Being Here, Now

Said by a participant in Michael’s workshop: “How can I learn to not be not present?”

Presence has flirted with me from time to time, but it sure does play hard to get. My really wonderful high school calculus teacher told me I would never make it through design school; he claimed that I was one of his best students ever at figuring out how to go about solving a problem, but as soon as the solution was in sight I lost interest. In design school I had one of North Carolina’s finest painters for a color class, and on one of the assignments everyone marveled at how well I had rendered my beloved Earth Shoes in acrylic, but then asked why I just quit on addressing the background.

A couple of years later I sat tinkering at a piano – I’ve never had lessons – and figured out how the two hands were to work with each other on Fur Elise. It was tingly, marvelous, but I basically ran away, never to go there again.

In our time together at CPSI I found myself checking in and checking out, once again. Since then I’ve been reading Dialogue, by William Isaacs. (Michael Jones shows up in there from time to time!) Isaacs says that what often gets in the way of dialogue is a tendency to be preoccupied with either the past or the future, at the huge expense of engaging in the present. I’ve often thought Yoda was talking to me and not Luke: “Always your mind somewhere else. Never on where you are, what you are doing.”

Two weeks before CPSI I taught a planning workshop on Russell Ackoff’s Idealized Design. I was struck yet again at his emphasis on developing the design for the present, on what is wanted now. I’m now reading his Redesigning Society, and as he talks about systems, synthesis and analysis, and I’m seeing Isaacs talk about coherence, unfolding and fragmentation…………they’re talking about the same things!