CxD #111
Foibles; Network of kisses; Saturn; Death comes Early
Announcement, Character Designers: If you live near Austin and are interested in working with a masterful therapist, communicator and group leadership expert that I know and have utmost respect for, well… it’s your lucky day because he’s leading an upcoming training about group leadership and the evolution of group dynamics––the stuff all leaders and people involved in systemic change need to know–– and the training, though small, still has a few openings. Please send an email to cxd@characterbydesign.org to let me know you’re interested and I’ll send you more info. The training starts on Saturday and Sunday February 29th and March 1st, and will take place the following three first weekends of April/May/June.
If you have a foible, let’s call it, you’ll notice that whatever impatience shows up in judgement tends to make an even bigger mess of things. Consider then this wise reflection:
“Habit is habit, and not to be thrown down the stairs, but coaxed down one step at a time.” ~ Mark Twain
You have teachers everywhere around you. Everything and everybody is your teacher. The question is whether you are prepared to receive the lessons.
Are you?
What’s the worst lesson you can imagine?
And what would happen if you failed it?You’re stuck in your habits because you think of yourself as a thing (and things don’t change (you think to yourself)). But what if you thought of yourself as movement and change instead? Here’s my favorite passage after having my nose deep inside four different books all week long, taken from Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, written using such elegant and simple language than can only be the result of truly deep and profound understanding. Basically, Plato was wrong!
“We can think of the world as made up of things. Of substances. Of entities. Of something that is. Or we can think of it as made up of events. Of happenings. Of processes. Of something that occurs. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time. The destruction of the notion of time in fundamental physics is the crumbling of the first of these two perspectives, not of the second. It is the realization of the ubiquity of impermanence, not of stasis in a motionless time.
Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend, and describe it. It is the only way that is compatible with relativity. The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.
The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. conversely, a kiss is an “event.” It makes no sense to ask were the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones….Things in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous. ”4. I was deeply moved by this headline: Leila Janah, Entrepreneur Who Hired the Poor, Dies at 37.
A child of Indian immigrants, she created digital jobs that pay a living wage to thousands in Africa and India, believing that the intellect of the poor was “the biggest untapped resource” in the world.
Read more here.5. Remember when you got into that argument with that guy over that thing he did? When you sent someone a sweet and loving GIF for valentine’s day and they didn’t reply? How does seeing this photo below shift your view of “right and wrong”?
