An important part of everyday zen practice is noticing our noticing. Noticing where we put our attention. We always have a choice about our attention - whether we believe we do or not.

I’ve long been amazed at our capacity as human beings to focus on what we don’t have, don’t like, and don’t want. Yesterday morning, amidst the most beautiful spring morning the earth is capable of choreographing, I listened to a very bright and worldly wise guy go on complaining about just about anything you could name.

Negative judgments create a sense of power over our world, and logically, we’re most negatively judgmental when we feel victimized by our world. It gives us a sense of power that we think we need.

We start to let go of unhappiness when we realize that we are not victims and don’t need power over anything. Letting go of a need for power, we discover happiness.

The NY Times reports that the hottest executive title these days is chief. According to one of the experts quoted in the article, “It’s easier to give someone a fancier-sounding title than to give them a real bump in authority or pay.” It’s called title inflation and it’s intended to give people an edge on competitiveness. To say nothing about feeding enough egos to keep organizations dysfunctional.

When I was young, we used chief to refer to a usually male laborer in a service position whose short attention span we wanted to garner. You’d pull up and say things like: “Hey chief … how’s it going? We need 5 dollars of regular and could you check the oil?”

When I drove in Tokyo a couple of years ago they still have these guys - four to any car that would pull in. They’d run around cleaning windshields and headlights while gassing up. When you take off, they run after the car waving until you got to the street, hightailing it back to the next car waiting for service at the service station. If anybody deserved to be called chief, it was these guys.

So today the inflated title chief resurfaces. I can’t wait for the next corporate meeting where I can once again pronounce the salutation: “Hey chief, how’s it going?”

Open Space founder, Harrison Owen, reminds us often that everything has a beginning, middle and end. This spring’s spectacular flowers are no exceptions. It’s a reminder that change is a constant in life. The paradox is that we experience peace to the degree that we embrace change. Zen teachers remind us that because of change all good things happen. Because of change, we are able to be born, we grow, we learn, we gain new ways of being, doing, and having.

Our attemps to surprise-proof the world not only don’t work, but they add to suffering because they are ways we resist the reality of change, from which all good things emerge.

I love watching people in organizations twitch at the intersection of curiosity and horror when I suggest that they need to expect their plans to change and if they want to resist anything it’s the notion of an unchanged or unchangable plan. That’s why prediction is futile - because it implies expecting a future that we can count and depend on. Change implies a future we can expect will change, whether we participate in that change or not. Of course there is a word for the act of participating in change. It’s joy.

Part of a life-affirming practice is asking ourselves every day: What do I want to say yes to today? It’s a question that liberates, focuses, and energizes. It’s useful again to repeat the question in any moments of feeling anxious, frustrated, or tired. It reconnects us with the ground of our quantum potentiality.

In a lunch conversation today with Chris Varley, a talented local economic development leader in technology, it occured to me that there are forms of global commerce that lead to local sustainability.

One example would be when a local collaboration between an environmental design company and fabric company produces a cheap durable new bio-friendly (actually edible) fabric that can be used to create safe, temporary shelters for homeless families in emerging country villages devastated by war or natural disasters. The product provides value in locations where no other alternatives are available and adds economic value to the local innovators, producers and the value chain they interdepend with. Very smart.

In a talk I heard today at a regional economic development conference, I heard that biological evidence points to the fact that we’re hardwired for crisis-driven, competitive, hierarchical organizations and communities. Chatting with the speaker in the elevator, the very bright director of the Cleveland Museum of History, he remarked that with dialogue, sociology can transcend biology.

So how do we foster dialogue instead of debate? How do we encourage people versant in dialogue to participate fully in conversations?

Back tonight from a road trip. I worked this week with people from a large independent bank in Michigan, helping them better engage each other’s strengths in projects. People love talking about their strengths and successes. They thrive on the confidence and esteem that emanates from these conversations. It’s palpable, seeing how people come alive talking about the best in themselves. After all what else matters.

My hope is that organizations get it - that people want to work from their passions and strengths. People want to be believed in and to act from a position of trust. People want to give their best and will if they feel their best is recognized, engaged, and appreciated. So in order to pull this off organizations need to stop acting like negative management has any value.

This isn’t difficult. Step 1 is getting it. Step 2 is making it happen.

According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association, US golf equipment sales in 2004 rose 3% to $2.5 billion. In my minority view that golf occurs in the mind rather than in the equipment, I’ve somehow managed to resist the songs of the golf sirens, singing of the “high performance” clubs and balls now proliferating sales. The NY Times on the front page today reports that in spite of this growth, both amateur and professional golf scores have stayed virtually the same over the past ten years. My father and his friends used to joke when I was a kid learning that it’s “all in the shoes.”

The article suggests that people are practicing less, while expecting the equipment to substitute for the immeasurable value of practice. If peak experience was about the equipment rather than about the mind, and golfers nationwide took up zazen (sitting meditation), they’d encounter the usual challenges of meditation and would likely run out to buy the latest in bigger, better cushions guaranteeing “at least 30 more yards of enlightenment.”

What is deep, authentic listening? Listening invites people to see beyond what they’ve already seen. In deep listening there is no resistance and therefore people are no longer stuck in the confines of their experience. Listening gives them freedom to explore and discover. Listening opens a space large enough for people to become transcendent.

Listening is something we all know how to do. We do not need to learn how to listen. The only thing that inhibits listening is the urge to problem solve.

As my friend June Holley said this morning, listening allows the emergence of the sparkling part of what’s real.

First season’s round of golf yesterday. I have two kinds of friends when it comes to golf. Those who can’t believe I would spend time on such a thing and those who can’t believe I wouldn’t spend more time with it.

I really don’t care either way. Golf, like everything else in life, is certainly not for everybody. I would never recommend it any more than I would recommend, let’s say, eating or breathing.

These days, it never ceases to amaze me how the game is constant practice in bringing attention back to the moment. Good shots and bad have the same way of eclipsing the here and now until we remember to return here, now. What I like about the game is that the feedback on how well we stay in the present is totally dependable. When we’re not present, we miss the next shot. That simple. And if we want to linger in what should have happened, we get to miss the next one just as well.

I don’t know. Is that a metaphor for life or what? To bring our attention to the present no matter how miserable or miraculous the last moment was. Maybe that’s why the relentless teacher of golf usually occurs in the most beautiful, bucolic landscapes on the planet - so that we have ample opportunity to be present when we are!