It was either life or
my parents
(I'm not exactly sure which - it was probably a bit of both) who taught
me that people are important, that relationships with people are
important, and that if I got rich, it would be less to the degree that
I had accumulated a lot of stuff, and more to the degree that I was
trusted and loved
by my Self
and by the people in my life.
My mother
served in the local community.
My father
was a doctor, a
brilliant
diagnostician who served his patients. So I was raised in an
environment of service which, like air to the bird and water to the
fish, I wasn't always fully aware of or appreciative of.
It was a grand lesson. And somehow I mislearned a critical part of it.
For years (if not for
decades)
I assumed that the way I was raised, was the way all
people were raised, and that that was the way life on
the planet
worked for everyone. For the longest time, I labored under that gross
misconception to the degree that it kept me out of synch with (if not
at odds with) the way life on
the planet
really worked, and with the way people for the most part really are.
Soon after
I encountered Werner
and
experienced his work
for the first time, I began to confront this discrepancy / this
mismatch in the way I was being with life and with people, as opposed
to the way they were being with me. It slowly occurred to me that
transformation is actually not well known by most people. That's the
fact of the matter. I saw (I began to let in) that to act as if
transformation is known by most people, was pure naïveté on
my part, and that interacting with people as if it were, was
much worse than simple naïveté. I slowly began 'fessing up
to the enormity and extent of this misconception.
Transformation is simple, but
it isn't easy. If
transformation were easy, the whole world would be transformed by
now.
And since there was little likelihood that people who hadn't
experienced
Werner's work
would suddenly flip a switch and meet me at the confluence of
transformation and life in
the real world,
I realized it was up to me to generate a way / be in a way that made
transformed conversations available to them so that they didn't have to
(that the onus wasn't on them to), and to give up chastising (running a
racket on) them for not bringing it forth by themselves as
if they were withholding it
deliberately.
I don't know why some people bridge that gap, and others don't. It's
often said that some are called to, and others aren't. But
as for who are called and who aren't (in other words, as
for the defining quality that those who are called, have), I've often
attributed that to grace. We all have that quality / we all have
grace like a possibility. All human beings are endowed with it /
are imbued with it. Yet only some of us will elect to make it a
centerpiece in our lives. Generating transformed conversations is an
act of grace. Why some will do it and some won't, why some do and some
don't, is one of the
mysteries
of life.
In the end, what grace comes down to is having the
intention
and the willingness to source transformed conversations in
the world.
And now watch: all our transformed conversations won't change a thing.
Rather, they bring forth a new realm of possibility into the ordinary
good ol' regular conversations you and I are already having in our day
to day lives in one way or another anyway, without really (dare I say
consciously?) being fully
present
in them. And that's a critical distinction: transformed conversations
don't change anything - rather, they transform ie they bring something
newly possible to what's already there.
