Integrate!

I can't help but feel like I should have something big to say today. It's a little like stepping up to the podium and finding you forgot your notes at home - or maybe forgot even to make some notes. I've been blogging for five years. This is post 500. I knew it was coming, planned for it, worked for it, and now I need to say something. What was I thinking? Most often, we ask ourselves that after we have done something surprising (and not in a good way). Today I am wondering what I was thinking when I started this blog. At the time, it didn't seem like a surprising thing to do - not even a major challenge. It seemed like one more way to use the web to carry on a conversation with clients and colleagues and prospects. Five years ago I think I thought I was building a business, that I was doing the groundwork for something that worked the way businesses work. I thought that people would take our courses, give us referrals, that we would begin working in businesses ...

This year, we had friends for dinner on the 20th, which became a sort of 1st day of Christmas for us. While we have not been out or entertaining every day since then, we have had company for dinner twice more, drop-in guests, eaten out, had a birthday feast, and gone to the movies as a family. Twelve days is a lot of celebrating. Partly because celebrating involves a lot of work - shopping, cleaning, cooking, cleaning, serving, cleaning. But partly because twelve days is a long time to step away from satisfying work and pleasing routines. I love my sons and I am glad to have them home. But I will confess that I am a little weary of needing to make each day special. I am ready to eat simple foods and watch television and go to the gym. More than that, I am ready to get back to work. Work is never far away - this blog is evidence of that. This week has tempted me with quiet morning hours at my laptop (young men on vacation don't wake up much before noon). I have been reading agai...

If you could have three wishes, what would they be? There are always rules on wishes. The first rule is that these are wishes for yourself: you can't make wishes for other people. The second is that these are your only three wishes. There is no way to make more. What would you wish for yourself as a new year begins? I wish for clarity of purpose: to know what meaning I am trying to create through my thoughts and actions. I wish for kindness: to be gentle with the people around me and to add something sweet or lovely to their lives. I wish for - and the third wish is the hardest. The one that excludes all other possibilities. I wish for strength; I wish for grace; I wish for persistence; I wish for whatever it takes to move forward with imperfect strength and imperfect understanding. I wish to be in the presence of beauty. Choosing one does not necessarily mean not having the others. But it means not wishing for them. It means letting go of certainty and trusting I will fi...

My sons are both Art Sci's. That means that one is a grad and the other is a student in a program at McMaster University designed to allow a select group of students to explore what it means to adopt different models of thinking. Grads of this program typically go on to further education, so it's not surprising that the cost of education - and who bears that cost - comes up often in one form or another. I forget who it was who said, "If you think education is expensive, try the alternative." Education is expensive. Learning is a resource-intense activity that requires all of our attention and energy and, quite often, also our money and other stuff. It's also a wasteful process: we can spend hours learning something that we may have to unlearn just weeks or months later. It's hard to tell what will be useful until after you have spent time and effort and attention on learning it. My sons were dismissive tonight when I said that part of the cost of educatio...

Maintenance is hard work. Whether you are looking after your waistline or your car, maintenance means looking after something that is not breaking and is not making any claims on your attention in the belief that paying attention now will cost less than paying attention later. It takes effort to keep things the same. At any given moment, if you are not taking action to preserve something, you are allowing it to change. Some of that change will be so slow that it is undetectable - like the wear and tear of the wind on your house. Unless there's a huge storm, you won't notice that the wind has any impact at all. But the wind has an impact. So the choice we make is really between exerting effort to change or allowing change to happen - a choice between directing change and letting change direct us. Staying the same is not really an option. The new psychologies of choice are suggesting that making a decision to change is probably harder than whatever change we decide to make. ...

I have always been a private person. When I was young and small, I was shy. Somewhere during my undergrad days, I became someone who took some effort to know. Later, I grew into private. The head of my college at Trent knew about me through English tutorials and Master's dinners. When someone told him to mention my soccer skills at a dinner, he thought they were trying to embarrass me. He knew the me who had a quick mind and a quick tongue in tutorials. He didn't know I could take a hit on the soccer field - or kick the ball farther than girls much bigger and stronger than I was. I've always been hard to pull together and fit into a box - even for me. So it is harder and easier for me to fit my identity into larger entities. I stick with the groups I join - often for a long time. I let myself be part of things I do not own and cannot control, even when it means I drag myself, kicking and screaming - through bad meetings and bad decisions. I am good at honoring what wor...

If you're a parent, you have heard yourself say this at least once. Generally, it happens when too much has been happening and you have more than one thing on your mind. You tell someone to do something and they ask why. And you say, "because I said so." When you're the kid, this sounds pretty lame but it also indicates that you are very near to crossing a line. But "because I said so" sounds differently when it describes our own behaviour. Why are you doing that? Because I said I would do it. What are you loyal to him or her or that organization? Because I said so. How do you know you'll follow through with that? Because I said I would. Everything we say is only words, and we all know that it is hard to predict the relationship that words will have with the world they represent. Sometimes we say what we mean with our words, and sometimes the relationship between what we say and what we mean is more difficult. Yet, still we say "because I sa...