Choosing Growth.

Last year, I planted some prairie seeds on a small patch of disturbed lawn in our front yard. In my impatience to wait for the seeds to grow, I also dug up some prairie plants I was familiar with from vacant lots, purchased some other plants, and then planted some more so-called natives that I was given by a coworker. Last summer, it was difficult to tell any difference between the new garden and the unseeded vacant lot up the street that was overflowing with “weeds”.

This year, I was encouraged to see some of the planted natives reappear and bloom. I also feared that many of the plants that seemed to grow the most were the unwanted weeds I had not planted. My challenge has been figuring out which of the plants that have grown in this patch are “weeds” and which are the plants that sprouted from those I had planted. Earlier tonight, I finally concluded that the “weeds” seemed to be outgrowing the plants I planted, and with great pains began to pull them. I singled out which was “weed”, and which was prairie plant by noticing the two or three plants that seemed to be dominating my prairie patch, also dominated the vacant lot up the road. I concluded that encouraging diversity must be the key to identifying what to pull and what to leave. It will probably take some more patience on my part to find out if my choice was correct.

Robert Greenleaf’s third article on the “Seven Choices for Mature Living” from the July 1966 AA Grapevine reminds us, “the demands of growth are rigorous and exacting, but the rewards are exciting (…)”. His article focuses on the importance in choosing growth as we move through life. He shares some advice from Dr. Millicent MacIntosh, the former President of Barnard College given to her seniors on ways to ensure that growth continues:

1. Have a field, throughout your life, in which you maintain high competence.
2. Read extensively outside your field.
3. Develop excellence in a manual craft.
4. Be engaged in some service to others, all of the time.

It seems that Dr. MacIntosh was reminding her students to choose diversity to ensure real growth in their lives. Allowing one or two activities to dominate our lives is a sure way to being dominated by “weeds”; diversity is the path to sustainable growth. For Greenleaf, “Growth is the recognition that life is the healer.” Life in the prairie plot in our front yard gives me a little bit of healing whenever I walk by and see a new blossom, even if it might be a blossom from what I thought was a “weed”.

Choosing Awareness.

I have been riding my bike to work when I can and am amazed at how much more aware one needs to be on a bike as compared to speeding past the surroundings in a car. On my way home from work tonight I noticed another biker had stopped on the sidewalk and looked distressed about something. I slowed down and asked her if she was ok and was relieved to hear that she had simply stopped to keep a snapping turtle from crossing the busy street into what would likely result in the turtles death by car tire. I stepped off my bike and walked over to look at the turtle with her. The turtle was likely a female, planning to cross the road to lay her eggs.

I asked the woman if she made it a habit of helping snapping turtles cross roads. She mentioned that she was a veterinarian and actually had done so before, but that she normally would use a snow shovel to push the turtle into a large bucket as a way of avoiding the potentially dangerous snap from the jaws that the turtle derives its name. She made a call on her cell phone to her husband and he was soon on his way to bring her the needed turtle rescue gear. This woman demonstrated a keen sense of awareness of her surroundings, and an accompanying ability to act upon what she had become aware.

In his second series of articles that appeared in the AA Grapevine magazine in June of 1966, Robert Greenleaf wrote about another important choice that is needed if one desires to live a mature life, that of choosing to be aware. According to Greenleaf, “the lead that a leader has (whether he be parent, teacher, politician, businessman) is to use his superior information sources to see what must be done far enough ahead of anybody else so that he can act his way, the right way, rather than let events force his hand and require that he compromise with other people’s judgments."

The woman on the bike had told me that she debated with herself whether to give the turtle a hand or if she should let “nature take its course”. She said that she knew if she saw the turtle dead in the road the next day that she would be haunted by her choice, and therefore helping the turtle was what she must do. Her choice was a clear demonstration of a leader being able to see far enough ahead to be able to act in the right way.

Later as I continued my bike ride home, I traveled along another busy road, full of speeding cars. I came across another turtle, this time a painted turtle, which had not had the good fortune of being assisted by someone with awareness. This turtle had been struck by a car, and ended up at the side of the road, upside down, with her shell crushed, and her life and quest to lay her eggs over. This was a vivid reminder of the destructive power of our choice to be unaware.

