Fluidnews from another stream…

(Written as my quarterly column for a medical magazine)

When I first heard the phrase Bridges to Excellence, I thought perhaps the magazine’s topic was focusing on advances in dental technology.  But, then I realized that I really had no idea what the issue was about so I did the intelligent thing.  I asked.  Someone answered.  I still didn’t understand.  So, I did the unintelligent thing; I decided to take off on a personal flight of fancy.

Ladies and gentlemen, please, buckle your seatbelts, bring your seats to the full, upright position, and prepare for take-off.  Please turn off any electronic devices, so I may have your undivided attention for the next few minutes.  Before we reach cruising altitude, let us attempt some simple comprehension.  Read the following carefully.

Excellence \ˈek-s(ə-)lən(t)s\|     noun

the quality of being outstanding or extremely good

archaic; an outstanding feature or quality.

Now, just what the heck does that mean, outstanding or extremely good?  Big deal.  It even has an archaic meaning for a simply an outstanding feature or quality.  Piffle!  Once you are “extremely good,” then what?  Then, nada, zilch, big ostrich egg.  That’s as good as it gets and you’re on your way to a high level that leads to a gradual decline because, as everyone knows, the laws of entropy kick in.

So, if excellence is all you shoot for, you’re just setting yourself up for entropic decay.  Look at the record, so to speak.  Mathematically, an ascending curve that ends in excellence becomes a flat line.  That flat line then continues, but never again ascends; therefore, over any period of time, it must begin to go into retrograde, and start descending.  Just ask IBM who shot for excellence, hit it, got smug, and almost went out of business because smaller competitors were shooting for something else.  Fortunately, IBM learned its lesson, and now excellence isn’t good enough, henceforth they are on the comeback trail.

Come on, there has to be something better we can go for.  Hey!  I’ve got it! 

(Ladies and gentlemen, please tighten your seat belts as we may be encountering some emotional and psychic disturbance while your perceptions are turned upside down).

Exceptional \ik-ˈsep-shnəl, -shə-n^əl\     adjective

1. unusual, uncommon, atypical, extraordinary, out of the ordinary, rare,  unprecedented, unexpected, surprising. 2 outstanding, extraordinary, remarkable, special, excellent, phenomenal, prodigious; unequaled, unparalleled, unsurpassed, peerless, matchless, nonpareil, first-rate, first-class; informal A1, top-notch.

Now, there’s a word that has some room for growth!  It is excellence and much more.  It’s prodigious, it’s rare, it’s surprising, hey, even on the down low it’s A1 and top-notch! 

Yes, let’s ditch (pardon the phrase) the merely excellent and go for the exceptional!  Look at the possibilities: there is no entropy here because it is peerless and it’s extraordinary.  It does all of this while being unexpected and constantly surprising!  Constantly surprising!  That means it can always head off the charts. Visualize in your a big PowerPoint® slide.  Picture a line going from bottom left — starting at “barely getting by” — in a steeply ascending curve toward the upper right-hand corner, passing through “good enough” where it hits “excellent.”  Got it? Good.  Now, imagine that line doing the exceptionally impossible; see it leave the chart in a 3-D form and shoot out into space at a right angle off the screen.  That is where you find the exceptional.  Off the charts of previously perceived possibility!  Yes, it means you have to be completely unrealistic.  Why?

Because realistic has come to mean: “look at why we can’t do that; look at why that is impossible.”  Being realistic in a time of unfathomable change just won’t cut it.  It is time to go for the completely unrealistic and imagine the exceptional.  Stay with that image, use it, and make it work.

Ladies and gentlemen, and all of you who remain undecided as of yet, now that we are at our cruise altitude, I offer for your consideration the following concept:  let’s get rid of the wimpy, merely excellent, and go for being off the charts EXCEPTIONAL.  You are invited to use your exceptional imaginations to resolve the problem of building bridges which have yet to be conceived of.  If you don’t think it can be done, consider the unrealistic champions of the past: Charles Lindbergh, Madame Curie, Jonas Salk, Robert Jarvik, MD, along with your humble captain, C.W. Metcalf.  Oh, that’s me.   A dozen, intelligent, well-meaning physicians have told me for four years than I had anywhere from a few hours to several months to live.  But, I was totally unrealistic and shot off the charts in search of the exceptional.

Believe me when I say that if I can be writing this column, you can be building completely unrealistic, exceptional Bridges to Excellence.  Keep your seat belts fastened and your trays in the upright position.  You will hear from me again as we approach our exceptional landing.

The Joy of Chaos
by

C.W. Metcalf

“The self is not something that one discovers…
it is something that one creates.”
Thomas Szas

We can no longer deceive ourselves into believing that we have control of anything that happens outside of us. There was a time when we had time: a time when events moved slowly enough to allow us the delusion of control. Abruptly, however, the Stone Age ended. The speed of population, power and technological progress went into hyper-drive. Ever since, we have been struggling to cope with quantum leaps of complexity while desperately attempting to maintain a sense of control.

Finally, we have reached a stage where not only control, but even comprehension of our complex world, lives and spirits has been utterly shattered. Now, we are in the “real world” where our last stand for control is being waged: control of all we ever had to work with in the first place, control of how we choose to act instead of react, how we choose to view the events of our lives.

There is a joy in chaos and unpredictability, but it requires a major shift in how we see ourselves in relationship to the world around us: We must learn the wisdom of Albert Einstein who posited that the perfect answer opens the door to a thousand unforeseen questions; the courage of NBC’s Katie Couric, who turned events that could be seen as tragedy into opportunity to be of value to others; the vision of those yet without eyes to see.

