FootprintsintheWind.com

I don’t like the farming metaphor when you call us a team.

:- Doug.

That is the issue, yes? To live a larger life. Goals do put blinders in front of our eyes which keep us from, and maybe to keep us from, seeing what is all round us.

:- Doug.

Let’s look only a bit further than we can see—but lots wider.

:- Doug.

Goals and purposes differ from each other more than walls from windows. Plans and processes differ even more.

Why? Purposes move; goals are fixed. Purposes are clear, lucid, see-through; goals are opaque, with invented pictures of what things can be like.

Goals have three difficulties: 1. The steps from here to there cannot be known at the start; 2. The end position cannot be known in all its effects, positive and negative; 3. The What’s next? question is left dangling. So we are left with a jerky, stop and start motion, and a need for head intervention.

1. Purposes specifically do not know the steps: the process (Do what’s most life-intensifying here, now) takes care of those. Each day, each time. 2. Purposes do not try to delimit any end position: just every step makes the whole ever better. 3. The What’s Next? is already known at every point in time: Intensify living. It is smooth as a pair of dancers, turning, seeing, gracefully back and forth, swaying to the rhythm.

:- Doug.

Adjust by eye. Every step.

:- Doug.

Our impatience contributes to our desires for goals: if we set it, they will come—faster. Yet it is a false speed: we can have our more important desires now—peace, love, life, God.

:- Doug.

When we first set a goal, it is hubris to think we know what the final result will be, how it will effect us and those round us, and where it will lead on. Far better a purpose upon which we keep circling and closing…& improving.

:- Doug.

Goals put blinders—in front of our eyes. We can only see the picture we painted on the blinders.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 983

Things I have learned from canoeing rivers:

The river does not care if you ride along or fall in.

The white water was a thrill—once you’ve past it. When you’re in it, it is terror.

Sometimes you think you see swift easy passage—only to find yourself lodged on the bottom in shallow water. The only thing to do is to get out and walk on the rocks. Better then if you brought shoes you can get wet.

Although you have a paddle, the river still flows where it wants.

Please pass it on.

© c 2009, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Doug AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

Always be living.

:- Doug.

The process is step-by-step—free of grand designs, working our ways to weal, helping each other and self and whole, generously. Process is three-dimensional: involving design, make and live.

:- Doug.

A goal is a ladder: you get to the top and if you want to go someplace else, sometimes you have to come down.

:- Doug.

A step-by-step process—based on a purpose of healing and adding life to the whole, is the exact opposite of a goal.

:- Doug.

The lawyer can demand to be heard by his or her client: can give dignity and resonance to the message of life-engendering. The lawyer can demand to be heard by his or her client’s family: can call forth an engaged and co-enacting circle.

:- Doug.

Process is key. Meeting. Standing in the face: hearing and demanding to be heard.

:- Doug.

Life is made together: it takes 4 specific works: dreaming, forming, using, and processing.

:- Doug.

What we see as magic is the process doing its work. Design alone cannot accomplish anything. Make alone cannot accomplish beauty nor life. Living it gets lost in the dailiness. All three need each other. From here, life sprouts and grows.

:- Doug.

Pattern: always be conveying the need for life and conversing, for bringing design, make, and live together in a living process. Pattern: encourage process that is beyond give and take to live and take and make. Live and create and make.

:- Doug.

We have seen ourselves as technicians in a technical society; now we need to see ourselves as humans in a living society.

:- Doug.

Making our communities live
Making our communities dance

:- Doug.

Taking to scale is simpler still, and more complex: invite everyone; hear everyone. When the experience enters the hearts and imaginations of a certain number of people—is it 500 or 5 billion?—practical scale is assured.

:- Doug.

Emergence is the process of designing, making, and living working out together a living world and from there working out a living world, and from there….

:- Doug.

It is so simple. It is so complex. It is so rooted in life as we know it—but life as we refuse to allow ourselves to see it.

:- Doug.