Getting The Blood Flowing

Up Early and Writing - It is "The Work"

This was the first thing that came up on my radar. It was on frequent repeat in the office of Web500 A/S up on the 7th floor of Nansensgade 19 in Copenhagen, Denmark during the creation of the award-winning online help for our .NET-based Web Content Management System. If it wasn’t for John Swymer’s skill as a technical writer and the choices that I made about how we would build it, we wouldn’t have taken the Award of Merit in the 2002 European Technical Publication Competition given in December of that year in Paris, France.

Sadly, by that time, the fortunes of the company were ebbing as we weren’t selling enough of our killer software to remain in business and I had already been set at my liberty, having “architected” myself out of a job, so to speak. I call it a success, however. I had been given a three-year work visa to come over and give the company an American voice online and abroad. I’d traveled in 2001 to CEBIT in Hannover Germany, the largest technology exposition in the world and identified all the competitors I could find, getting them to demo their products and had brought the intelligence back. It was a grand adventure.

In the one thing leads to another department, I can see in hindsight how everything leads up to this day. It’s just like any other day that has ever been.

In a short time, I’ll get over to Q and Connecticut NW here in DC and start setting up Daily Provisions for the coming day. I’ll man the register after making sure that the front of the house is properly set up. Should be fun. I’ll be keeping my:

This is all part of “the Work” in the sense of the Fourth Way. Staying awake and aware of all of the things that make people’s experiences worth the coin in coming in and moving the needle in a positive direction for this cafe/restaurant fusion. It’s a third space where people set up and work for hours. It’s a joy to get to know the regulars and weave the thread of my life into theirs although the touch is tangential.

Shifting the focus as my blood is now moving and my thoughts are crashing into each other, on break yesterday, I received a text from a young father south of here whose wife; the mother of their five-month old son, is apparently having some difficulties. He was, at the time, at his wit’s end. It is hard to be helpful from a distance, but I did the best I could. We all need to be supported as we move from dawn to dusk and back again. I think we forget that.

Mor broadly, I believe that we are geared to believe ourselves to be independent. We view asking for help to be against everything that we learn as we come up in this society and yet so many need help. A dream I had last night surfaced, I was witnessing a young man being tortured by an authority figure. I didn’t know what to do so did nothing but watched, but another onlooker shouted at the individual doing the violence to this person to stop. I then felt that I could join my voice with his.

The dream melted into another without resolving.

I’ve written extensively on these topics in the past. Particularly important is that we recognize our power. The Everyday Junglist wrote on this subject a few days ago and I’ll amplify his signal through the noise now:

How Much Power Do You Really Have?

Even as we are more powerful than we believe we are, we still need to ask for help from time to time which is why wrote this some time ago:

Part of the help that I am offering and have been offered by those who have gone on before me is this published a few days ago about an event that happened on the last Sunday in June somewhere out in the Midwest:

The ripple effects that emanate when we are willing to ask for help, as my friend out there did, are hard to quantify. If anyone picks up my signal; picks up what I’m laying down, that is one more mind that might have been influenced. It’s likely that we will leave a mark that way from forming our impressions. Often, we need to be shown:

”A wizard should know better!” - Treebeard intones as he has been steered past Isengarde while carrying the two hobbits to safety. If you don’t know the story, the Ents, shepherds of the forests, had voted to weather the events of Middle Earth as they always had and not get involved. However, once they were shown what had happened to the trees of the forests near Isengarde, they had risen up.

I believe that it’s time for us to be the guardians of all life on the planet and have written a number of essays on this subject since last June or July when it struck me that we, collectively, might have our purpose here as a species on earth with the ability to manipulate so much of our environment so thoroughly, we might become good stewards of the resources that support all life. We’ve been doing a poor job lately as we’ve gotten our feet under us. Since 1750 or so, we’ve used our technology to scar the planet for our own selfish ends, in other words. It’s time to adopt what I call “radical utilitarianism” and optimize our activity for all life and not just ourselves.

To take this essay back to where I started, we might feel independent, we might feel as if we are not intertwined with everything, but we are wrong. We might feel powerless, but, as my friends essay above indicates, we are wrong about that too.

We ought to be awake and aware. We ought to shock ourselves into a realization of just what power rests in our hands. We ought to recognize that whether we are conscious of it or not, we are:

Leaving a mark has some really good material within it. I hope more than a few of you will read it, if you haven’t already.

I’ll wrap up this morning’s essay and get myself dressed for work now. Let me hear from you. Use your voice!

I am so happy whenever I get to amplify Patti Smith through the echoing halls of cyberspace. On May 24, her daughter, Jesse Paris Smith was good enough to amplify mine:

Companion Thoughts for a Rainy Mind

Let’s all work to be the change we want to see in the world. As I often say, if not us, who? If not now, when?

Onward!

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