La Fermata

I have endless respect and compassion for the gatekeepers of conflicting realities and their noble charge to help reveal the truest of truths that all humans with open hearts can strive to connect to.

I’m watching
the light
flicker
grow bright
as we struggle and toil
scream and fight
for all we believe in that’s true and right.

Then dim
with our snickers,
judgements abound,
the darkness seeps in,
a dampening sound.
Our faces hollow
and gaunt with despair,
denial, indifference,
living in fear.

When will the lightness
illuminate each face
so we can see each other,
acknowledge more than race
and move past indifference
fear and pain,
recognize
“me” and “other”
as one and the same.

Surely my overall awareness has increased through this experience–I am more awake to the reality that people are judgemental, selfish, unaware and uncaring of those around them, and it has been a painful awakening. I know I can use this information to strengthen myself, but first I need to process how despairing I feel about it. I have long been awake to the reality that people also mean well–that their hearts are frequently in the right places even if they lack the knowledge or tools to follow through on their good intentions. But this is not enough.

Recipe for a Social Justice Learning Conversation:

Take one group of awkward, eager MBA students,
mix them into a classroom together,
ask them to talk about how they’re different.

Throw in some blind faith,
some hope,
and patience.

Wait for the projections to begin flying around the room.
Wait for the anger, the mistrust, the blame, the denial.

Take a deep breath. More patience.

“But we’re all the same…and we’re all different, too.”
“How can I face myself now that I realize how blind I’ve been to other realities?”
“How can I own my privilege without feeling guilty for it?”
“I never even realized that I was being oppressed. What does this mean in the context of how I’ve been living my life?”

At the beginning of our first intensive, I found myself excited to continue the process of exploring diversity in our social justice class. In our group at school, I felt like maybe I’d found a place where I could be open about the wide range of experiences I’ve had in my life. I thought maybe we all shared a vision, a common ground, where we could come together and see eye-to-eye, and we did…sort of, on some levels, in some ways.

Little did I know, I had a big reality check coming…

It’s all about creating a safe space for radical self-expression.

Setting the stage is 80% of the battle.

At our first intensive at school, if anything could have been done differently to help our class begin to dive into learning about social justice, it would have been for our professors to spend more time doing some teambuilding and trust building exercises to pave the way for the students to feel more comfortable with each other stepping into the space of openness, compassion, humility and vulnerability.

How have we experienced privilege or oppression in our world? Can we speak up loud and clear about those experiences, own the good, the bad, the neutral, and create a common language of love together?

It’s asking a lot of people to step out of our defenses and stand naked among our peers to discuss something many of us are entirely unfamiliar with. After our first initial group conversation about Social Justice at school, I found myself curious to see where this would lead…

A chaotic system is one that is unpredictable and exists in dynamic instability. If you like chaos, fractals and systems thinking, the inner geek in you will love Chaoscope, 3-D strange attractors rendering software.

Sometimes, I find it simpler to draw concepts rather than take notes. My thoughts on paper:

I like how the image above on structure generated behavior seems very similar to a drawing of the Samoan Circle method of generative group discourse we learned about and practiced in our Leadership and Personal Development course the same weekend:

Maintaining a relationship of love isn’t easy. There are a lot of emotional potholes, traps and stumbling blocks along the way that can trip us up and send a treasured relationship spiraling away from a place of love and toward an unhealthy, unwanted place that breeds unhappiness and suffering.

On the other hand, there is an endless list of healthy, positive emotions that one can nurture to help nurture a state that not only maintains love, but enhances it; potentially creating a positive feedback loop that continually amplifies love in our lives. Love is available to us in infinite quantities–it is up to us to identify the ways in which we can tap into it and build a system of love within ourselves and with others. Love is limitless, and I find that essential nature of love is such that the more I give it away, the more I receive.

This diagram (formally called a Causal Loop Diagram) is an exploration of love that I drew for a Systems Thinking class on Valentine’s day:

On the left side of the diagram, you will see a set of interrelated systems involving contempt, indifference, stress, jealousy, fear and stagnation–a set of emotions that are often detrimental to maintaining a relationship with love within ourselves and with others.

On the right side, we have systems involving respect, compassion, insight, compersion, faith and creativity that have the potential to generate a continual cycle that creates more love in endless quantities through understanding and nurturing them within ourselves and others.

Nestled between these two polarized systems are states of peace, balance, mindfulness and our capacity for learning. I believe that using these central states to process our emotions provide us spaces wherein one can begin to make a conscious choice about how they want love to flow through their lives.

This diagram was inspired by countless life-changing past and present experiences I’ve had with love in my personal relationships (if you’re reading this right now, you know who you are!), and an ongoing dialogue about love with a special someone that is opening up incredible new layers of richness and understanding about the meaning of love in my life. I am infinitely grateful.

I leave you with a prayer I wrote yesterday morning:

May I remember the journey that brought me here,
the kindness and love that nurtured me,
the incredible stillness nestled deep within my soul.
May I dwell in a space of ever-growing gratitude,
and seek to bestow upon others
the blessings that I have received.

One of the most powerful messages I’ve come across yet in my investigation and examination of the Systems Theory perspective was a paragraph about lasers…yes, the very same lights that illuminate those blinkly little mischeif-making pocket-sized devices that you’ve probably discovered illuminating your (feet or worse). Here’s what Fritjof Capra said in his book The Web of Life:

“When the laser phenomenon was discovered, it was interpreted as an amplification process, which Einstein had already described in the early days of quantum theory. Atoms emit light when they are “excited”–that is, when their electrons have been lifted to higher orbits. After a while the electrons will spontaneously jump back into lower orbits and in the process emit energy in the form of wavelets of light. A beam of ordinary light consists of an incoherent mixture of these tiny wavelets emitted by individual atoms.

Under special circumstances…a passing light wave can “stimulate”–or, as Einstein callled it “induce”–an excited atom to emit its energy in such a way that the light wave is amplified. This amplified wave can, in turn, stimulate another atom to amplify it further, and eventually there will be an avalanche of amplifications. The resulting phenomenon was called “light amplification through stimulated emission of radiation,” which gave rise to the acronym LASER. ”

My takeaway:
The concept of inducing light atoms to emit their energy so that their energy is amplified, whenn applied to people instead of atoms, remains the same: stimulating and inducing others to emit their energy in such a way that their light is amplified is one of the keys to self-organization. Good teachers and leaders will find a way to direct and channel the light and “cooperative effects” of others such that their energy synergizes and self-organizes and begins to bloom and grow.

At Bainbridge Graduate Institute, some of the challenges we encountered when defining leverage points and interventions in a team project on Student Engagement were:

• Choosing the leverage points we thought were most pertinent to K-12 schools: finding places where we believed actionable steps could be taken to enact change.
• Coming to consensus on key leverage points: each of us has a different background and different values, and our personal choices were affected by these differences.
• The complexity of the issues surrounding each leverage point: narrowing our focus to the key issues connected to each leverage point meant carefully selecting issues that seemed most pertinent to our research findings.

A living systems theory informed my approach to successfully implement a change initiative addressing the issues surrounding Student Engagement by: encouraging me to dig deeply into each of the issues to obtain as holistic an understanding of them as possible, reminding me that no single answer is necessarily the correct answer, and through helping me identify “problem areas” where change might be enacted.

On a more personal level, I believe that mindfully holding a space for the understanding that everything, ultimately, is an element of the system (no matter how seemingly insignificant or extraneous) allows one to begin to develop a sight that perceives increasing layers of complexity and draws connections where they might have before been invisible. Seeing these deeper connections is key to identifying increasingly powerful leverage points.