"Despising, for you, the city, thus I turn my back: there is
a world
elsewhere."
...
William
Shakespeare
embodying Coriolanus, The Tragedy Of Coriolanus, Act III, Scene III,
The
Forum
This essay,
A World
Elsewhere,
is the companion piece to
"I can't
believe
what just
happened"
they said to me - shocked, disappointed, upset.
"How
did we
get
here?".
"I got it"
I said, "you and slightly less than seven and a half billion other
people as well, can't
believe
what just
happened.".
For me it was a great opportunity to look at the difference between
what we
believe
and what we like and what we want and what we
expect
and what we prefer will
happen
... and what actually
happens.
That's the direction in which I
intended
to steer the
conversation
ie an
essentialconversation
in the panoply of
conversations for
transformation.
But first I had to find an
opening
to steer it in that direction. Finding an
opening
to steer it in that direction, would require addressing their
listening
ie taking their concerns into account, giving them the sense of
being heard.
There are various
ways
to look at it
turning outthe way
it
turned out
which was so shocking to them, I suggested. They weren't
fully
informed about its impending direction (almost no one was). They
trusted too much that the people who directed it
the way
it went, thought like them, viewed life like them, indeed
viewed people like them. That's almost always
unexamined. We think well of people, we're considerate of people, we
include people, and so we think everyone else does the
same ... and then we're surprised, shocked even, when they don't. I
said I thought that was a useful distinction to make ie that it had
some leverage. I also said I thought that was taking the long
way
around. There are two other distinctions that end up in the same place
but arguably
get
there faster. The thing is both of them require
giving up
more, and they also require being less positional
(listen:
being positional is equally biased when it's being positional
for something, as when it's being positional
against something; you're being equally positional when
you're right, as when you're wrong, yes?).
The second one is
gettingclear
it all
turns outthe way
it
turns outall by itself - just as it's been doing for millennia. And
in spite of our preferences that it should be otherwise, we really
don't have much say in
the way
it
turns out.
What we do have say in, is what
context
we
create
for whatever
way
it
turns out
- in other
words,
what
possibilities
we invent for ourselves and our lives in spite of (not because of)
the way
it
turns out.
Our zeitgeist is filled with countless (if not unlikely)
tales of women and men whose lives represent the highest
human
quality ie who provide inestimable value and
service
to others, both by their
actions
as well as by their inspiration
(Mother Teresa,
Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Dian Fossey, Aung San Suu Kyi,
Nelson Mandela,
the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Sidney Rittenberg, Cesar Chavez,
Oskar Schindler et al on and on and more come to
mind
- to name a few) sometimes in the midst of the most dire if not the
most horrific circumstances.
"And so" I said, "of two things you can be sure: one is whatever
happensnext
is neither going to be as bad as
expected,
and nor is it going to be as good as predicted (you can always
eliminate both those two extremes); and two is (yes I know this may be
hard to hear)
what happened
really won't make much difference either way as long as
it's simply a change in
the way
we do
business
- in which case, it'll just be
more of the same old same
old.".
By that I
mean
if there's no core
transformation
of
who we really are
for ourselves ie if there's no core
transformation
in our
epistemology
of what we
already alwaysconsider
ourselves to be as
human beings,
it'll be "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même
chose", Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr's infamous
French
epigram which is usually translated as "The more things change, the
more they stay the same.". But no kidding!: that's hard to hear,
especially given our ongoing dissatisfaction with the status quo,
whatever it is, while we defensively remain all but
totally ignorant of
who we really are
and our
epistemology
of what we
already alwaysconsider
ourselves to be as
human beings.
It's at
times
like these that
the river
between taking on the
possibility
of
being transformed
or not, seems to be so wide as to relegate its banks not merely to
different
appellations
but to different
worlds
- parallelworlds
maybe, but different
worlds
nonetheless. And ultimately thisworld
ie the same
world
which you
believed
and liked and wanted and
expected
and preferred to
turn out
differently than
the way
it
turned out,
isn't the only
world.
None of this, I told them, is going to go well for you if you don't
get that.
There is a
world
elsewhere. It's not the
world
whose quality is dictated to you by circumstances or by changes or even
by electoral college votes. It's a
world
whose quality is determined purely by what you say - to a
lesser extent by
the way
you say it, but certainly by what you say, indeed by the
mere fact you're endowed with "say-ability" (if you will) in the
first place. It's a
world
over which you have total dominion - always, and
regardless of the circumstances.
That was
enough
for one evening. I didn't want to overwhelm them, so I left it at that
- with a caveat ie with an implied "to be continued ..." -
meaning
"I'll always be available to you later, should you wish to continue this
conversation.".
But actually my
intention
is that they won't need to, that they
got it,
and that it will be
enough.