May 31, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Leaders use their superpowers on themselves first.

A leader’s primary superpower isn’t their ability to persuade or inspire or mobilize others.

Mobilizing others is essential to leadership. Mobilizing others is co-creating space where other people can motivate themselves to take aligned, constructive action.

Mobilizing others is secondary to a leader’s ability to transcend internal resistance, work around interior shadow, and recognize that most other people are walking through life trying to do the same.

A leader’s superpower addresses, stretches, and enlightens them first. When people who have a compelling vision, are convincing, and know how to motivate others to take action nevertheless stumble over their own shadow, take it as a sign that they’ve skipped a step or two.

All the gifts and abilities we have yet fail to use for good in our own lives pile up like wood and newspapers in a hoarder’s garage. Self-awareness, self-auditing through reflection, and acting on what we learn are ways to clear space within us. That cleared space means room to acknowledge our gifts, claim our power, and use that power in the outer world with consciousness, kindness, and minimal interference.

It takes all of my energy to resist.
It takes none of my energy to surrender.” —Lench Archuleta

Resource

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (Steven Pressfield).

February 4, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Beautiful Things Take Time To Grow

Photo: Four coastal redwoods viewed from the trunk up. They are in the foreground against a light blue sky with streaky clouds. — Coastal redwoods at Muir Woods National Monument, CA. Photo © Keisha E. McKenzie. All rights reserved.

If you’re ever near San Francisco, CA, take a trek north to Mill Valley. Spend a couple of hours walking around these thousand-year-old trees and see if you don’t leave the grounds with clearer lungs and a fresh perspective on time.

I brought back a bag of sequoia seeds in a can when I visited Muir Woods last spring. I planted them dutifully, watered them, stored them in the fridge, shocked them warm in their plastic greenhouse, and waited.

Two seeds sprouted. They’ve been about two inches long since November.

“What if they’re dead?” I asked last night.
“They aren’t dead,” my favorite American said. “Aren’t they still green?”
“Yes.”
“Then they’re not dead.”

Beautiful things sometimes take thousands of years to grow.

Beautiful things can also seem to spring up overnight, like the cherry blossoms I photographed on Christmas Day that arrived on the region’s trees four months early. There are reasons they bloomed out of season this year: in a complex system, all outcomes have causes, and many outcomes have several. But from where we stand, from our tiny vantage point and limited perspective, some outcomes seem wondrous.

At Muir Woods I walked among trees older than seven of my family’s generations. Some of the trees were forest fire survivors; others had survived world wars and cold war; and all of them were threatened by anthropogenic climate change—the risk of a few degrees and the loss of the cool humidity that has helped these tree guardians to thrive for so long.

We take our whole lives to grow up, but the distance between our state yesterday and our state today isn’t large enough for us to notice the difference. Our societies seem to grow even more slowly than we do, and that makes it hard to motivate substantive change.

Sometimes it feels as if our promising world is two inches tall or dead altogether, but there are still green leaves on the branches. The world is in motion, and things do change. But the process is too slow and we’re too small in the context of change to sense it. We have the ability to imagine our world regardless, to re-envision and reshape the way things are and the social world that we came, found, and sometimes take for granted.

We’re not big enough, don’t live long enough, and don’t perceive widely enough to know all causes for an outcome. Nor can we guarantee the results of what we’ve contributed or limit ahead how much time the seeds we’ve planted and nourished will take to yield results.

We can guess. We can model and project. We can hope.

Nothing about life in this quadrant of space promises us any long-term outcome no matter how anxiously we hover over what should be and isn’t yet. We’re not promised sure victory or an inevitable arc. All we’re promised, as Krishna tells Arjuna, and Steven Pressfield tells us, is the intrinsic reward of our daily work and the distance and time to grow between one state and the next.

Our job is to press for a world we’ve never had, and to inspire every generation that follows us to keep pressing until that world is real.

Beautiful things sometimes take thousands of years to grow, and the chance we have to nourish them is its own reward.

January 14, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

No Arc, No Guarantees. Work Anyway. (Coates)

I came across these paragraphs today, from one of the last columns The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote on New Years Eve 2013.

I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don’t even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos. I believe powerful people who think they can make Utopia out of chaos should be watched closely. I don’t know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.

I’m also not a cynic. I think that those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Or perhaps not. Maybe the very myths I decry are necessary for that work. I don’t know. —Ta-Nehisi Coates

Read the rest of the article too. It’s worth at least 7 minutes.

As part of my prep for a panel this February about the future of Seventh-day Adventism, I’ve been reflecting on the oft-quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. statement that the “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It’s from a 1965 speech he gave in Montgomery, Alabama, just one month after the assassination of Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz). King affirmed the crowd on the desegregation and Civil Rights Act victories, but also looked forward to other issues: voting rights, anti-poverty work, employment access, and continued non-violence.

In the past I’ve argued for all three of MLK’s premises: (a) that there is an arc to the outworking of human activity; (b) that this arc is long, spans generations, and favors the patient; and (c) that this arc bends toward justice, toward improvement, toward wholeness. The beauty to this perspective is an assurance that, contrary to appearances, things will work out in the end: there is an ideal future ahead—a heaven—if we will only persist and insist through the inertia of the present.

Visually complex representation of internet relay chat connections. A series of circles on a horizontal line are linked by arcs; each arc shows who sent messages to whom; heavier lines represent more frequent communication. — Image credit: Martin Dittus (c) 2006, Internet Relay Chat Arcs

Since 1965, though, the “bends towards justice” phrase has dropped into cliche. To those like Coates who’ve graduated from King’s Christian idealism, premise (b) appears obvious: humans have been figuring out what a healthy society takes for a mighty long time, and progress on most fronts takes lifetimes even as it includes setbacks. But premises (a) and (c) don’t fare so well when analyzed afresh. There’s no objective proof for a pre-determined blueprint, and while humans seem to be becoming less violent overall, justice and wholeness haven’t proven to be inevitable alternatives to the abuse and division that seem so common. The belief that they are inevitable and/or can be coaxed out of the ether with our cultivated determination is somewhat like functional self-deception, a mantra that keeps activists working for the changes we advertise and argue for.

There’s a line from the Bhagavad-Gita that I’ve been resisting for about a year now and that came home to me when I read Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art a few months ago:

A professional schools herself to stand apart from her performance, even as she gives herself to it heart and soul. The Bhagavad-Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not to the fruits of our labor. All the warrior can give is his life; all the athlete can do is leave everything on the field. (emphasis added)

This insight isn’t about salary or compensation: it’s not about labor rights or fair pay or anything so straightforward. It’s much scarier than that. It’s a head-on challenge to the prophet’s closeted wish that he’ll see the outcomes for which he strives in his lifetime, that he’ll be vindicated, that the scoffers will finally get it, and that a well-earned flush of smugness can finally flow through him.

But it’s rare that we get that pay-off. We work and live in hope that our work will be proven valuable, that the challenges are worth our effort. Because we hope, we can be disappointed; we work in love with and for communities we love, and so we can be heartbroken. Even if there is no arc, no bend toward justice, and no guarantee of success, we work anyway. Even if there is no arc, we live as though there were.

The dreamers, the strivers, the change-seekers—we’re the stout-hearted children of Atlas. Our load isn’t the celestial sphere, though: it’s a cluster of night visions and daydreams, dreams of an inhabitable future.

We know that that future is not inevitable.

And we work anyway.

The dreamers are the saviors of the world… Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them in the realities which it shall one day see and know.

Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven. —James Allen, As a Man Thinketh

The Farnese Atlas upholds the celestial sphere. Image credit: Gabriel Seah (c) 2006