reflection : Page 2 : mackenzian

October 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Wise selfishness

I learned a phrase today: “wise selfishness.” It comes from the Dalai Lama, who wrote this short thought a few years ago:

It is important that when pursing our own self-interest we should be “wise selfish” and not “foolish selfish”. Being foolish selfish means pursuing our own interests in a narrow, shortsighted way. Being wise selfish means taking a broader view and recognizing that our own long-term individual interest lies in the welfare of everyone. Being wise selfish means being compassionate.” —Dalai Lama (January 23, 2012)

For writers like Gordon Dveirin, this is a perspective that allows us to seek “the good of the commons” and not simply personal advantage. Because the personal good and the planetary good are connected, choosing well for ourselves as individuals can also mean choosing well for our groups and for human society at large.

The problem of what to do about climate change is one example of an issue where personal interests and common interests starkly intersect. We can’t thrive as individuals on a planet too hot to sustain our species and too susceptible to extreme weather events to be safe.

So even when some of us might be able to profit from business as usual, that benefit has a short shelf-life. It serves us much, much more to pool our creativity, leverage our social and political influence, and look for ways to act in support of collective well-being.

There’s nothing wrong with caring for the self. We only need ensure that our work for the “self” also favors the rest of humankind too.

October 17, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

At the heart of community

Angel Kyodo Williams is a Zen Buddhist teacher who writes lucidly about the resources we have for staying grounded and gracious regardless of external circumstances. One of the resources she emphasizes in the book Being Black is community.

We have the power to choose not to let our beautiful diversity be a source of division amongst us. We have to see ourselves as having enormous strength because of the wealth of our resources. That wealth lies in our differences. We have so much to learn from each other based on our range of experiences. We can share our different perspectives as individuals to make the vision of the greater community wider and more inclusive. This naturally multiplies our possibilities.” —Angel Kyodo Williams

Community, more complex than unity, and definitely more than uniformity, is how Williams recognizes “those for whom we are responsible.” Being part of community is more than having an ideological tribe, and it’s more than the vehicle for peer control that some denominations use it as. Community is about shared experience and mutual responsibility, co-learning, and cooperative action.

This morning, two of my teachers shared their reflections on the power of human community and the wisdom of the collective. In her own reflection on community, Williams shares this quote from Martin Luther King, Jr:

No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the heart of community are those with whom we dream, those who share and nurture imagination with us.

We simply need to stay in relationships that are substantial enough to bear that wisdom, to allow us to share fluidly with each other, and to empower us to make from our wisdom a liveable world.

October 3, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

The meditative routine

A small child in a red hooded jacket carries water on her back. A man in dungarees and a straw hat follows closely behind her. — Photo credit: J Durham via morguefile

Chop wood. Carry water.” —Unknown

Every time you start to feel a little anxious, just put your head down and get to work.” —Janelle Belgrave

One of the things I find fascinating about work that I love is that my love and enjoyment doesn’t cancel out the tedium in the task.

Editing can include painstaking attention to quote marks and commas as much as it allows me to dive into examples and argument logic.

Development can include logging contacts with donors and updating their database records, not just connecting people who have resources with projects worth resourcing.

Research can include tracking quotes to their source and cleaning up references as much as marshaling facts and stories to make a sound point.

Congregational communications can include updating contact lists and making the same documents every few days just as much it includes holding space for people during the joys and challenges of their lives.

There are routines to every role. And even a bucket of water will get heavy if carried for long enough.

But there’s some wisdom in the old saying, “Chop wood. Carry water.” An extended version of this saying ties it to enlightenment or awareness: “Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.”

I’ve learned that even the tedium can be a meditation, that as I do the same thing again and again, I get to notice new things each time. I can focus my attention, and check in with the work rather than check out of it.

That task that is tedious can bring me a kind of calm in my workspace. The repetition is its own order, and reminds me that even grand work depends on small actions, and small actions are worth doing well.

August 27, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Keeping ambition in proportion

The whole point of dancing is the dance.” —Alan Watts

Alan Watts was a British philosopher who popularized Buddhist philosophy for receptive U.S. audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. I first heard of him during grad school, while I was around extraordinarily bright and motivated people. Many of whom were strangers to failure and most of whom were also driving hard toward a tenure-track teaching or research faculty job.

