Quickening

Today, in every conversation and email, I could feel the quickening. The effects of last week’s Emerging Futures: Leadership Redefined – Reclaimed continues to reverberate through all that I think and say and do. It is as if I am vibrating at a different frequency.

When I read Anne’s post on her blog re ‘Redefining Education’, I got goose bumps. My goose bumps never lie! When they move, I know that I’ve touched something (an idea, a person, a random thought, etc) that is very potent for the future to emerge differently.

Any nominalization in our language can be redefined. Success. Love. Parenting. Work. It doesn’t matter what it is, recognizing that nominalizations are nothing more than code words for habituated ways of thinking and being, redefining them is a great place to start! I wonder what my life might become if I were to pick one a day – one that I hold as important and/or ‘fact’ – and just consider how else I might ‘define’ that for myself; and how those who move through their world differently, define it for themselves. Kind of like blowing the cob webs out of the attic.

This just popped to mind (and I wonder how they’re related since I know they have to be or they would not have connected): the notion that history is irrelevant for creating the future. History is not intended to be a guide to the future – it’s intended to be digested so that we might become ‘more’ as a result of it. Discover more about ourselves so that we need not hang on to how we’ve been. That was really driven home tonight while my mother and I watched the CBC DVD on the re dedication of the monument at Vimy Ridge.

Perhaps war and our experience of those who fight them is the greatest challenge for us to move beyond who we have been. As I watch and listen, I experience a deep and genuine grief, and sadness and profound gratitude and appreciation for all those whose courage and sacrifice have made it possible for me to live the life I live today. My father was on the beaches at Normandy on D-Day plus 1 – wading through bodies – and was never the same again. He went there a boy and came back stunned by his experience.

And yet, even as the tears flow down my cheeks, I know deep in my being that this is insane! In our grief and appreciation, we build monumental myths about the valor of war. There is no valor in war – there is only death, destruction and the devastation of the human mind and spirit.

Who would we be without our willingness to kill? Who would we become without our myths and mythos of warrior cultures…brave and strong and true…ready to take a life and lay down their own for the cause. As I watched the Vimy Ridge documentary, all I could see were thousands of men in the ancient garb of European peasants, whacking at each other, brutalizing each other….and for what! We’re still at it….and not much has changed.

Perhaps ‘war’ is a nominalization that we need to redefine. Like there was a time when it was ‘kool‘ to drink and drive, all of which has been redefined in our cultural psyche – maybe ‘war’ is not kool anymore and we need to reconsider what the real consequence of it is.

It’s been a long day…and a great day….

And breathing is good….