Not On Your Life

It has been great in the last few days to get back into writ­ing here. I have been so intense­ly involved in putting up the “Reach­ing Out to Build Trust” pages at teamtrustsurvey.com that this blog has been all too neglect­ed this spring. Thanks to all of you who have for­ward­ed com­ments and feed­back about the reach­ing out mate­r­i­al. It is much appreciated.

Anoth­er project for me has been stay­ing on the hunt to find a venue for my co-facil­i­tat­ed work­shop, Beyond the Edge. It has turned out to be a more dif­fi­cult chal­lenge to find the right place than I had hoped. I men­tioned post before last a recent stay at the Whid­bey Insti­tute here in Wash­ing­ton State — I was there check­ing it out. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Beyond the Edge does­n’t match the assets of Whid­bey Insti­tute, and I’m sad about that because it’s close to where I live and is in many respects a real­ly mag­nif­i­cent place. Up until a few years ago, we offered Beyond the Edge at the Spring Creek Ranch in Jack­son Hole, Wyoming. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it became too expen­sive to con­tin­ue there. 

I’d hap­pened on Spring Creek ear­ly in my con­sult­ing career. I dis­cov­ered it after miss­ing a flight out of Jack­son and unex­pect­ed­ly had to stay the night. Dri­ving around look­ing for a place to eat, I saw the sign and drove up the hill to a stun­ning view of the Tetons. For what it’s worth, I imme­di­ate­ly had a strong feel­ing of attrac­tion and syn­chronic­i­ty — and sev­er­al years lat­er, there we were doing the workshop. 

There have been many oth­er times when I have felt called to a place — or some­thing that place rep­re­sent­ed. In fact, I began my con­sult­ing career not too long after I expe­ri­enced a very strong feel­ing one day when I hap­pened to notice a round build­ing at a resort near the south­ern tip of the island of Hawaii. I was so intense­ly curi­ous about it I asked at the front desk, “What do they do in that build­ing over there?” “Oh, it’s some sort of retreat thing,” a staff mem­ber replied. “The com­pa­ny that owns it sends man­agers here a cou­ple of times a year.” And I thought to myself, some­how that’s exact­ly the sort of thing I’d like to do. Although I’d nev­er facil­i­tat­ed any­thing at that point, I sud­den­ly want­ed to facil­i­tate a retreat in a place just like this. It sounds fun­ny to say it but I had the same but­ter­flies in my stom­ach look­ing at that build­ing as when falling in love. The call was so strong. The mys­tery was so compelling.

Joshua Tree

I have no words of wis­dom about such moments. They just feel to me like I am enter­ing the stream of life in some fore­shad­owed way. They seem to express a des­tined future. Like any infat­u­a­tion, they don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly lead to a bliss­ful, “hap­pi­ly ever after” out­come, but they sure have some­thing to say, at least for me, about where my heart’s come from and where it’s going.

If there’s a mes­sage, I sup­pose it must be about stay­ing open to such moments. You don’t know when they are going to show up. They are sig­nals of some arche­type, per­haps, reach­ing up to grab us, telling us to “enter here;” that is, if you want to live a “mean­ing­ful life.” It’s sure clear that mean­ing­ful isn’t the same as easy. As I look back, there were as many mis­takes and hard times that have come of my path as beau­ti­ful moments that soared out of this world. But would I want to have missed any of them? Some days, I’ll be ratio­nal and say yes there are a few things I’d just as soon foregone. 

But most days, reflect­ing, my answer would have to be, “not on your life.”

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