Author: Tenneson Woolf

I’ve just spent the last three days with my parents, them visiting Lindon, UT where I live, on their way back from three months in California. My Mom is 20 years older than me. We laugh together a lot. We tease each other. And we get to the serious stuff when needed. My Stepfather is also playful. Kind. Loves being a Grandpa, and I love him for that. These three days were simply to be together. It happens two or three times during a calendar year. I think we make up for lost time together in a compact way. Some play. Some important conversations. Some cooking food together. Linking together family.

I am rather lucky, I’d say. I’ve known my grandparents well. I’ve been close to my parents. I adore my kids. I particularly adore the times that link all of these together. Family line has always been very strong for me.

Today was a sweet parting, sending my parents along the way, the next leg of highway driving back to Canada. After nearly four months away, they will be returning to a system of my aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmother and other family.

The sweet aspect of parting is the tenderness that arrives. For all of us, welling tears. Sometimes a flood running down our cheeks. It was that way for me today, as they pulled away from the parking lot. I experience this tenderness as pure gratitude. These are moments to remember.

The sad part is the heart tugging. Perhaps it is fear and uncertainty for the future. Will we have this again? Will my kids have this? The family is growing and will be launching in several directions likely within the next five years. Young adults getting married. Following jobs, I hope. Creating their life paths. Living in to who they are. I hope, very soulfully.

Life is holding. Life is letting go. Life is moving on.

And perhaps, the sad part is just love. Perhaps that is just what love does. Regardless, partings like this leave me involuntarily touching my heart with my hand, so that I can remember that moment, and that feeling, forever.

Seven or eight years ago I watched two of my friends juggling. They were in a passing kind of juggling. Six balls total. Exchanges between them. It took some skill. They laughed. I laughed. It was juggling — balls dropped, inevitably.

What impressed me as I watched my friends was that there was a  kind of informal agreement together, to get them past the dropped balls. It was their “dynamic duo” of principles that helped support essential relationship in the midst of complex behavior. For them, “No nice. No sorry.”

The latter part was easy to understand. No sorry. They were removing the need to apologize. Balls would fall to the ground. There was no shame needed. However, the former part was also interesting. “No nice” was taking away the need to compliment. I can see that there is more to explore in that, but for now, I’ll just say it was a principle to simply be more real together.

I continue to learn that there are dynamic principles of being in relationship. For now, I’m not talking about casual relationships. Rather, the ones that you have to lean in to. With a partner or spouse. With colleagues on a team. Particularly when working on complex issues that don’t really have a finish line.

Two that are at the top of my list, searching for simplicity and a good place to start, are “No blame. Radical honesty.”

No blame is not about just being polite and nice to each other. I suppose it can be. I suppose there are times when that is needed. The deeper, more significant level of this is to develop a complexity literacy. Blame is convenient. That makes it comforting sometimes and well used. That doesn’t make it fair, however. Blame often comes from a reductive perspective of a complex environment. It comes from lacking compassion for choices being made — how could anyone ever make any other choice than the one I would make — and the many diverse ways of seeing the same circumstances.

No blame does not remove accountability. Stuff needs to get done. Deadlines need to be met. But no blame helps us develop more understanding together, which in fact creates more capacity for acting together in the future.

Radical honesty is closely related to no blame, going together like fish and chips. Radical honesty is a kind of truth telling that expects each of us as vehicles for sense-making. It turns us into witnesses together, assuming a kind of complexity and emotional literacy. Radical honesty, even the painful shining light on blind spots, requires us to show up real with one another. Not always easy. In part because there is a pretty good chance most of us are learning to do this with ourselves, let alone with others.

My suggestions is that these principles matter. They are to be practiced. They are words that most people understand, yet all of us likely need to learn about. Maybe some of us grossly misunderstand also. But they offer a start point for many of us seeing through complexity paradigms, trying to become more grounded, helpful, and effective in the unknowable futures before us.

Balls will drop, yes. But perhaps these practices will help has laugh a bit more together as we pick them up and start again.

I’ve been ready a bit lately on silence, one of my favorite topics.

One source of that is a book, Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness, by Robert Sardello.

Here are the teasers that are grabbing my attention:

– this description from early 20th century French writer and physician of the soul, Georges Bernanos, “sin as the patterned way of being in which we remain living at the surface.”

– from Meister Eckhart, German mystic and monk from the the late 1200s and early 1300s, “The central silence is the purest element of the soul, the soul’s most exalted place, the core, the essence of the soul.”

– from Pythagoras, Greek philosopher and mathematician from 600 BC, “Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb the silence.”

– and from the author, Robert Sardello, “Silence is autonomous. It is beyond us; our task is to coordinate our being with the greater Being of Silence.”

Worth the attention, yes.

 

Over the last few weeks I’ve talked and emailed several times with my friend Bob Stilger. Bob and I met in the late 1990s while working through The Berkana Institute. Bob, like Berkana, has always embodied a spirit of dialogue and inquiry that has inspired me.

One of our conversation topics has been this idea of “unknowable futures.” The entry point for our conversations has been a couple of workshops that Bob and I are involved in creating. And more specifically, Bob has many years, decades really, of working and living in Japan. Most recently, this has included learning journeys to Japan to explore thriving after disasters.

Disaster, thriving, calling communities back to life — these are all entry points. The real focus that I appreciate in Bob is the call to being in the unknowable. Becoming comfortably uncomfortable with uncertainty.

It occurred to me that there is an important distinction between “unknowable” and “unknown.” And unknown future has some implication that it can be known. If we try harder. If we learn more. If we prepare more thoroughly. It feels like good old due diligence. There are times when this is essential.

But Bob is saying something else. An “unknowable” future is one that cannot be known regardless of the due diligence efforts. The unknowable is not an interruption from which we will soon return to the normal. “Unknowable” is increasingly the new normal.

The unknowable highlights qualities and practices needed. Individually and together. Personally and professionally. The unknowable requires ways of being that release us from the fallacy of knowing. It requires dispositions of curiosity, non-judgement, and compassion for self and others. It requires keen honesty and emotional literacy.

These may be categories of life-long practice. Yes, all of us can get better. But I believe they are required and possible now. Just starting somewhere.

Thanks Bob.