The dance of ME and WE

Where are your places of practice? Who is your community?

Back in 2008 I was part of a conference hosting team in Takayama, Japan. We were invited by the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA), the forerunner of the International Association of Facilitators, to host the different parts of the then UN development agenda.

I remember they were all negatively phrased and the set I co-facilitated for four days was called Disconnection & Barriers to Engagement. On the first day our sign fell off the wall and would not stay up until we changed it to Connection & Engagement. (Whew! What a relief!)

What most sticks in my mind was a small Appreciative Inquiry conversation we offered around these topics. Everyone paired up and we had one group of three -- two young women and a young man.

 The two women came back from the conversation saying: "We need to get connected and then we get engaged." The young man said: "I need to get engaged, then I get connected."

There is a a very deep truth here about the multiple ways it takes to build understanding, connection and mutual engagement for a purpose. (It might also have something to say about the masculine and feminine, but I leave that up to you!)

Whatever it takes.... just start there

I realised that it is not important that everyone start at the same place, what is important is that connection and engagement happen.  They are vital for any transformation to take place. That's what makes storytelling so important, because that's exactly what story does.

The final harvest from our week of work in Japan was so very beautiful and simple that it has stayed with me ever since -- When ME and WE are beautiful reflections of each other (and we had drawn a picture as if ME was standing by the waterside and WE was its reflection in the water), then we will have connection and engagement.

Simple, but oh so not easy. 

If you ask me what's up on the planet right now, I'd say -- at the root level -- we are in the dance of rebalancing ME and WE.

There are places on our planet where ME is overriding WE in a greedy run at snatching resources and controlling societal behaviour. There are places where WE is so constricting that ME offers the ultimate sacrifice -- people think it honourable to die at the desk from overwork. There are places in every society where WE doesn't involve a group we think of as not-ME, therefore an "other" we can (mis)treat as some kind of inferior being.

And the very worst of all? 

A WE that doesn't include the Earth or any of her inhabitants or a WE community of Earth inhabitants somehow doesn't include ME. This perspective creates human beings who have somehow fallen out of the web of life. At one end of the continuum they take no responsibility for behaviours that negatively impact all of life, in the middle they are numbing themselves or are asleep, and at the other end they are suffering from lack of meaning, disconnection and loneliness.

Essentially this means as a human race, most of us have decided to live in a horror story instead of a love story. WHY? Especially when we can choose it to be different.

At the very end of the Japanese conference I found someone who could translate for me. Written Japanese, like Chinese, is a pictorial language. Each symbol is a composite of stories. That's why I find it so fascinating.

When I asked my Japanese friend for the story meaning of the Kanji for what is commonly translated as "community", he paused for a moment, and then said: "The place where I am most myself."

I've repeatedly experienced this manifesting during April. Read more about that here.

Let's work to make it so. For everyone.