Though I wasn’t aiming for teaching, I was part of the academy’s intensity, and I was often grateful for a caution my mother sent me from time to time: “Remember to pause to smell the flowers,” she said. “No matter how busy things are.” And then, with a little wry smile, “They grant degrees posthumously too, you know.”

In the video below (captioned), Alan Watts explains how the metaphor of life-as-journey has entailments that dissuade us from stopping to fully experience and attend to what’s happening now, because society encourages us to be so driven, so ambitious, and so locked into a sequential model of progress from elementary school through retirement.

While some of us are beginning to realize that the old 20th Century progress model no longer works, we don’t all agree on what should replace it. Entrepreneur coaches tell us to be “top performers.” Others tell us to “choose ourselves.”

The message they don’t give, because it tends not to motivate people to sign up for recurring charges, is that striving isn’t the purpose of life. That’s Alan Watts’ message in this video.
Watch it:

Alan Watts – Why Your Life Is Not A Journey from The Liston Group NPO on Vimeo.

There’s a great series of short clips from Watts’ other talks, animated by South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker. These aren’t captioned.

August 16, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Working the substrate

Substrate (noun): a substance or layer that underlies something, or on which some process occurs, in particular. * the surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment. * the substance on which an enzyme acts. — Image via Google.

So much of life is invisible: the roots that nourish plants below the soil surface, the nonverbal communication that conveys our thoughts and attitudes, the years of training that go into a 10-second Olympic sprint.

It’s so easy to be dazzled by whatever appears, and to miss the substrate that props it up.
But the world below the surface matters, and to resolve problems, we have to work that substrate.

Working the substrate might mean not reacting to others immediately, but first reviewing the experiences and assumptions that precipitate their choices and behavior. How did they get here? How did you get here? What’s the wider story, and how can your responses take that wider story into account?

Working the substrate might mean re-evaluating the way an intractable community debate has been framed, and emphasizing what’s possible rather than just what’s been consistent. Is a “problem” group really the source of the discord? Are there new ways you could perceive your contributions and responsibilities as you engage other group members?

Working the substrate might mean transcending the call to conversation entirely in favor of taking action with and for people who are actively harmed and under-served. What does the dialogue circuit require of you? What could you accomplish if you focused less on explaining to the doubtful and more on focused on acting with the willing?

Deal with what feeds the obvious—or work around it, and watch how what grows changes.

August 13, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Listening

The wise are not learned; the learned are not wise.”

“A well-frog cannot imagine the ocean, nor can a summer insect conceive of ice. How then can a scholar understand the Tao? he is restricted by his own learning.”

“‘Lots of people talk to animals,’ Pooh said.
‘Maybe, but…’
‘Not very many listen, though,’ he said.
‘That’s the problem,’ he added.”

–Lao-tse, Chuang-tse, and Pooh Bear via Benjamin Hoff

When we recognize that we need to learn more, and we go out into the world to observe, we then gain the opportunity to listen.

Listening isn’t the filled spaces between speech. It’s the ground that words worth attending to emerge from. The two communities that have held this insight most brightly around me have been unprogrammed Quakers in Texas and Maryland.

Reverence for the context that precedes and supports pronouncements is what allows small and large groups of people to invest an hour at a time in sitting together yet saying nothing and affirming one another in not speaking until compelled to.

The Maryland Quakers have been practicing this for more than 200 years. The Texas Quakers, more than 100. And both groups have helped me inquire for myself:

Where are the spaces in my life where I pause to actively listen rather than assert? What can I learn when I choose to receive, when I pause expression and open up to impression? And, rather than conceiving of listening as not doing something, what happens for me when I perceive it as a gift I first give to myself and then share with the people around me?

It can be especially hard to maintain the listening practice of Sabbath when the majority of the world hums on continuous performance and constant expression. But I treat this time as a reminder to listen, not just in formal community, but also to the natural world, and to my and others’ experience.

As a well-frog or a summer insect, I have to assume that there’s so much more for me to learn. And as the child of a world filled with noise, I have to believe that our attention is precious.