The price of liberty

"If you ruin your life, you will pay the price of rehabilitating yourself. We are not punished for our sins, but by them."

-- Michael Cloud

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."

-- George Bernard Shaw

I met with a guy yesterday who has paid a steep price indeed, and he is now ready for his rehabilitation, and he has lots of good and justifiable reasons not to go forward. We all have so many ghosts to blame. The amount of responsibility his work will require, given the magnitude of his pain (both self-inflicted and otherwise), is really huge. But I can see the fire of liberty in his eyes, and his willingness to pay the price. I have faith in him, and I know he will make it. He's just got to find his heart along the way, right M.B.? I'm more than happy to hold the flashlight while you search, buddy. I think we got a good glimpse of it yesterday.

Just to be sure, and to re-affirm yesterday's theme, try this test:

What do you see first when you look at the following letters? (There are 2 answers)


IAMNOWHERE


Finally, my 21-year-old son Mark comes to town today with his girlfriend, Amy, and I am so excited to see him. I will be writing over the next 3 days, but I will not be very available as I celebrate his visit. Have a great weekend, all!

Set yourself free!

"Out of love and care for yourself, send your love and compassion to your hurt, then forgive. It is the door to your freedom."

- Bruce McArthur, in The Intelligent Heart


I had a dear old friend contact me yesterday to say that two of his long-time colleagues, two really good men who have been at the same company for many years (and who used to work for me back when I was their GM 9 years ago), have just lost their jobs unexpectedly due to poor market conditions (an all too familiar story these days), and he asked me to extend my compassion, prayers, and understanding to them, and this is my heartfelt offering. I went out and searched for simple, yet powerful words and images that captured my greatest wish for you, R.I. and C.W., and here they are. Both the quote and the accompanying images say it all for me. You have been set free for a purpose. It hurts right now, I'm sure, but clear understanding will come later. After mourning your loss, which you so richly deserve, please don't let bad feelings, disappointment, fear, resentment, or self-doubt stand in the way of fulfilling your wildest dreams. My heart goes out to your friends who will miss you, your families who will stand by you through this transition, and also to the man who took my place who had to do this, who I know is suffering over it right now. When you go through the next door and can see the perfection of it all, please let me know what it looks like. I know it will be great. If I can help you in any way, by simply standing in the void with you, please let me know.

The joy of "thanks" giving

“God loves a cheerful giver.” Have you ever thought about that and tried to analyze your own feelings regarding the act of giving. When you discover that a more precise translation from Greek of the word “cheerful” is “hilarious,” the question becomes even more interesting. How many of us give with "hilarity"? Perhaps the ability to give with cheerfulness or hilarity is related to our motivation for giving:

Grudge giving says, “I have to.” Duty giving says, “I ought to.” Thanks giving says, “I want to.”

I'm sorry that I don't remember the source of the above; it has escaped me. But what a powerful message. And to illustrate its point, I met with a good man yesterday who spends the bulk of his life serving others, and we talked about how draining that can be over time, and we also talked about the fact that it doesn't have to be - not if we simply remember why we're doing it. It's a matter of perspective, which is determined by the lenses through which we are seeing ourselves and others. If we're doing it out of a sense of obligation, like we "have to", then we're not really serving, we're operating out of our own need to "appease our dragons." If we're doing it out of a false sense of morality, for appearances sake, doing it as a burden because we "should", then we're not really serving, we're doing it to look good or to avoid looking bad. The truest form of serving, which is actually self-sustaining in nature, like the apple tree metaphor of a few weeks ago, is done out of our appreciation for our many shared blessings and our unique individual gifts, and we are left feeling fully alive, connected, and energized, realizing that we are doing it to honor God's plan and the incredible life he gave us to serve it. And I love this notion of giving with "hilarity." Humor and laughter are such great medicine in the tough times and, as Reinhold Neibuhr once said:

"Humor is a prelude to faith and Laughter is the beginning of prayer."

You get what you give.

"Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."

-- Luke 6:38 (NIV)

A good friend/client shared this Bible verse with me yesterday, in recognition of a truly great week in progress, and we enjoyed a warm and wonderful chat over it, in which I got to hear of the many miracles showing up in her life. I love it when I get to bask in another person's self-created joy. When we do our work, which always involves being 100% responsible for ourselves, while selflessly serving others, the rewards are so abundant, swift, and sweet, and so elegantly expressed here. Thank you, K.T., for being you, and for inviting me to see your life's "fireworks."

