A World of Relationship

How, then, have we come to this - this throw-away world of sub-contractors and assembly lines? There isn't much that we cherish anymore. We covet things, but we do not cherish them.

When one person builds something from start to finish, manifesting a dream into reality, that person breathes a certain life into it. It may not be life in the biological sense, but if enough personal attention goes into the making of a thing, that thing becomes more than just some inanimate object, useful but distant. It becomes something that someone cares about. And once it is cared about, it will also be cared for.

My Father's House

My father built the house I grew up in. He designed it himself, and he built it with his bare hands. He had help, of course, but only two men, Herman and Louie, men with names, who worked side by side with my father as they built that house up around us. We lived in it even as they worked. They knew us, we knew them, and we all came to know the house as it grew up, so to speak, along with us.

Your life mission is what you stand for. How you choose to express your life mission is where your own unique interests and talents come in.

To be honest, it is unlikely that anyone's life mission is entirely unique in the world. As I write these words today, there are over six billion human beings on this planet, with two or three net additions every second. (That adds up to just under eighty million additional people every year!) With so many people walking around on this earth, I can virtually guaranty you that I am not the only one who stands for the principle of inclusion!

Nonetheless, every single human being is unique. Each of us has our own unique set of interests and talents, developed through a combination of genetics and experience, so that even people sharing the same life mission will most likely express that mission in completely different ways.

The easiest way to see the true breadth of a life mission is by example. In my last post in this series, I mentioned that my own life mission is about inclusion. But what does that mean I am supposed to do, exactly?

That's the beauty of a life mission: I am to do whatever I feel called to do at any given moment. A life mission is not about specific tasks. Ultimately, we are meant to explore and express our life mission in many different ways throughout the entire span of our years.

Announcing Win-Win Web's 100th post!

Ok, ok, it's "really" the 49th post, but I'm in a base 7 mood today.

For those of you who aren't engineers or computer scientists or mathematicians, that's a little math humor for you, offered up to illustrate a point. (The point's worth it, I promise.) Allow me to explain...

Your life mission is at once both narrowly focused and yet sweepingly broad. Think of it as the profound theme that permeates your life.

It’s tempting to think about your life’s mission as though it were a particular career, or at least a particular type of work. People who receive public accolades and media attention for their professional accomplishments often seem to have found their mission in what they do for a living. No one looks at Wayne Dyer or Tony Robbins or Bill Gates and thinks, “Poor guy - if only he could find some direction in life!”

Recognizing your life's mission is not always easy. I can't tell you how many times I have heard people say, "I know I was born on this earth with a specific purpose. I just don't know what it is!" If you have yet to discover your own life's purpose, I'm going to give you a hint: it's a lot broader than you probably realize.

I've been thinking long and hard about this Scavenger Hunt entry from Dwayne Melancon under the "unusual landscape" category. I absolutely love this photograph so I have been determined to use it in the blog, but I haven't quite figured out how to connect it to the philosophy of mutualistic symbiosis. Nonetheless, I have a standing promise to the win-win web readers to create a post out of every scavenger hunt contribution, and as I am particularly fond of this image, I am even more determined to step up to the challenge. So here we go: motorcycles, fruit stands, and mutualistic symbiosis, coming right up...

What strikes me most about this photograph is the contrast of the brightly colored fruit, the flames of the motorcycle, and the red tail light against the gray of the wall, the sidewalk, and the asphalt. The colors pop out of the image to grab one's attention, and it would be easy to allow the conscious mind to stop there in its observation. But pay attention for a few moments to that gray background, and you'll realize that there's a lot going on behind the scene.

Sitting in a church,
listening to my friend’s wife
as she remembers him to us
in our respectful silence.

She tells the story of their first date,
nothing fancy—dinner and a movie,
a slapstick film I don’t remember.
Bill loved that kind of silliness.

He laughed until he cried
while his future wife
eyed him suspiciously.
Slapstick wasn’t her thing.

As the credits rolled he turned to her,
his eyes still gleaming,
his sides still convulsing in giggles.
“Wasn’t that funny???”

Her expression politely stoic,
she shrugged, noncommittal,
and he saw her—truly saw her.
He had a gift for seeing people.

Wiping the tears from his face,
he smothered his laughter
and looked her straight in the eye.
“You’re right, it really wasn’t that funny.”

Standing in the graveyard
the overcast skies
reflect my isolation.
Perfect weather for a funeral.

His family at the grave,
we who worked with him
are scattered by the stones,
unsure of our place.

We pretend a certain friendship,
yet we never touch each other, even here.
Funeral behavior isn’t covered
in the office manual.

My heart cries out as I weep alone.
I reach for solace,
but no one returns my gaze.
Where is our comfort now?

The family’s turn
to bury husband and father—
ceremonious heaps of dirt
lowered onto the coffin.

The shovel is passed
to Bill’s small son,
no more than five years old.
The blade alone outweighs him.

Following their example,
he digs into the soil,
piles on as much as he can lift,
and spins awkwardly toward the grave.

Too late, he realizes his mistake.
A flash of surprise—he loses his balance;
falling in slow motion,
he tilts toward inevitability.

Quick as a wink,
a mother’s sure hand
darts forth to capture a shoulder
and rescues him from disaster.

Standing behind him,
she can not see his face,
but from across the grave
I have a better vantage point.

For one fleeting moment
time stands eternal,
my heart imprinted forever
by his mischievous grin.

As swiftly as it arrived,
it is gone, and I the only witness.
He smothers his amusement
as Bill once smothered his.

But I saw it—Bill’s smile;
even in a graveyard, I saw it,
and Bill and I were laughing
when the sun broke through the clouds.

Between work and a brand new bicycle (save gas—use leg power!) I’ve been away from my blog for several days. I’ve been checking my blog-related e-mail, of course, but there hasn’t been much chatter lately. I fired up my HP this morning only to discover that I had received nothing but junk mail for the third day in a row. The good news is I wasn’t missing much while I was out pedaling around town. The bad news is there wasn’t much at the office to come back to.

I’ve come to expect most business activity to grind to a near halt around the holidays, so I wasn’t especially surprised at the stark November downturn. What’s interesting to me is the level of disappointment I’ve come to associate with an empty in-box. I love receiving mail. It’s that touch of personal correspondence with far away friends or with people I’ve never even met. It’s a few strands of connection every morning with the not-so-virtual world-wide web of humanity. That is, of course, until it stops coming.