No pain, no gain, and the lamp.

Robert Greenleaf began an article he wrote for the May 1966 AA Grapevine with a story about a man who had a chance to rub Aladdin’s magical lamp and have one wish granted. Concerned about the evil in the world around him, the man wished that all the evil in the world would disappear. His wish was granted and the world became a pure and serene place, with no conflict. The man’s life soon became filled with boredom and sterility, and he regretted that he ever made his wish. Deep inside he realized that humans evolved to “deal creatively with all the challenges of evil, danger, frustration, uncertainty, pain and hardship”. It is dealing with conflict that gives meaning to our lives.

Greenleaf went on to write, “At the center of every healthy man who is really alive is a paradox: while he always struggles to minimize pain, he would choose the world of pain and confusion and problems to the one with no challenge and no problems and no pain.” Greenleaf addressed his message to the members of Alcoholics Anonymous, a group of folks who knew first hand the consequences of avoiding pain with the use of “magic”. Their attempts to avoid pain (or seek pleasure) in the end caused them more unbearable pain of the realization of a life not lived to its fullest. Other “magic potions” that lure us away from true fulfillment include drug use, the purchase of some new miracle product, sexual escape, or gambling to name a few of the addictions that plague our society.

Greenleaf believed that like the man in his opening story, that the state of our lives is determined by the choices we make. We can choose what appears to be the easy route, the one where we can avoid responsibility, and look for the magic to take away our pains, or we can choose to act responsibly in our lives, which may cause some pain, but will ultimately result in growth. That is what living life is really all about. For Greenleaf, the root of responsibility requires that we respond to obligations when the opportunity to act responsibly is first revealed. Avoiding conflict, by avoiding responsibility, avoids our opportunity for growth.

The Soap Box

The May/June issue of Orion Magazine includes an article by Jeffrey Kaplan titled The Gospel of Consumption that is an interesting read. Kaplan’s article discusses the history of how we have created a world where production and consumption of more and more goods has become the priority over living a meaningful life.

The author quotes Arthur Dahlberg’s 1932 book Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism in relation to the impacts that increasing the length of the workday would have on consumers.

“By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in" he suggested, the profit motive becomes "both the creator and satisfier of spiritual needs." For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, "it wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is solace to our souls.”

I came across a prime example of “wrapping our soap in pretty boxes” the other day when I had the opportunity to tour a box factory. The facility designs packaging for a number of consumer products, then prints graphic patterns on paperboard, cuts out the boxes, and then runs them through a folding/gluing machine creating thousands of boxes in a single run. The packaging is designed to entice us to buy the soaps and other products they contain. In the end, we consumers unwrap our new soaps, and toss the boxes in the trash, or if we are “environmentally conscious” the “recycle” bin. After my tour, I have not been able to look at the boxes that hold the “cleansers of my soul” in the same light.

Kaplan concludes his article with the following reminder.

We can break the cycle by turning off our machines when they have created enough of what we need. Doing so will give us an opportunity to re-create the kind of healthy communities (…) in which human welfare is the overriding concern rather than subservience to machines and those who own them. We can create a society where people have time to play together as well as work together, time to act politically in their common interests, and time even to argue over what those common interests might be. That fertile mix of human relationships is necessary for healthy human societies, which in turn are necessary for sustaining a healthy planet. If we want to save the Earth, we must also save ourselves from ourselves. We can start by sharing the work and the wealth. We may just find that there is plenty of both to go around.

What’s wrong with our economy?

“The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process. It is not simply to produce a lot of stuff. Stuff is a means, not an end.”

From Testimony given by Jonathan Rowe to Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on Wednesday, March 12, 2008

I came across this quote in the June 2008 Harper’s Magazine. The Testimony (read a copy of it at the link above) does a great job explaining how use of the Gross National Product (GNP) as a measure of the productivity of our economy is wreaking havoc on us and our world. Is it time we rethink how we measure the richness of our lives?