And you asked me in your message last night how Jake was doing, now that you've met him, and I thought it was so appropriate that you asked in the context of this theme and verse. It won't surprise you to know that Jake is my teacher in this area. Stealing a line from one of my favorite movies (and in many ways my life story), Jerry Maguire, he's my little "Ambassador of Quan" (living life in such a way as to receive abundance, friendship, health, love, peace of mind, wealth - the "all of it"). One of the many ways Jake amazes me beyond words while teaching me about "Quan" is when he is expressing a request, and I don't understand him, he will claim 100% responsibility for the miscommunication, by saying, "I'm sorry, I mean xxxxxxxxx." You have to be there to hear it. He will not lose focus, or get frustrated or tired of my struggle. He will own it all and just smile and repeat his request, until you get him. And "sorry" comes out sounding more like "socky," which only makes it more adorable. He also tells Anne and me he loves us with his warm little hugs about 100 times a day, a gift we get to carry around and share with friends all day long. What a little trip he is. He belongs wherever he is, because he gives himself so completely, and the world clearly belongs to him, pouring itself into his lap, and he knows it. "Give and it will be given to you." Hmmm.....

Giving up the fight

"The intense feelings that are not openly and honestly expressed soon come to own you. When you feel owned or weighed down by these feelings, the only answer is to quiet down to listen to them (to fully understand what you're feeling), and then to share them with a friend, (which lightens the load a little), and then to pray for God's help (which invites you to give up the fight altogether and let Him handle it). The answer is never in denial or escape, but is instead on the other side of a doorway that is buried deep within the feelings themselves. The way beyond is always through."

I write this this morning for a good man in India who seems to be reaching out for a friend, wrestling with "stubborn, old" feelings of "clutter, numbness, and sadness," and I'm happy to be that friend for him. In his words I hear the frustration of one who has worked on these "issues" for some time. I can relate to this, as can many of you out there who have been doing your inner work for years. Healing is very tricky work. When we rush to declare it done, it prolongs itself. When we ease into our pain and accept it, it dissipates. When our eyes clear and we see and reach out for God's hand, we can surrender it up. So much of so many lives is wasted in trying desparately to be strong and tough when we feel tired and weak. And yet when we accept our human weakness and give up the fight, our strength returns.

I know that K. understands this, intellectually, so I am not offering it as new knowledge, but as a community prayer of love and support. And speaking of which, although I know I've sent this to you before, I just had several other people ask me to once again post this poem that I wrote 10 years ago, in the midst of great despair. It is a prayer of new beginnings, and hope, and transformation, and total surrender, offered up as my connection to my own deepest pain, which is the place from which I can lend a compassionate ear and heart to a friend.

"The hole in my heart,
once carefully concealed,
has burst open,
and I have fallen in.

The fall leaves me breathless
and frozen in fear,
not the fear of hitting ground,
but that the fall will never end.

Hands reaching out to help me
I have pushed away.
Don't rescue me.
I need this.

They say, in dreams of falling,
that if you hit the ground you're dead.
I've been dead.
I must hit the ground to live."

After writing this and ready to send it this morning, another good man and friend, W., reached out to share a passage from a recent Tom Clancy book he's been reading that fit right in with today's theme, so I add it for further reinforcement:

"After all these years of sailing, Kannaday had thought he understood what
it took to be a man. He believed it meant a willingness to take on muscular
challenges. Exertion made the male, danger made the man.

That was what he thought. He was beginning to see that he could not have
been more wrong. Being a man meant doing things that did not come
naturally, where the risk was in challenging one's own beliefs and traditions.
In his case, fighting back with mind instead of sinew (or maybe giving up the
fight altogether?). The exertion still made the male. But it was the
knowledge (and wisdom) gained that made the man."

The fortuitousness of love

"What is interesting about the question of the fortuitousness of love, of whether it turns upon fate or coincidence, is that it is probably only seriously asked by those who are not yet in love, or not deeply in love, or who in fact have no idea what love is. These are the sort of people who like to ponder whether the lover they have found might be the one or maybe only one of any number of possibilities. But the person who is truly in love, by contrast, couldn't care less about other possibilities, just as one who has found the Truth takes no interest in 'other truths.' For the one who believes and for the one who loves, there is no other truth and there is no other love."

