I am indebted to Palmer Kelly who inspired this conversation.
The perfect writing is when I disappear after I've written it, leaving
people with their experience of you.
It's an awesome experience,
moving
to observe, this experiencing people experiencing
who they really are.
In this regard, some things
work
and others don't. Beyond the conversation, beyond the introduction to
the possibility,
what works
is exemplifying it. If you're really being
who you really are,
it shows. It leaves a trail. There are clues. There are tell
tale signs. There's enthusiasm, responsibility, alacrity, listening,
and
breakthroughs
as normalcy. And then there's also velocity.
With particular regard to the tell tale sign of velocity, you've taken
out all the stops. You're pedal to the metal. You've breached
all the barriers. On your speedometer, "full steam ahead" is the
slowest setting there is. Indeed it may even be the
only setting there is. It's inspiring. Anyone observing
the pace at which
you work
knows they'd be exhausted working at half your velocity.
Until it's
seen to be believed,
working at your velocity isn't even possible. And once gotten, even if
the thought of working at your velocity is exhausting, being exhausted
in thiscontext
is inspiring.
<aside>
That's powerful: the mere thought of working at your
velocity, while exhausting, is inspiring ...
<un-aside>
Whereas others talk about
retiring, you're
investing every available second in making a difference.
You've gotten the next few decades of your life laid out in fifteen
minute increments, most of which are already scheduled and
accounted for. You're also flexible enough to turn on a
dime and go in a totally new direction when it's called for.
You've organized yourself with every possible encumbrance, barrier,
and hindrance to your creativity out of the way. Your entire life
demonstratesfull on creativity requires no down time. It's this
demonstration
alone for which there's really no counter-argument. It's this
demonstration
alone which most often comes clear out of left field as a
sudden jarring reminder just when I've begun to buy into
my limiting, constraining beliefs about what's possible for
performance.
Where you
lay new track
is wherever you are whenever you're being creative, which is
24 / 7 / 365
(perhaps that should be
"25 / 8 / 366").
Creativity surges from you sweep aside all the trivia, all the
business as usual,
all the yesterday's news in it's path, leaving in its wake
alignment, clarity, new openings, new possibilities, new opportunities,
and powerful new thoughts which haven't been thought before.
But it's not a wild tornado, this unbridled creativity of yours. It's
no
runaway
out of control
egotistical
indulgence, this vortex of
Self
expression which renders me stunned as it
inexorably
reminds me of my own creativity which I've neglected and steadily
tamped down over the course of my life to the point where I sometimes
forget I have it at all. No, this tornado is
tempered, elegantly managed, carefully applied and meticulously
monitored for the benefit of anyone and everyone who has the good
fortune to come across it.
adjective
from the verb
temper
(REDUCE)
to make something less strong, extreme, etc
<unquote>
There's a rich analogy I could get into with "to heat then cool a
metal in order to make it hard" which is what it is to temper
metal, the point of which would be this: tempering metal is managing it
to
transform
it. Tempering a tornado, the life force, is managing it to
transform
it. At the same time, tempering a tornado to make it less
extreme allows its considerable power to be harnessed. In
this analogy my life is a tornado.
What attracts me is the possibility
who you are
makes available. It's the possibility, with regard to my life, of
tempering the tornado. So I'm both the tornado ... AND ...
I'm its temper-er. And the way you make available to me the
possibility of tempering the tornado of my life is by being a
tempered tornado.
Then you disappear, leaving me with my experience of my
Self.