Yarn spinning

We tell ourselves stories about why we do what we do. Part of growing up is having better myths to explain what we are willing to take responsibility for. We spend hours spinning the yarn of myths until we come on a story that we deem credible. We are less comfortable not knowing why we or someone else does what we or they do. Even bad behavior appears more acceptable if it’s adorned with a compelling causal myth.

One of the 4 principles of the wildly successful group process called Open Space Technology is: Whatever happens is the only thing that could. The wisdom here is that life is wasted in explanations; and it is lived in the next moment’s choices. The most honest explanation for anything we do is that we did it because we could. Any more explanation is a postponement of living into a new choice in the next moment given to us. Realizing we always do what we do because we can frees us to live into new possibilities.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 14th, 2005 at 8:09am and is filed under Open Space, Human nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.