Heath Bunting's Day Planning

At Interactive Screen this year, I met Heath Bunting, along with a bunch of really inspired folks.
Heath's a retired artist who's artfully living his life. While in Banff, he built a rope swing, got really good at throwing rocks, and joined me on a paddle down the Bow River as well as a hike to Bourgeau Lake. On the hike we talked about his Day Planning approach and I downloaded his little book. I highly recommend grabbing it.

http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=31

He makes a great point that if you plan your day and execute effectively, you can spend more time the way you intend, "A day plan can be used to ring fence time and place for personal pleasure and growth." Isn't that much better than a work To Do list as long as your thigh?

What I really like is that Heath encourages thinking about the landmark or locations where you want to be, as well as the actions. Something that makes huge sense in the mountains where I live, is having a day plan for good weather and one for bad.

The location thing is great because certain places evoke certain actions and moods. Mapping the locations and your movement through them helps to make the day seem real before you execute it, and helps pre-experience what your intention will deliver. Try it! Map out what you want to do, and get to it.

Red and Pink Day with Tessa

My 5-year old neighbour has become my new best friend. She came over a few days ago and I couldn't play with her as I was deep into something. So I suggested that we plan a play date the next day. We themed it Red Day--all items worn, ingested, used, needed to be red.

I was so excited that night as I purchased strawberries, watermelon, red-berry juice, and strawberry wafer cookies for us to munch on! The next day, while Tessa was taking her big sister to school, I ran over to her house and drew a big chalk arrow on the sidewalk to my house along with the words, "Tessa, go here for fun...keep going....almost there....turn here..." Well, imagine the fun we had!

We went hunting for beavers on the Bow River, threw rocks in the river for the dog, paddled across an estuary in the kayak for a picnic only to get our boots sucked off our feet by the shoreline's mud monsters. So we turned around later eating lunch while sitting riverside on top of the red table cloth we threw over top the giant Flat Rock before searching for signs of fairies using magic fairy dust my mom sent me a couple years ago. Fantastic! We had a blast.

It's soooooo important to have recess.

Vanity

I've been re reading The Valkyries by Paulo Coelho. I visited his blog today and he asked for submissions about the up side of Vanity. It got me thinking. This is the comment that I left on his blog:

30 years ago, while in high school, my vanity gave me an inflated sense of my worth. I had mistaken my self to be more important, greater than my friendship with a gentle, shy girl who had befriended me on my first day.

I publicly betrayed her and hurt her with unkind words. And I felt smaller, not larger as I had expected. I shrank before the eyes of my classmates, and my soul shriveled like an over-dried fig.

In that moment, I found something I had missed, that became my greatest friendship: Empathy. Without Vanity, I might have never found Empathy.

Bouge!

Some friends are at the stage that they are wondering, "What now? What's next?" A couple have been fretting on this for a long time but only looking under the odd rock to see if their life purpose could be hiding there.

As my dad once told me, "You'll never figure out what you want to do sitting in that chair. You've got to get out and try things, see what you love and hate, and go from there." Or as the French say, “Bouge Toi!”

As a fashion editor shared when I showed up with a modeling book, a design portfolio, a photography portfolio, and an illustration book hoping she'd help me choose my path, "I won't tell you which to pick, but I can tell you to choose one. Do it till it's not fun anymore, then pick the next thing." She went on, "I'm 35. I've already had 5 careers and hope to have 5 more before I stop." Great advice. I'm doing NONE of those things now--although I've explored them all.

In the same way, it's hard to extend your self knowledge if you are looking each day at the same artifacts of who you are. Get off the chair, get curious, go try something new. Get into motion. You never know what you'll find. Like Doon Wilkins says, "Get stumbling." Expecting to KNOW FOR CERTAIN before exploring, is unrealistic.

Infamous Sun Tzu says, if you don't know yourself, it doesn't matter if you know the terrain and the opponent, you'll lose every time. In this "battle" for purpose for your life, you must know your Self. See him/her through different lenses by thinking AND doing.

Don't wait until you can find "The Perfect Thing". Get in motion toward Some Thing. That way your muscles will be strong and ready to spring when you see the Next Thing. Along the way, you may just find some clues pointing towards Your Thing.

Papery thoughts

My new friend Genevieve sent me some wild one-page paper cut outs by Peter Callesen.

