An overflowing calendar, courses, dinner dates, fitness, driving the kids to their activities, reading to them, helping them with their homework, visiting parents, and on and on…
Sounds familiar?
And this: an increasing number of companies are fighting for their survival. The tension in organisations is noticeably increasing. Workload is rising. Many of my friends have been working longer hours for the same or sometimes even less income; myself included.
My friend Ralph recently shared an episode of VPRO’s Tegenlicht: ‘Free Money; a basic income for everyone’. (Interesting topic, by the way; sounds good to me). He mentioned the word ‘survival mode’. And that really hit me. Since then, I keep hearing about that concept. I seem to be alert to it. I’m feeling it myself too: Yes, I’m happy. But also: I’m running from one thing to the next, without really giving enough attention to any of them. Whether it is my own partner or kids who want to do something with me, or my mother, who is calling again, or that dear friend that needs a sympathetic ear. It often ends with: “I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to you soon…”
It just so happened that I had some extra time to mull these things over during the past two months. I thought: How, as a society, have we come to be in this survival mode? And closer to home: how can I get myself out of survival mode? For me personally, the key is in something Martin Luther King once said: ‘The biggest and most important question in life is: what do you do for others?’
That seemed like a good starting point to me. So I asked myself some questions:
What if the survival of our planet was my highest priority? What if I were to think: what kind of footprint do I want to leave behind? What can I contribute? What if I stop thinking: ‘Who am I to think that what I do matters? There are so many people who have much more influence than I do.” Or: ‘I have to pay my mortgage, which, incidentally is higher than the value of my home.’ If I can let go of that, what concrete step could I take tomorrow?
This morning, as I tore a page off my calendar, I noticed an ad for the book Buddhist Bootcamp. ‘Cool name,’ I thought. ‘Ideal for people with very little time,’ it said. Timber Hawkeye makes the Buddhist insights acceptable to us, ‘to the corporate world’, as he himself puts it.
I’ve lately been thinking of ideas to do something similar. The call for more creativity and innovation in our society and in organizations is getting stronger. Economist Marcel Canoy from the TV program Free Money places it in the heart of our future. As that which is desperately needed for our survival. With that we can make the difference, together. And that is exactly what I believe. And I happen to understand what is needed for it.
So, how about I just start doing it tomorrow: help individuals and organizations discover how easy it really is to draw on our own existing sources to become more creative and innovative? What do you think? Go for it?
