A Southerly Aspect
fresh perspectivefacing the future
Regardless of your personal views of the monarchy, you MUST watch this years David Dimbleby Lecture on the BBC iPlayer. Delivered by HRH Prince of Wales, it should, in all seriousness, be required watching for the world. This man’s destiny was set the day he was born, yet rather than patiently wait to take his seat on the throne, he’s spent the last thirty or so years of his life asking the kind of questions of the world which we all need to be asking. He’s an inspiration. What more might we ask of a future leader?
new challenges, new relationships
There are two types of challenges in the world today. The first are those which happen unannounced, which take us by surprise. I’m sure you won’t have missed the fact that there’s a fairly substantial global financial crisis on the go at the moment and I’m confident that you’ll remember the sharp increases in energy costs that we suffered just less than a year ago. You’ll no doubt be aware of the ‘Baby P’ case and some of the other disturbing incidents which have shook the country recently. Five years ago, it would have been difficult, nigh on impossible, to predict such events. In response, we look for the reasons why and for someone to blame. Then there’s the second type – those which present themselves, but have yet to reveal their true enormity – challenges such as climate change and peak oil. What will our reaction be to these? In the future, who will we blame when these challenges present themselves in the most ferocious of ways? Successive governments? Bank Managers? Social Workers?
It’s been just under three months now since my colleagues and I hung up our hats at the end of the ‘Communities on the Edge’ project. Since then, I’ve been pondering what it is that people will remember of our work and what impact it had on me and the rest of the world. Did we, in our own small way, help to mitigate the effects of any of the challenges mentioned above? A lasting memory of the project for me will be our fantastic event for the landowning sector held at Floors Castle, but what will those who attended recall in the weeks and months to come? The answers to those questions will never fully be known, but I’m confident that our impact was significant and that the relationships which formed between people across some of the most inhospitable barriers have the potential, given time and investment, to grow and last well into the future.
Positive and productive relationships – the kind which lead to action – are built around common interest and shared agenda. These kinds of relationships are built between people who want to build them, not people who are paid to build them – people who thrive in spaces which feel safe and where the skills and talents of all are nurtured. Innovative relationships occur when people are able to meet the people they never thought they needed to meet. They occur across sectoral boundaries and those involved work together for the betterment of all in a culture where looking beyond our own needs is the only way to be able to secure them.
Relationships were key to everything in the COTE project. Without building and maintaining and managing relationships, we’d have achieved very little. I’d hazard a guess that if we’re to find solutions to the challenges I mention above, then the development of new relationships and the renewal of existing ones will go a long way to securing success. In that environment of new, creative and exciting relationships, where we’re presented with countless opportunities and where new solutions to age old problems are found, a culture of shared responsibility will ensure that the question ‘Who will we blame?’ will never be answered.
countdown
Yesterday marked the start of the ten day countdown to me moving into my new house! I say ‘new’, it’s actually been about since 1880, it’s just that it’s new to me – and has lots of new additions like kitchens and bathrooms as well as a few deletions in the form of the odd wall!
After a year of hard work and too much money leaving my bank account, the place is actually starting to feel like home and I can’t wait to get in!
playfulness
To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as if nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with one another, we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for unlimited possibility.
James Carse
new beginnings
Thinking lots today about new beginnings, fresh starts and second chances. 2009 promises its fair share of these for me – I’ll be moving into my new home (at last!) and as of today I’m officially unemployed so I’m hoping a new job will provide all sorts of exciting possibilities!
It’s good to have new starts and clean slates. It’s refreshing and exciting and scary. Wishing you all a glorious new beginning in 2009 with copious lashings of hope on the side.
the glorious sun
If anyone’s struggling to know what to pick up for my Christmas this year then look no further than a subscription to The Sun Magazine. It’s a phenomenal monthly, ad-free publication and I always eagerly await the online publication (see links). The Sun Interview is always a highlight and this month is no exception. Bethany Saltman talks to Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges about religion, the new atheists, war and morality – fantastic stuff! Here’s a wee snippet to tempt you in….
