I love Sundays. Setting aside that it’s laundry day (lol), Sundays represent a day of rest and family and love to me. I guess it is from my upbringing that I get this feeling about Sundays. I tend to feel pollyannic on Sundays. Like if every day was a Sunday the world would be a better place. I once was involved in a team building exercise (over the course of 20 years of working in corporate America you do this several times in different ways according to what comes around at that time) that was different than any I had been involved in before. This was the team building concept behind the McCarthy’s “The Core Protocols”. I actually went through their BootCamp twice. The second time as a coach to a new team. It was not until that second time that I was blessed to be in a team that “got it”.
The Core Protocols work toward building a team that is committed to achieving Greatness. (No, this is not a commercial, I am just explaining the concept so you can follow the story.) Greatness is a fairly amorphous term…and I believe that was intentional. Each team must come up with their own definition of what Greatness is, and then the final project is to conceptually show what achieving that definition of Greatness would be like. Being an engineer who likes to stick with numbers and objectives, it is hard to get into the creative mindset of thinking this way for me.
I remember in that second BootCamp at one point our team was stuck and really not clicking. We went out and set under a big tree in a nearby children’s park and started talking about what we would think the world would be like if the entire world achieved this undefined “Greatness”. The talk went from everybody having every they need (not necessary want, but just basic needs) to everybody being honest and finally, collectively, we agreed that if everybody just loved each other the way they love themselves that would eliminate greed that exploits, dishonesty, violence, etc. We weren’t talking about a “socialized” world, but about a world where nobody would, well…basically crap on anybody else. Because it’s pretty hard to achieve Greatness in your own life if you’re busy all day shoveling someone else’s shit off your head…to be blunt.
Wowzer…our answer came down to the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Pretty neat.
Our conceptualization of this came down to a short play in which we had various headstones each having a commonly perceived “evil” of society on it. War, Addiction, Theft, Death, etc. And at each one of these headstones a very short enactment of that particular dark side of society was conducted. For addiction a man shooting heroine. For war a battle scene. For theft a mugging. For death, a homeless woman with her child dying in her arms and a doctor just walking by without assisting. Throughout the short play one man is seen walking through each of these scenes and viewing the atrocities of society as they take place. He wanders over to a large canvas we had collectively created that showed the world without these evils. It showed the world in Greatness.
After seeing the “right world” he walked over to the doctor and led him back to the dying child and silently pointed to the world as it should be. The doctor picked up the child and exited with her in his arms. The mother then walked to the scene of the drug addict and embraced him and starting talking to him. He then went to the next scene and righted something there and so on…each scene passing it forward.
I was not in this play because I was a coach and it was the team’s responsibility to conceptualize what they had defined as Greatness. As I stood in the sound booth and watched it, I was overcome with something….not sure what. Pride that these people had together conceptualized what the world should be. Sadness that the world was not that way. Hopeful that maybe someday…someday.
I leave you for this Sunday with one of my long-held favorite quotes…
The day will come when after harnessing the ether,
the winds, the tides, gravitation,
we shall harness for God the energies of love.
And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world,
man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Tielhard de Chardin
HAVE A LOVED-FILLED SUNDAY!
Valhall.
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