people I go to first when I do research or look for inspiration on a particular topic. In its place on the home page is an innovation that I call my Gravitational Community, which you’ll find in the right sidebar beneath my photo. This is a list of the 70 people I have contacted most frequently in the past few months. I am sure there are some errors and omissions in the list, so please e-mail me with corrections. The Gravitational Community list will be updated more frequently than the full Blogroll. I’m considering setting up FriendFeed links for these 70 people, so that my readers can see what they’re writing and posting far beyond just blogs (twitters, photos etc.) — You can set up phantom feeds for people even if they are not FriendFeed users. Ideally, of course, it would be great to have some way to set up impromptu ‘conversations’ using IM that could wrap in members of this Gravitational Community plus other readers who want to chat about a particular topic. Somehow, we need to make blogs more conversational. Let me know what you think — I’m open to suggestions to make this more useful. And yes, Iknow my table of contents needs to be updated too. That’s next. |
June 4, 2008
Are We Boomers Getting Lazy, or Are We Just Getting Old?
 While riding on a train going west I fell asleep for to take my restI dreamed a dream that made me sad concerning myself and the first few friends I had. With half damp eyes I stared to the room where my friends and I spent many an afternoon By the old wooden stove where our hats were hung, our words were told, and our songs were sung With hungry hearts thru the heat and cold, we never much thought we could get very old As easy as it was to tell black from white, it was all that easy to tell wrong from right, Now many a year has passed and gone, many a gamble has been lost and won I wish, I wish, I wish in vain that we could sit simply in that room once again When I finished reading John Gray’s Straw Dogs, and realized that nothing we humans do can prevent the end of our civilization by the end of this century, I was immensely relieved. Even though the name of this blog is meant to be a bit ironic, I felt as if some huge, exhausting and impossible responsibility had just been lifted off my shoulders. If I’d read the book when I was younger, I’d probably have dismissed it as an old cynic’s weary ravings. So what has changed? Have I become smarter, or lazier, or just older and more tired? Many boomers I know have recently gone through a similar self-change. As I put it in a recent article about Intentional Communities where some members work forty hours a week or more, in the fields or in maintenance and repair work, on top of other assignments and family duties: I don’t want to work that hard. I could have added: any more. I know men and women of my age who work as employees in one job, in often-challenging and taxing family relationships as a second ‘job’, and in volunteer or activist work as a third job. No wonder so many of my age will admit, off the record, that they have no time for sex (and some will admit it’s really not a priority for them anyway). Any more. The wage slave job. The struggle with perpetually unhappy family members. The frustration of trying to bring about political, economic and social change. It seems more and more as if it’s all more trouble than it’s worth. Is our whole generation just getting worn out? My first thoughts on this were not terribly charitable. I think it is in our nature to be lazy. We work, most of us, only if and when we think we have to (though a number of our civilization’s guilt trips and propaganda techniques can make us feel we have to when we really don’t). Liberals and conservatives alike deplore lazyness (through they don’t agree on what that is). We are told that we get out of our lives (and relationships, and communities) only what we put into them. Loitering in many places is criminal behaviour. Idleness is “the devil’s workshop”, we are told. We are indoctrinated to believe that a good marriage (or equivalent) takes continuous hard work. That anything worth doing is worth doing well. That time is something we ‘invest’, carefully and diligently, to generate an optimal ‘return’, or else it is ‘wasted’. And a person who does not keep busy is described as indolent, a word that, tellingly, originally meant incapable of feeling pain. Despite the propaganda, I think we (and all creatures) are inherently disinclined to do hard work. All this industry is, after all, responsible for most of the pollution, global warming, suburban sprawl and much of the other environmental destruction that is desolating our Earth. The words conservative and conservation both mean to keep things unchanged, leave things as they are. So I was initially inclined to chalk up my boomer cohort’s growing work-fatigue (and my own) to lazyness. But if that were so, we wouldn’t have worked so hard, on so many ambitious and ultimately largely fruitless causes, when we were younger. My aversion to taking on responsibility and new commitments is a relatively new personality quirk. When I was younger I wanted more responsibility (because with it came authority) — “power to the people” meant responsibility as well, and we were ready. It’s not that I’ve become more irresponsible or noncommittal. I still care just as much. I thought to ascribe it, then, to getting older, to having less energy. I used to love to flirt, but damn it’s hard work. And if you’re not careful, you end up with the object of your attention, some way-too-young-for-you thing, expecting more from you, and then when they open their mouth and say something really boneheaded and your eyes roll back in your head and you run for the hills and say to yourself “Whew, dodged a bullet there“. Whereas if it had happened twenty years earlier, well… Maybe, I wondered, my current infatuation with polyamorism, and my current disdain for the cult of ‘leadership’, are just a reflection of my growing aversion to hard work. But that doesn’t make sense either. Loving a lot of people, while arguably more fun and stimulating than monogamy, takes lots of time and energy too. And if you think facilitating change is easier than leading change, then you don’t know much about either. What polyamorous love, and intelligent conversation, and living and working collaboratively in real community are (compared, say, to the alternatives of monogamy, mindless entertainments, and fighting your way up the corporate or political ladder to power, wealth and leadership) is, for most of us anyway, social, and fun. So I thought, finally, perhaps these a-little-past-midlife crises of boomers like me are indications of neither laziness nor exhaustion (nor, for that matter, wisdom), but rather an aching desire for sociability and playfulness, long postponed after far-too-competitive, over-committed, too-individualistic and far-too-earnest young adulthood. Maybe we just want to talk, intelligently, quietly, imaginatively, collaboratively, compassionately — instead of dedicating our lives to a cause, or a person, or the job dangled like a carrot on a stick. And maybe we want to play, not competitively or passionately, but whimsically, creatively, light-heartedly. Perhaps we are discovering our second childhood — carefree, joyful, open, attentive, accepting, egalitarian, cooperative, without responsibility, loving everyone andbeing simply amazed by everything — a little early. Category: Our Culture
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