Integrate!

Photo by deadfly.media If you're like me, then 2017 already feels like a long time ago. Your eyes are looking deep into the new year, and you've got more to do than you know how to manage. Your days are crowded with too many tasks and too many commitments. And what you really feel like doing most days is to crawl under a duvet and wait for the weather to warm up. How do you stay on course when you're feeling the stress and the time crunch? You might think it's all about managing your time better. If you just stick to those 15 minute increments in your crammed agenda, you'll get everything done. You've probably got an app for that, or maybe a book or two with different systems for staying on task. But if all that was working for you, you would not be reading this. You're reading this in the hope that one more post will give you one idea that actually works so you can keep your head above water and stick to your plans for the new year. And I'm goin...

I wonder if you've ever struggled to stay connected to someone as you were communicating something important to you? It often seems that connecting to someone is a distraction from our message, rather than the purpose for it.  It's hard to stay clear about what we want to say when we also have to be clear about what someone else will hear in our words. This is the central paradox of communication: for a message to be clear, the sender of that message must hold onto their own vision while connecting with someone else's. There's a benefit to this paradox. As we become less sure of what we want to say, we are more likely to engage in shared thinking. We come up with ideas together when we communicate in ways that are unclear enough to encourage participation. As you struggle to be both clear and connected, think about this. If you had to sacrifice either clarity or connection, which would be most important? Giving up clarity makes room for collaboration. Givin...

Some people say I work too hard. They're the people who know the difference between work and play. Play is supposed to be easy and light and fun and work is supposed to be serious and require an effort. But it's easier to work too hard if you think you're playing. Imagine that someone at work told you to get down on the floor next to the closet and make art on a paper bag. You'd think the demand was preposterous. I don't work too hard. It's possible I don't work hard enough. But I sometimes play on the floor until I get stiff and sore. It happens when I am playing with fascinating people making real a vision I can almost bring into focus. Like the best learners I know, I play until my eyes won't stay open.

When you think of the word "vision," two quite opposite things come to mind. One is physical sight: the ability to see what is in front of you. The other is a more grand and sweeping concept of how the world could be different than it is. Understanding the link between these two apparent opposites is the key to improving the way you walk into your future. It's always a good idea to begin with what we can test. You can play different games to find out how good you are at recognizing what you can see with your physical eyes. We all have been guilty of searching for something that is right in front of us and of walking through a room (or a textbook) and instantly forgetting what we have seen there. Our visual awareness is a bit sketchy. Perhaps we need another word. We distinguish between hearing (which is a physical capacity) and listening (which is something we do with our attention). We don't have the same distinction with our eyes: we see something with our physi...

Here's what we imagine family life to be: serene, calm, harmonious. At least, this is how we imagine other people's families, the ones we see in the perfect Facebook photographs. Our own families are more. . . complicated. Family Day weekend is a good time to reflect on perfect images. As I write this, the sun is shining on bright white snow. It's also about 25 below zero (celsius). It's a great day to sit by a window. We think that photographs tell the truth, but they only ever tell part of the truth. Words are like that too. They turn our focus to one thing, and other things disappear. Even when we use words like complicated, we miss something. There are elements in every situation that are simple, uncomplicated, true. When you use a word like calm, you can focus on difference. Calm is not complicated, not crazy, not loud, not anxious.  Or you can simply focus on one thing that is grounded and real and clear. As you read this, you can hear that last phrase: g...

I took this photo before training last weekend. The trees are mostly bare now, and although the days have been warmer than usual for this time of year, they are still getting shorter. For many people, the shorter days mean hours spent working in the dark. There is no less to do. Often there is more to do as people prepare for the holiday season and carry the same load as always at work. Students prepare for exams, but they are not the only group to feel that December is stressful. Most of us find that the darkest month of the year is a time for anxiety. In a time when short, dark days meant less time to work and less work to do, people found hope in focusing on lights. We have the lights of Christmas and Hanukkah as focal points that remind us that darkness is temporary and not as powerful as it seems. And yet, these lights have come to also remind us of long to-do lists and the pressure to celebrate in a way worthy of Facebook likes. If a focus on the lights we make isn'...

 Carole Luft opens Leading Words    On Saturday, we held an unusual conference. Although it began much as every conference begins (with a welcome from a podium), there had been an unusual amount of hugging as people found their seats. Scattered around the tables were monkeys–monkey cutouts, monkey stickers, monkeys sitting in the fancy chair at the front. Everywhere were reminders of what the Buddhists call Monkey Mind. And our goal for the day was to get the monkeys to focus, engage, and show their most loving, cooperative, and ingenious selves. What do you think of when you think about monkeys? Do you imagine playing, shrieking, mischief or cuddles? Do you think of mindless activity or of a sudden, focused interest in a puzzle to be solved? All of these are typical of monkeys. All of these are typical of the monkeys in your mind–the troop of ideas, emotions, biases, memories, and hopes that are in perpetual motion as you try to focus, to think, to make decisions. ...

What do you see when you look at this picture?  I took it on the road between Pacific Rim National Park and Port Alberni. It's a twisting, turning drive that reminds you how hard it is even now to make one's way through the mountains. The beauty combined with the twists and turns can put a passenger into a kind of trance. The camera interrupts the flow. It reminds me to look at something instead of everything. I'm just starting to experiment with a camera, to move beyond "spray and pray" with a point and click and work at seeing through the camera. The point is not to take pretty pictures (although that helps with social media posts). The point is to understand how what we see is a composition - an interaction between what is there and how we choose to frame it. When you look at this picture, you can see that the camera saw the young maple at the front in sharpest detail. That seems to make it the point of the picture. And yet the point of that drive is thos...