The Defeat Of Sadness

June 16th, 2011 by Kathleen

In Canada, hockey is a beloved sport.  In Vancouver, it is a culture.  From the time I was a little girl, I recall my Dad and his friends cheering for the Vancouver Canucks.  I remember my parents organizing their social gatherings around hockey games.  Saturday evenings always began with a hockey game, most especially when Vancouver was on the ice.

As we grew older, we grew interested with our own friends.  We make meals and plan gatherings around the games.  Our little ones play and we make an effort to support their teams.  The game we have come to love is a finesse, not a brute game.  It is a competition of skill and thinking on one’s feet…. literally!  It is fast and hard-hitting and emotional, for sure.  There are teams who play with technical prowess and teams who play their power.  Most certainly, one is much prettier than the other.  On a personal note, I definitively love the technical finesse game versus the brute version.  All that said, what occurred in Vancouver last night had nothing to do with either version of the game.

At the end of last night, for a vast majority of people in the city of Vancouver, what was in the space?  What feeling was calling to be experienced?  Disappointment?  Deflation?  Sadness?  Were you willing – fully willing – to feel the sadness?  Your sadness?  Alternatively, did you choose to resist that sadness?  At some deep and perhaps unknown level, did we push sadness aside?

What might have occurred if we invited it in?  What might be possible if we were willing to fully experience the sadness in the space?  Would it have altered the frustration, anger, and ugliness we witnessed?  What did chaos in the streets tell us about ourselves?  What message can we take from it for our own life and its progession?

We witnessed large scale frustration, large scale anger, large scale ugliness expressed as disconcerting and discouraging city riots.  Is this what it takes to have us fully feel what we are experiencing?  Daily on a much smaller scale, are we unwilling to notice and fully acknowledge a general sense of sadness?

Are we adamant in pursuing The Defeat Of Sadness?

Will we relentlessly resist acceptance of this necessary and rich human experience?

Today I feel sad. It would have been enough to just be sad about a team’s collapse. Now, unfortunately, my sadness is about something much deeper and more disturbing than the loss of a hockey game.

What do you feel?

Chasing Transformational Change Is A Futile Pursuit

June 2nd, 2011 by Kathleen

‘The essence of leadership is to shift the inner place from which we operate both individually and collectively.’…. C. Otto Scharmer, Theory U: Leading From The Future As It Emerges

Last week, in working with a young man participating in QuintessentialYou Design’s DevelopmentConversation, I witnessed the very essence of why I do the work I do.  Involved in the early stages of a community project, my client has shared many of the ups and downs, ins and outs that come with his desire to make a difference.  In the context of the human development work we are doing together, Andrew (not his real name) often discusses what he sees as not quite right with our existence and the mistakes we have made in building the structures and processes that we collectively use to make our way in the world.  Over the weeks of discovering his own internal architecture through the QuintessentialYou Blueprint work, Andrew progressively sees what makes him tick and make the choices he does in his little corner of the world.

As the weeks of conversation progress and the layers of who and what he is not drop away to reveal who he is, something begins to happen.  His conversation alters.  He begins to hear hisSelf and to recognize the difference between everyone else’s noise and his own quiet desire and subtle authentic concern.  I am not referring here to ‘concern’ as a cause for worry.  I mean ‘concern’ in the realm of what absorbs him and has his full attention.  Having worked on projects and community initiatives, he has seen firsthand the chase to make change happen.  He notices and acknowledges his determination to fix what is ‘wrong with the world’.  Yet, somehow naturally and organically, this same determination begins to have a different flavor.  Without fanfare or any obvious precursor, a transformation takes place.  The change being chased juxtaposes.  The chase changes.

I witness an individual awakening to a new idea – to a transformed structure in relationship with the world.  In a moment of spontaneous innocence, musing about no longer being interested in exploring the problems per se, the young man exclaimed, ‘I want to investigate the void – that empty place that we continually look to fill.  That’s what I am interested in.’  What is it that makes us chase new things, novel circumstances, new relationships?   He didn’t ask this but later, I wondered for myself, ‘Is this the same factor that has us yearn for a renewed world, a repaired environment, a re-jigged economy, a restructured government, a reorganized business etc….?

And if we could be with that very void, what might be possible?  What might be revealed?  Where might it lead us?  What future might emerge?  What might we individually create for ourSelf, each Other, and the World?

To make this leap and access this field of potential, what would we have to open to?  What would we have to trust and realize?   Can we individually and collectively muster up the courage to follow Andrew’s innocent suggestion to investigate our own void?  Is it possible that in this very vacuum of emptiness if we are willing to experience nothing we gain access to everything?  Within me, within you, collectively within all of us, is our pursuit the very thing that holds us back from that victorious moment in which transformational change arises and arrives in the space within our own being?

I would love to hear your experience and your thoughts.  Do leave a comment or two.