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« Guidance on the Go | Main | Meditation in a Moment »

April 17, 2010

Comments

Dick Richards

Once again your words have "captured the moment" for me. The quote from Berry -- right on. The sentence, "In between these decisions and actions lay a sense of uncertainty, worry, and fear. And out of all that courage comes forward to prevail and lead the way," touches on the first chapter of a book I am working on. And me doing this particular book doesn't make sense at all. Thanks Deb.

Deb Call

Dick - I look forward to hearing more about your book! It sounds like you are writing on a topic closer to your heart than your head!

Dan

This is a stunning post, Deb. It strikes at the root of so many leadership issues I see in my work: the failure to move into allowing for being baffled or destablized; the trust that events have their way of working out; the inner flow of decisions that 'don't make sense,' but do.

There have been any number of times when I've come up against the unknowns -- one was when I decided to leave my comfortable municipal job for the vagaries of consulting (no clients, 1st child just born, big house payments). Another was my divorce -- that was maybe the biggest one -- putting everything on the line for an inexplicable sense of inner wholeness, an 'integrity' I couldn't easily verbalize and which sounded weird and selfish at one level but which superseded so much of what was damaging and alienating about my own past conditioning. And, you know, just surviving on my own and alone for many years is another. There were plenty of moments of feeling scraped to the bone. I never really thought of any of it as courageous; more just following a path and sustaining it. I've certainly come to agree with William Stafford that "there's a thread you follow," and "you don't let go of it," despite all the time and all the changes, hidden as it might sometimes seem and against the dictates of the rational mind. Sometimes, as Ken Kesey said in Sometimes A Great Notion we "win by losing." I'd tack on that sometimes we're right by living out with great consciousness and intentionality something we once might have told ourselves was 'wrong.'

Deb Call

Dan, thank you for the personal examples you have shared that illustrate what it takes to act upon guidance. Perhaps if more of these kinds of conversations went on as a matter of course, people would learn to trust what they "know!"

You have an endearing and penetrating way of making these kinds of concepts come alive for our blog readers. Thank you for the depth of your insights.

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