Category: General Learning

I am told that the neurological lifespan of an emotion is 90 seconds. That is to say, the chemical part of it is, well, rather short-lived. Anger. Frustration. Sadness. Joy. Fear. Love.

Think, driving a car and being cut off. Adrenalin rush. The brain, rightfully so, releases chemicals that are intended to give our bodies the ability to protect ourselves, react, and adapt. I don’t know the detail of those chemicals. I’m glad I have friends that are learning that (Teresa Posakony in particular). I do know the chemicals help us to survive. We may get angry, or tense when cut off on the road, but the chemical part of that is highly purposeful.

That’s the cool part, the adaptiveness.

I am also told that if that emotion, the 90 second experience, if fed by a source — an external experience, a person, a thought about the experience, a story, a judgement — can live for a lifetime. Protectiveness from a road experience can create the perceived need for protectiveness throughout a life in all of the unrelated places.

Fascinating, right? The body tricks us into believing that the 90 second experience is one to maintain hyper vigilantly is so many non-related places. Chemical, chemical, chemical.

I have my favorites. Well, not so favorite, but often present emotions. Fear of loss. Fear of an aloneness. To be clear, I’ve done plenty to become more aware of these. But to be honest, they are still there. This is common in us humans.

I don’t think the point is to be emotionless. But there is an awfully big point in becoming more…, updated…, about how emotions work us and how release is possible.

Perhaps, with some discipline, emotions are a temporary sensation. Perhaps, with some discipline, a gateway to keen and needed awareness in a well-rounded individual spiritual being having a human experience.

Just from 90 seconds.

An impressive thing is happening with The Circle Way. It took place in this home over four days last week, Marty’s Place overlooking a part of the Puget Sound on Whidbey Island, Washington.

It may not sound like much, but this impressive thing is a layered and multi-nuanced change that is happening to consciously shift from an effort centered and stewarded by two founders for 20+ years, to a movement stewarded and grown by a network of people for the next, perhaps 20+ years. From the two to the many. It’s about succession, sure. It’s about evolution, yes. It’s about essential attention to integrity and form, yes that too. Make that a double yes. It is about daring to let go, so as to let come.

The founders in this story are Ann Linnea and Christina Baldwin. They are as wise of humans as there are. For 20+ years they have been working to bring the form of meeting that is Circle to contemporary use. Yes, that means remembering an old form that is arguably in our DNA. It is true that at one point in human history, we gathered around the fire because it was essential. For community. For safety. And yes, it also means that in contemporary meeting culture there are more choices for people than information dumping.

The Circle Way is about activating a spirit of purpose together. It is a form to do this, a methodology. I would suggest an essential form.

For four days some of the key people in the network met, those helping to make the essential shift. Twelve of us. In sense-making, and in project planning and accountabilities. To carry us for the next six months. So that we can now go out to our respective places in the world, do our next steps having been lifted together momentarily, and then return again in six months to check-in and make sense of the next steps again.

I love it that we met in the home pictured here. Cooked food together. Tended a fire together. Rolled up our sleeves together. Held each other and this work in much laughter and in a few tears.

It’s impressive to feel and honor home. It’s massively impressive to me to release home into the broader territory on the horizon.

 

In the last few days I have been paying a lot of attention to fire. Literally, in the home that I’m staying in where 12 of us are meeting in relation to The Circle Way. There is a corner fire place in which I’ve placed logs periodically to keep the flame present in our day. When the flame has burned to mere embers, I’ve stuck my face near the fire to blow deep breaths and watch orange embers come back to spontaneous blue, yellow, and white flame. I love fires. They remain, an event to me. A treat.

I’ve also been paying attention to the image of fire keeping, one of the metaphors the 12 of us have invoked together. You see, we are in the complex work of shifting a body of work, Circle, from founders, Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea of PeerSpirit, to a broader network of practitioners, to release the form and practice into another level of scale and service in the world. Whew! It’s a long sentence, but simple in concept.

I woke up remembering this poem by Judy Sorum Brown, an American poet, writer, and change leader who was part of creating the Society for Organizational Learning. It’s a poem I’ve used many times before, but not recently. It’s a solid reminder for any of us working literally and figuratively with fire.

 

FIRE ~ Judy Brown

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.

So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.

A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.

Some things just make me say a genuine out loud, “hmmm?” With my friend and colleague Kinde Nebeker, there is a lot of that. We continue to explore the topic of Evolutionary Leadership. We are developing curriculum. We are adding participative process for workshops. We are searching into the center of what this is. It’s one of those really delightful inquiries that I find myself looking forward to in the day.

One aspect that I found myself noticing this week is how evolution often connotes a natural process that arrives when the time is right. Not “forcing something in to being prematurely.” Rather, when the conditions are prominent enough to require the beginning of a significant shift.  Walking on two feet didn’t happen in the first days of our species. The white peppered moth did not become the black sooty moth overnight.

There is an inevitability to evolution. Because people and species adapt, inherently. Arguably, because a species is born to adapt. In humans, biologically, yes. But also emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. That doesn’t mean that we as humans in the 21st century don’t fight it and resist it sometimes. It doesn’t mean that we don’t try to help a shift arrive before its time. We do that sometimes too. But there is an “already happening” quality to it isn’t there.

In leadership, I wonder what is already happening and inevitably arriving. Like the awareness that we are wiser together rather than alone. Like the procedural choice to convene people and create interaction rather than separation. Like the approaches that welcome not just brain intelligence, but also emotional intelligence and intuitive intelligence.

Ah, there is more. But this is a teaser. A missive of thought-in-progress that continues to intrigue. And points my inquiry to notice and try on the lenses that have me seeing “inevitable arriving” rather than “forcing.” Hmmm?