Have the large problems facing us as humans gotten so large, complex and irreversible in their momentum that it is too late for us to reverse them or even really understand them?
Has our culture in the States, so strongly shaped by marketing, evolved us into beings who cannot summon the will, fortitude, stamina and patience to take sustained action over a long period of time, which is necessary for resolving these large problems?
Can we in the West do more than “our part,” and instead find a way to act in concerted, collective, effective action? Will we overcome our hyper-individuality?
Will we develop enough courage to stop comparing ourselves to each other and instead honor our particular irreplaceable beauty? Or will we waste our precious lives trying to be someone we cannot possibly be?
In wondering about all this, I’ve found in a new, unexpected and fresh way the centrality of what we are trying to do in coaching. It’s my response to these questions, and is more than anything else an artistic expression that’s meant to draw us into deeper questioning and contact with the energy and resolve to meet them.
What is coaching for you?
It’s odd to say in a public forum like this, but nonetheless I’m in the middle of feeling it as true: that what were up to something huge and very necessary right now.
It’s not that individually we are all that important. It’s more that we are keeping–as my friend Craig so aptly and poetically put it recently–a flame alive and passing it along and along and along until it is a wide enough to bring the necessary light.
How are you doing with keeping the flame alive? Can you see and feel the importance of it?