They are magical aren’t they? So simple. It’s what isn’t shown that defines the object as the object itself. I was thinking that this is so true of many things. It’s the ultimate irony.

In accounting for example. It can be very creative. Things, like profits, that aren’t even there can appear. Debts, disappear.

In what people say, “Oh I don’t mean to be critical but...” Or worse, “I’m the kind of person who is very direct.” And then they aren’t.

Compassionate Warrior

Yesterday I talked about Aikido the martial art with the main tenet that you “fight so that no one will lose”--this means even your opponent. The founder, Morihei Ueshiba had trained legions of martial forces for decades, but then he had several Visions--the mystical kind which change everything.

In his book, The Art of Peace”, he talks about how these visions caused him to shift his training program so that the primary skill of a warrior became compassion.

Now, “compassionate warrior” is a hard thing to get one’s brain around. I’ve been thinking for years about how that applies in the real world. The Dalai Lama is the best example of this I suppose. When the Chinese were on the offensive, he left Tibet. He could have chosen to fight (and get slaughtered). But he avoided the conflict. And says that the Chinese afford him his best learning opportunity.

When I was in the Edmonton airport one day, I spotted a buddhist monk who was traveling. I asked his permission to pose a question, “How is a warrior compassionate?”

He replied, “Whenever you take up a position, you spend all your energy defending that position. Do not take a position” Think about that for a sec. How often have we wasted energy defending a position that wasn’t worth it? Is it ever worth it?

The obvious answer is “of course” like if someone’s trying to hurt your mother or steal your baby. But maybe it’s in the stolid nature of taking a position that there’s a clue. In Aikido, they talk about being like “silk in the wind” and “breaking an opponent’s sword” so he/she can’t be hurt. This is an interesting Entering into the opponents world. Their world and my world are the same.

Think how different this is from the War on Terror. That’s taking a position and posture. It could have been so different. I felt the world yearning for Bush to take a different position when maybe a choice would have been to be more compassionate. More fluid.

What if Peace was a verb? Not an end state to be fought for then defended. But rather a way of being. A way of living.

Life is less conflict ridden with compassion as its goal. One tough part is becoming compassionate before the others in your world. I mean if a neighbor wants to bash you over the head with a rock and steal your food...or shoot you because he didn’t like the look you gave him or the way you voted...

The Bible includes “the meek shall inherit the earth”, and “the peace makers are the children of God.” Not a bad guide for civil society. How do we get There from Here?

Aiki Principles

I Love Wikipedia! I just zoomed over there to look up the genus of “irony” and found featured on the home page the history of Aiki Jujitsu the martial art I practiced! It’s rare to ever find references to it. Since moving to a new city, I have been missing my Sensei, Ric Cameron. He knows so much about the history and principles of the art as well as the practice.

Being “poor student” I have not retained nearly as much as I would have liked about the art. Takeda Sokaku innovated Aiki JuJitsu just prior to the turn of the 20th century. The Ju Jitsu part is mostly about joint locks and bone crunching techniques. But where things get interesting is in the Aiki part.

This quote* from Sokaku’s son Tokimuni, “Aiki is to pull when you are pushed, and to push when you are pulled. It is the spirit of slowness and speed, of harmonizing your movement with your opponent's ki. Its opposite, kiai, is to push to the limit, while aiki never resists.” (Read about my conversation with a buddhist monk tomorrow for more on this idea).

Aiki Jujitsu greatly influenced Aikido founded by Morihei Ueshiba. My life continues to be informed by Aikido’s main precept which is: “to fight so that no one will lose”. I admire the wisdom inherent in that phrase. The philosophy behind Aikido is that of the skilled warrior first being compassionate.

Wow. Imagine that! How would global conflict change if our warriors’ first skill were compassion?

I see corporations moving to this stance of fighting so that no one will lose. Instead of Competition being the main driver, Cooperation and Collaboration is emerging. Instead of “us against them”, there is “us with them” mentality that is more pervasive. The Gen X’ers have insisted--in fact they would say “Us IS Them”. And Boomers looking for more meaning in their lives are searching for a new alignment of the personal and meaningful with corporate vision and mission.

(Except maybe in broadcasting and online video distribution)/


* = Pranin, Stanley (1996). Daito-ryu Aikijujutsu: Conversations with Daito-ryu Masters. Tokyo: Aiki News. ISBN 4900586188.