And by our definition, environments that work are inspired.
Are you excited to go to work or school each day?
While enjoying vacations, do you miss the atmosphere at work or school?
Do you feel valued and appreciated by those with whom you work or study?
If any of the above is true, and it must be our hope that they are, then there is a basic groundwork of respect present in your school or place of business. Perhaps the most important ingredient in creating an environment where people experience being treated with dignity, grace and loving-kindness, is that there is an institution-wide agreement in place that the value of a person does not come from their grades or their achievements.
It is my experience that no one wins in an environment where what you do or achieve determines your value or worth. Those who achieve academically, succeed in athletics, produce brilliant sales results, often believe that their achievements do determine their worth and when those achievements are eclipsed, they can lose their way and become discouraged or in some cases self-damaging. What else would explain the high suicide rates among retired white, male doctors? Many of those who do not achieve in any area internalize a sense of mediocrity or even failure depending on the depth of the performance and from that point forward think of themselves in those terms.
The real issue, however, is not that we should do away with competition, rather, that a prerequisite for participation in any event whether academic or extra-curricular would be the establishment of each person’s worth as an individual and a separation of people from their achievements, faults and points of view.
“There is a lovely saying of Tranxu, a great Chinese sage, that I took the trouble to learn by heart. It goes: ‘When the archer shoots for no particular prize, he has all his skills; when he shoots to win a brass buckle, he is already nervous; when he shoots for a gold prize, he goes blind, sees two targets, and is out of his mind. His skill has not changed, but the prize divides him. He cares! He thinks more of winning than of shooting, and the need to win drains him of power.’ When you are living for nothing, you’ve got all your skills, you’ve got all your energy, you’re relaxed, you don’t care, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose.”
Awareness, Tony DeMello
In 1978, The Cleveland Trust Company was considering making a grant to train a thousand people to take responsibility for the (court ordered) peaceful desegregation of the Cleveland Public Schools. At one point in a grant review meeting, the CEO asked what made us think that the youngsters in the inner city would respond to the kind of training we were proposing. Levi Swindell, an eighteen year old young man from the heart of one of San Francisco’s roughest neighborhoods leaned forward on the Board Room table and asked the CEO what made him think that what the kids in the neighborhood wanted was any different than what he wanted, a life of value and purpose, to love and be loved, and the power to make choices that would allow him to have some say in how that life turned out. Nothing needed to be said. The playing field was leveled.
Each time I work with anyone, I remind myself that I might be speaking to the next Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi. You, the person reading these pages might be that person. What an individual has produced up until this moment, has nothing to do with what they will produce tomorrow. The issue is capacity.
“And the use of the word capacity is critical. This is not about ‘talent’ or ‘potential.’ It is that, as human beings, we arrived with a ‘main frame’ capacity for all things. Think of it as a computer full of wiring and capacitors before any programming is installed. Babies arrive with it.
How is it I am so sure we all have the capacity to lead meaningful, productive, contributory lives? There are three things I would ask you to consider. Given all of our scientific research and theological writings, there are two primary theories regarding how human beings came to be. Those who believe each theory are absolutely convinced they are right and absolutely sure those with any other notion are wrong. It matters little.
According to people of Christian and Jewish faith, the Story of Creation allows that God created the world and then Adam and Eve and from there on evolved the whole human race. After the existence of Adam and Eve, each time they conceived, it began with two cells, a sperm and an egg combining to create a single cell which developed into another human being. So in a very real sense, according to this tradition, we are related. Literally related, traceable, cell by cell, generation to generation descended from Adam and Eve.
Now, for a moment, consider the Darwinian theory of evolution.
According to this theory, once you go back from human beings you get to all the other mammals, then on to birds, amphibians and then on to smaller creatures, finally arriving at the single celled creature, the amoeba. So we originated with a single cell and have evolved over time and mutation to human beings as we know them.
The next time you go to the grocery store, take a very careful look at your relatives. Using either of the most adopted and believed stories of the origins of our beginnings and existence, you and I are literally related. With the exception of those with an additional gene or chromosome or catastrophic biochemical imbalance (less than 1% of all people), you and I are related and share the same capacities. Again, think of the guts of a computer before any programming is installed. The capacity, depending on the programming is identical.”
What Every Person Can Do
If I approach you from the point of view of the greatness you possess within, it is far more likely you will discover, refine, nurture and grow that capacity.
If I approach you from the perspective of what you do not know, does it encourage you to look?
In inspired environments, everybody does self-care. They talk about it, refine it and most of all understand its importance relative to how we relate to and treat others. Self-care here defined as any regular time, set aside to create clarity and peace before beginning the day. It contains three ingredients: gratitude for being alive, having been delivered into a miracle (you are breathing?); everything is inter-connected, (everything you do affects everyone else, all 6.7 billion of us); and recognition that the only thing we control is how we are going to be today.
Will I be on purpose?
Will I be about loving-kindness?
Will I remember the giant in all people?
Will I separate people from their past?
What might happen if students decided what kind of a day they intended to create for themselves, each day, every day?
What might happen if every employee approached every minute at work from the point of view of what they could contribute? Would we choose to be of use?
Do you think that the airliner would have sat on the tarmac for six hours with no food and children crying?
Make yourself a magical month!
We will continue this series next month.
by Bill Cumming
