What happens to our definition of success when we respect serendipity as the nature of the universe in which we live? What happens to our definition of success when we live from the position that everything depends on our ability to control our world?
And is there a significant relationship between how we define success and the quality of our life’s spirit?
Interesting piece this morning in the NY Times on God as every good President’s prime war ally. It concludes with a section from Mark Twain’s War Prayer:
O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with pale forms of their patriot dead … help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; … help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolate land … We ask it in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love.
If we’re inclined to work/hope for any grace, perhaps it is for a global transcendence of the religion of dualism inspiring a world divided by violent divinities.
From Digital Aboriginal by Mikela Tarlow:
An aboriginal nomad traveling through the Australian desert carries little
on his back. Yet when he arrives at the next water hole, he finds his
favourite musical instrument, the didgeridoo, hanging from a thin reed,
dangling in the water, safely protected from the dry climate.
He plays to his heart’s content and then moves on, leaving it for the next
person. This beautiful reed instrument with the low haunting sound belongs
to no one, yet encompasses the spirit of everyone who passes by. The context
for participation is the art form as much as the music itself.
Summarizing current research in today’s Wall Street Journal, Sharon Begley writes: The more cultural diversity and, hence, thinking styles in a workforce, the likelier it is to see problems clearly and solve them.
I wonder what would happen if there was an international law saying that every person and family in the world had to spend a week a year living with a host family in another country. In the event of a possible war, all visits during a designated time period would need to occur between/among the countries in conflict.
In one of his themes in a breakfast dialogue today, international trade guru, Anthony Yen, counseled emerging leaders to “be the last to speak.” His stories of dealings with world-class business and government leaders (Jack Welch, Casper Weinberger) illustrated the sage wisdom that those with the most data and the imagination to connect everyone’s data dots have the greatest leverage in any situation.
It is still common practice to be in conversations where entrepreneurs will casually whip out of their pants non-disclosure forms and suggest that they can only continue if participants agree to sign them.
I’m considering a similar but different tool for some of the new ideas I regularly have and participate in: a disclosure form. This document would obligate people to spread the idea as far as they can. The language would include the fact that they “agree not to keep said ideas confidential in any media or form, in either its original or transformations thereof.”
Foster an atmosphere of trust, always be open to new sources of information, and expect answers to come from the most unexpected of places.
Krishna Venkatraman, Chief Scientist and Disrupter, DemandTec
Basically, I just want people to be more daring, because if we’re more daring in our artistic choices, then we’re more daring in our political choices.
Writer, poet, producer, director Sherman Alexie in this month’s Hope Magazine
At the regional writer’s conference today, someone referenced journalism as the fourth branch of government. This idea becomes even cooler when we think of journalism in the more quantum (boundaryless) sense that includes all of the paid and unpaid print, radio, TV, and web participants in the reporting of today’s stories on all scales of narrative. May we serve our democracies well.