-- Mike Mason, in The Mystery of Marriage

Anne, you are it, woman. You are my life's beauty, passion, and truth, and you hold me accountable to loving myself, which is really hard. You push me to always be my best, and you never let me manipulate you into coddling me. You demand my best for you, Jake, and our new baby out of your love and respect for you. And, with that help and modeling, I am learning that my intimacy with you is bound to my intimacy with myself, and I am learning to embrace me full-out as the authentic, courageous, reliable, trustworthy, "in love" man that I am.

Thank you for being you and for choosing me, and thank you for a wonderful birthday weekend. I love you with all my heart and soul.

Obsession with numbers

"The first sign that we don't know what we're doing is obsession with numbers."

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Numbers are at best a measurement tool for effectiveness in life, but they are never the purpose of life, and need never be its primary focus. Whether it's age, amount, rate, size, volume, weight, etc., numbers can indicate that something is working well or that it is broken, strained, or vulnerable to something. But when fear about what "the numbers" means about us causes us to attempt to "fix" them at all costs and in a state of panic, the effect of this perspective and these actions usually creates further damage to that which is already suffering. In our individual lives, numbers (like blood pressure, earnings, number of friends, weight, etc.) tend to be a reflection of our own personal integrity - our relationship with ourselves - and a fixation on improving the numbers vs. improving ourselves (and our relationship to our word) often proves both frustrating and painful. In organizations, business numbers (like revenue, profit, growth, etc.) often indicate organizational integrity, and performance problems usually arise out of "human" suffering in the pursuit of a group undertaking. After all, organizations are living organisms - communities of people. Organizational performance is mostly a function of how human beings are interacting and relating with each other (and the marketplace) in pursuing a common goal within a shared vision. And yet when the response by management to performance numbers that reflect these human problems is to behave in a very mechanistic way to "fix the numbers," human beings can feel completely de-valued in the process, especially when their response to whatever's wrong is ignored and/or judged, and this is how entire organizations strangle themselves to death without anyone knowing what's "really" happening. I encourage everyone out there who finds themselves "numbers-obsessed" these days, in any venue, to stop and take a deep breath before hurting yourself. And in the business context, my message to leaders is to remember that, in organizations of any kind, the front line participants are the equivalent of "the golden goose." For leaders to respond to "unsatisfactory egg production" by ignoring the goose or by judging or threatening it, instead spending the bulk of their time and energy watching the tally sheet of daily production, that's just plain silly. It's time to take better care of the goose.

Right after I wrote this on Thursday, I took my Little Brother, Brandon, to go see "The Matrix Reloaded" in IMAX. What a mind-blowing movie-going experience. I knew when we went, having seen the movie once before, that I would find that one line in the movie that would jump out at me as the reason I was seeing it this time. The first Matrix movie was the first movie I ever took Brandon to some four years ago, and the line then was actually from Brandon afterwards over pizza when he said, "Jim, you are Morpheus for me, because you believe in me more than I believe in myself right now." That line set the tone for our entire relationship, now going on its fifth year. And sure enough, that crystal clear defining moment showed up again for us in this movie. In a scene where the commander of the human army was pleading with the Council of Zion for more ships to fight the attacking machines, and the members of the council were telling him that they were going to use two ships to find the one that had the hero of the movie, Neo, on board, the council member emphasized that the war was not going to be won by the number of ships deployed. The commander struggled in frustration, being a "practical" man, and said that he was desparately trying to understand their decision, because it didn't seem rational, and the council member said the line that I offer to anyone reading this message who is struggling to understand it, just as Brandon struggles to understand why he should live true to his spiritual integrity vs. his very powerful and urgent 18-year-old desires and wishes. When it comes to doing God's work in our lives (which is always about being loving of others), amidst all the chaos, pressure, and the ego's need to be practical in response to immediate pressures,

"Comprehension is not a requisite for cooperation."

And now, to reinforce my point in my own life, I am going to go out and run 6 calm, joyful miles, giving me 44 for the month so far (a reflection of my commitment to the marathon in January, and my consistency in doing what I said I would do this month, and nothing else), while totally ignoring the numbers "49" and "198," fully aware that they don't "have to" mean what I could very easily make them mean. :-)