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From St Kylies (Patron saint of the post modern waster).
I have a strong attachment to the idea of community, but having recently started working with a community of the unwilling – where members through homelessness have to get on with communal living, I’ve smudged some of the lines of my idealised picture. Community can be more picaresque than picturesque and often it doth sucketh.
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Now playing: Matt Nathanson – All We Are
via FoxyTunes
Go to the people
live with them
learn from them
love them
Start with what
they know,
build with what they have…
But with the best leaders
when the work is done, the task accomplished
the people will say….
‘We have done this ourselves.’
Lao Tsu 700BC
Put up at the end of a community development event today.
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Now playing: Peter Gabriel – Book of Love
via FoxyTunes
I’m supposed to be helping several groups think about strategic plans to safeguard their future. There comes a point where you just have to get on with it, and I find myself saying ‘You can’t do everything, but you can do something’ or some such organisational life coaching slogan. And then I found that some expert reckons that around 90% of plans are never implemented, so what’s the point of a plan? Except that thinking that something is doable is important for building confidence for battling with the dragons and finding your way in the dark.
Then I came across this which made me feel that the plan wasn’t the important thing, it was the thought that there was a plan.
“The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland. It began to snow immediately,snowed for two days and the unit did not return. The lieutenant suffered: he had dispatched
his own people to death. But the third day the unit came back. Where had they been? How had they made their way? Yes, they said, we considered ourselves lost and waited for the end. And then one of us found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.
The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps but of the Pyrenees.”
(A story from Miroslav Holub)
