The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said: “you can’t step into the same river twice.” Although numerically this statement is generally not true, qualitatively we don’t experience the “same” situation or person as we have before. Our confusion with this statement can be found in the word: “same.” It does seem to our minds that we are meeting the same person, or experiencing the same experience as we have before, when we again meet a friend, or reproduce an act multiple times. We do like the sense that the world and ourselves can be controlled and fixed for purposes of maintaining predictability and order. For most of us, this seems to offer us the confirmation of the solidness, or permanence of certain experiences. We like the idea of solid and permanence because they lull us into an interpretation of our lives that suggets a certain standard of safety can be built and maintained. What shakes us is when we encounter a shift in the quality with others, situations, or in ourselves. Likewise, what hurts us is when we are inflexible with our interpretations of others, situations, or even of ourselves that sees us as qualitatively static.

I have to admit that I personally have been guilty of being attracted to this way of thinking and living. The dogma of my life seemed to create a warm nest that offered not only comfort, but also safety. I have too many times locked others, situations or even my ownself into hardened ideas, or labels that created a blindness to deeper and more profound truth of each. My growth, as well as the impermanence of others was not seen because it disrupted the dillusional idea that I could control my experiences. What I thought created safety and strength had the converse effect. The more profound reality was that I was not in a nest that offered the freedom of flight, but a cacoon that imprisoned me, and sought to do the same to others.

The insidious addiction to this false security scarred far too many days and people in my life. I wish that I could go back and reshape the past, but I now know that my past and present are deeply improved by staying alert to impermanence, and the discontinuance of trying to solidify myself and those around me. My longtime hold onto myself as I had constructed myself to be, inhibited me from being open and receptive to the new that was available each moment. When I stopped being obsessed with what I thought was me, mine, or who I thought myself to be, I became awake to the truth that there is no me worth protecting if I lose presence with the “now” and authentic contact with others. I learned that taking “hills” isn’t worth doing if it means that I no longer see the deeper truth of what is emerging every moment.

What is humility but the faithful and honest rendering of truth. . .no more, no less. Why is it that for far too many, humility is about the degredation of ourselves at the altar of social acceptance? What it seems like is that pride is the real hidden god in that matter of not over playing our value within a situation, or group. I have listened to far too many speak of their abilities in ways that sound censored, but are largely that person copping out from facing their fear and practicing life truthfully. The messages of this false humility sounds right, but they are void of a deeper truth that demands full performance by the individual.

I see leaders withold themselves because they don’t want to come across brash or arrogant. I always encourage clients to pay attention to any noise within the system of their actions that reduce impact, but please differentiate between possible noise and fear. It serves none of us to play small. Likewise, it serves no one for us to misrepresent the truth. Let’s just be clear about the fact that misrepresentation of truth can swing either direction, and largely does.

My advocacy is toward an ethic of truth in love. I know that sounds “soft” in corporate circles, but try it and discover not only how hard it is, but how it is also good. Can we please live our lives asserting the truth of what we can do in the situations of our lives? Let the norm be that what is represented is a wholeness that offers clarity of what we are good at doing, and what we are not. It is only as we become honest about both truths - the good and bad - that we provide the situations and people of our lives the greatest contribution that we can give. . .ourselves.

Twenty-four hours, 365 days, and about 78 years is for most, a life. What do we want to experience, be, accomplish, or contribute within this time? For far too long, our “fire in the belly” is nothing more than our pursuit of an elusive salve that we think once held, will soothe the deep wound we each possess. When we do wake up, if we ever wake up, so much has gone on underfoot that we aren’t even sure where we are, what we want, or how to go about the next thing. I know I run the risk of sounding a bit odd (beyond the normal babbling), but just for the sake that there might be others who understand, I will continue.

Sometimes I look at this thing we define as life, these near 44 years, and tons of what one of my friends calls “creative abrasions,” or for the rest of us “hell,” and wonder what is the composite, what is meaningfully still true and with me. I want to believe that who I am is more than just the experiences joined together with me as the common denominator. Where can we set foot that we gain a deepening clarity of identity? I think we all want to be more that just vessels that transfer the sum total of life’s deposits to each moment. There is within me a desire to see how “who I am,” is more about the choices I made to be transformed by my experiences in a generative and developmental way. I want to see how even when it was like planting flowers in the dark, it still contributed to an emerging wholeness that’s uniquely my own, but very much united to something, or someone larger than just me.

Do these thoughts matter in the trenches of another corporate rift that arbitrarily lets 15 year employees go just so they can make the quarterly numbers? You betcha!

Just some thoughts from Parker Palmer that once again struck me as I read them again today:

By identity I means an evolving nexus where all the forces that constitute my life converge in the mystery of self: my genetic makeup, the nature of the man and woman who gave me life, the culture in which I was raised, people who have sustained me and people who have done me harm, the good and ill I have don to others and to myself, the experience of love and suffering - and much, much more. In the midst of that complex field, identity is a moving intersection of the inner and out forces that make me who I am, converging in the irreducible mystery of being human.

By integrity I mean whatever wholeness I am able to find within that nexus as its vectors form and re-form the pattern of my life. Integrity requires that I discern what is integral to my selfhood, what fits and what does not - and that I choose life-giving ways of relating to the forces that converge within me: Do I welcome them or fear them, embrace them or reject them, move with them or against them? By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am.

Identity lies in the intersection of the diverse forces that make up my life, and integrity lies in relating to those forces in ways that bring me wholeness and life rather than fragmentation and death.

Some days I just want to recoil. I don’t want to be unconditionally present with anyone. I want expediency! I want compliance! I want control! There are days that I feel like I have grown. There are other days where I wonder if the sensation of motion is like you have when you reach for something without taking a step.

Is growing a matter of leaping past my known place? Is it swift and strategic, or is it as Rilke suggests, being something that I just live into? Synchronicity would be nice.

Words never change our lives, but we collect them nevertheless in hope that they might. Experience does not demand alteration, only participation. Desire is empty left alone. As you read the words that follow remember this: If you are to grow to what you believe is true of your own self, then you will have to dramatically change your life. Don’t be too quick to shift to the next idea as if you just internalized the last. Reading and learning do not guarantee improvement; right action does. So the question every time we try something new, or come at things differently is not only, “Is this idea worthy?” but more central, “Will I do something with this idea in a way that is lasting?”