“You trust that the work is worth doing and that it’s helping somewhere, though perhaps evidence of that won’t be apparent in your lifetime. You find self-worth in the ability to stand up and fight back without worrying too much about what you can accomplish. That is part of being human. We’re not God. We have a limited capacity to fight evil. We use the gifts and tools we’ve been given and trust that life is meaningful, even if everything we try to do seems to fail”
Enjoy…
the silent leader?
“The 20th Century has tried to educate out… the heart, it’s educated out the intuitive element and only concentrates on the rational. And that’s crazy I think because look at the problems it’s caused, because at the end of the day that emphasis only on the rational has actually led to the testing of the world to destruction because the impirical outlook can only lead to a situation where you test the world to destruction and you only get the evidence that you’ve destroyed it by the time you’ve destroyed it, and what’s the point in having the evidence then? How do you put it back together again? And that’s what I’ve been trying to explain to people all these years. It’s crazy.
It’s balance, that’s all. Just to reintegrate the lost elements that we need in order to be able to look after this planet”
HRH Prince of Wales
barack
“He came to see me during his first year at Harvard. It was 31 March 1989. I found my desk calendar and I’d written his name with an exclamation point. From the late 1960s, when I began teaching as a professor at Harvard Law School, until the present, there has been no other student whose name I’ve noted in that way.
He impressed me from the beginning as an extraordinary young man. He was obviously brilliant, driven and interested in pursuing ideas with a clear sense that his reasons for being in law school were not to climb some corporate ladder, nor simply to broaden his opportunities, but to go back to the community.
He had a combination of intellectual acumen, open-mindedness, resistance to stereotypical thinking and conventional presuppositions. He also had a willingness to change his mind when new evidence appeared, confidence in his own moral compass and a maturity that obviously came from some combination of his upbringing and earlier experience.
I asked him to be my research assistant, a role he filled for a year and a half. We had a much more vibrant dialogue than one typically has with a research assistant. He was witty, he had a lighthearted touch and even though we were dealing with some pretty grave and weighty subjects, it was always a breezy thing to talk to him.
He had a charismatic quality and was very engaging. Other students gravitated towards him and liked him rather than envying him or wanting to compete with him.
Typically in a place as competitive as Harvard or Yale, one student will make a comment and another student will try and one-up him by saying something cleverer or wittier. But Barack would never put anyone else down. If a student expressed a view he didn’t agree with, he nevertheless saw the value in it and built on it.
He found points of communality and gave people the sense that he could see where they were coming from, and what their core beliefs were, and why they were worthy of respect. It was really a precursor to the way he engages in dialogue across ideological and partisan divisions.
In his second year, he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review [one of the leading law journals in the world]. It was a position which represented the judgment of his peers about his intellectual acumen and his leadership capacities. He emerged with the enthusiastic backing of other students. In no sense was this some kind of affirmative action; he was chosen as the best person people could find.
We used to take long walks on the Charles River in Boston. Our conversations were enormously wide-ranging and enjoyable, about life in general, not just about work. I had no doubt as I got to know him that he had an unlimited future. I didn’t have a clear sense of what direction it would take, but I thought it would be political and I thought the sky was the limit.
He had a personal quality which was transcendent and I continued to feel that way about him each time we met. And the quality he demonstrated that I’ve always been left with more than any other is authenticity.
There isn’t a fibre of phoniness about this guy”
Larry Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard on Barack Obama
the torment of rejection
‘Here are a few things I found out about my parents after I came out to them as a lesbian:
1. They house a tremendous amount of rage.
2. Homophobia can transform loving parents into hateful foes.
3. The promise of heaven, coupled with the fear of hell, dictates their beliefs.
4. Their relationship with their daughter is of little importance compared to their relationship with God.
5. One of the three of us will probably die before I ever see them again.
Sometimes I wonder who came out to whom’
Name Withheld