War

“War-huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” So goes the lyrics to that song “War” that comes to mind when I think of war. The song was written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for the Motown label in 1969.

I had the opportunity to watch a documentary on the impacts of war last weekend at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. Nerakhoon (The Betrayal) highlighted the primary consequence of war - the destruction of families and community. That impact is mostly ignored by those who choose war as an option for dealing with conflict. The documentary tells the story of Thavisouk Phrasavath and the impact that the overflow from the Vietnam War had on his family who were eventually forced to leave Laos and ended up in a slum in Brooklyn New York. They suffered many hardships that literally tore the family apart. Thavisouk Phrasavath who was also the co-director of the movie spoke afterwards about how he hoped that by telling the story of what war had done to his family that it might influence others to work towards preventing future wars.

At a brown bag lunch session at my work this past Wednesday, I had the opportunity to hear some more accounts of the impacts of war. This time the accounts were from our current Iraq War.

The first speaker gave some of the highlights from his son’s three tours of duty as a US Marine in Iraq. He told how his son’s training in boot camp consisted of teaching the new recruits how to shoot a gun, break down doors, and search Hollywood-type mockups of buildings for insurgents. The recruits then got a first hand lesson in finding out what it was like to deal with the stress of being shot at with live ammunition. The 18 to 24 year old marines who made up the bulk of his son’s platoon were then shipped off to test out their new skills by guarding conveys as they traveled across Iraq. Their ultimate test of the effectiveness of their training came to play when they implemented the policy of confronting potential enemy vehicles that approached the convoys by first signaling the vehicle to stop, then shooting at the ground in front of the vehicle, then shooting at the grill of the vehicle, then shooting the hood of the vehicle, then shooting at the windshield, and finally shooting the driver. All of these decisions and actions needed to be conducted within 60 seconds of first encountering the vehicle. These lessons are obviously important to know if you hope to survive a war.

The second speaker was a middle-aged major in the National Guard who had also served a tour of duty in Iraq. His experiences were from a different perspective; his role was to serve as an inspector to make sure troops received equipment that they needed to fight the war. The equipment might include armor for their humvees, guns, or other supplies. He job was also to conduct inspections to make sure the equipment did not disappear, which it apparently often did. All this work could be conducted in temperatures that could reach 140 degrees while wearing armor to protect them from being killed by bullets or bombs.

It was hard for me to understand how war can be talked about as a viable solution to our problems when history seems to teach that all wars result in are more wars and more violence. The Twelve Step community uses a definition for insanity of trying the same thing over and over again, and hoping for different outcomes. This definition seems to fit well our continuing practice of using wars to impose our wills on others.

Applying Greenleaf’s best test of servant leadership – What is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived? – it is clear that all war is far from servant leadership. War is the ultimate in coercion, and its consequences are the ultimate example of its failure to bring about peace, stability, or community. So why then do we continue to choose war to try to solve our differences?

What Is Wrong With Us?

Achmad Ibrahim / AP
A woman rushes for free food during a food distribution sponsored by the United Development Party in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Thursday.







When I pay attention to what is going on in the world around us, it becomes obvious that there is something wrong with the path we humans are taking. The news is dominated by stories of:


war - Divided nation ready to fight to the death

murder - Yonge St. killing described at hearing

environmental devastation - Two greenhouse gases rose sharply in '07

the negative consequences of drug - Spain holds Moroccan drugs baron

and alcohol use - Acquittals in groom's shooting spark outrage

prostitution - Former Prostitute Publishes Internet Escort's Handbook for Aspiring Call Girls

our fixation with consumption - Bush says tax rebates will bolster economy

political cover-ups - Despite E-mails, VA Boss Denies Cover Up

and inequality - U.N. chief calls food price rise a global crisis

It could be that the news media tends to dwell on the negative stories, or it could be that these stories highlight the symptoms that are telling us we need to change our ways. I tend to believe the second option.

So what is the underlying ailment is that is causing these symptoms, and how to we go about healing our world?

I hope to delve into these questions and pose some possible alternatives in some upcoming posts.