“The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any
given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Viktor Frankel

© by C.W. Metcalf 2 March 2007

FLUID NEWS: Navigating in a sea of change

THE MYTH OF BALANCE

(WARNING: If you are in upper management, go directly to Paragraph 4.)

More and more, I am hired by companies to help address the issue of “Work/Life Balance”. I don’t accept every offer because experience has shown that some in upper management, and their bosses, the shareholders, really don’t care about a life-sustaining workplace. They do care about profits; so, when even the most stress-resistant workaholics begin to crack, folks like me show up to offer various trainings. There is little in the way of committed follow-through after these events. The expectation that you will do more with less, in a global marketplace that is different in the morning than it was when you went to bed, grinds on. Eventually, things get worse and some CEO who tried to serve two masters—the employees and the stockholders–is paid millions to leave because he or she screwed up, and the cycle begins again.

I prefer to work with organizations that are genuinely committed to providing an enjoyable, life-sustaining work environment that keeps retention high and is far more productive and consistently profitable over time. Fortunately, there are more such organizations that you might think.

(End of tirade: now we can move on to the main topic.)

The concept of Work/Life Balance seems a worthy one. On closer inspection, I find that it is based on false assumptions that must be changed in order to gain the real objective.

One: There is the presumption that “work” and “life” are two separate forms of existence. While many people have to work at jobs they consider demeaning in order to support themselves, just as many work at careers which they actually like. However, there is no doubt that something needs to change. After all, when was the last time someone came up to you and said: “Well, I’m ahead of schedule–how about you?” In today’s world, being a little less behind than the competition is about the greatest edge one can hope for.

Perhaps a better description of the concern would be for “Life Balance.” Unfortunately, that leads us to the most defective presumption.

Two: Balance is a myth! True balance would require that we play 40 hours for every 40 hours we work–not to mention the 40 hours with friends and family, or the 40 hours we might want to spend alone! (Let me see: 7 days x 24 hours = 168 hours. So, given the above formula for balance, we are left with 8 hours per week for the physical necessities of sleep, nutrition, elimination, etc.) Perhaps balance is not what we seek.

Twenty years ago, while working for a Japanese company on retreat in Bali, I had the privilege of meeting an elder whom the locals considered a seer.

“She was old when my mother was a child,” my 60-something guide said as we entered a small thicket of palms and grasses where Ni Oka Satriya held court. This woman was reportedly over a hundred years old, but her alert eyes reflected light like luminescent black pearls. As she spoke Old Balinese, our meeting required two interpreters. (It took fifteen minutes just to exchange a few honorary words.)

She sat on a small bench, wrapped in a bright batik sari. She did not look directly at me until she asked her first question, which finally babbled its way through the interpreters as: “What is the purpose of your life?”

It seems that when you are a Centenarian Seer, the time for chitchat is minimal.

I tried to explain that my work was intended to help people achieve balance. So, I drew a line in the sand at her feet, with a fulcrum sign under the center. To further visualize my communication, I held my arms straight out, moving back and forth until I became still, when I repeated, “Balance!” She looked at me, laughed, and said in perfect English, “Oh, you mean dead?”

Giggling at my confusion, she then drew a wavy line beneath my line of balance along with a series of cryptographic symbols. The interpreters told me that there was no word in Old Balinese for “balance,” so the closest they could come to in English translation was “Harmony” (and yes, it deserves a capital H). We went back to using Old Balinese-Indonesian-English because the Seer deemed English to be too limited a language in which to express herself. “Everything in nature that is not moving is dead,” she explained. “Like a corpse. Even stones are living. Over time, rocks change shape, size and appearance in their dance with weather.” For the Seer, Harmony meant learning “how to sing your life’s song,” in tune with the events and people around you.

It would be ten years before I truly understood what that old woman was trying to tell me. But then, I’m stuck with thinking in English.

After my first brain surgery in 1996, which I had been told I would likely not survive, I awoke after a 26-hour operation in a room full of medical machines. Had any of them shown a flat, balanced line, I would have been . . . well, dead.

The music and dancing sine waves of those machines brought back the memory-lessons of the Bali wise woman’s description of Harmony that I had been offered a decade earlier.

Unlike balance, Harmony can be achieved–it is, in fact, the natural state of things. In the always changing composition of our lives, Life Harmony means putting down the baton and finding our place in the orchestra; it means we all must learn to improvise so that work, play, difficulty, success, and silence become interwoven in the shifting rhythms of life.

If my readers are interested, I can offer more examples in future Fluid Newsletters. But now it is time for me to be silent, because, as Albert Einstein once said:

“If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.”

August 1, 2006
FLUID NEWS
From
C.W. METCALF

Future Fluid Newsletters will address a number of issues and concerns as they arise, or that I hold in common with my clients/subscribers. We will also welcome your stories and observations, which may be included here.

However, as all of my work emphasizes fluidity and Learning To Be Water, and because I am something of a closet poet, this newsletter contains a piece I wrote after the long recovery following my first brain surgery in 1996. During that period, I was literally inundated with images of water from rain to streams and oceans. In the decade since, I have had another brain surgery, four cancers and attendant difficulties. Through it all the discoveries, which revealed themselves to me in the poem below, have helped me understand that water, which is essential to all of existence, was to be my new teacher.

Trappers Creek

A stream filled with micro-life to small to see. I am standing here nothing less than
a visible collection of those same organisms fluid and yet having forgotten I slowly petrify.

In this place I am reminded of a liquid continuity that knows how to flow around, under, between, over and through all obstacles in our path. This is my retreat and our reminder–Learn to be water. Move naturally without fear, embrace each new obstacle as an opportunity to transform and cleanse.
(Written: November 96)