‘Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift’. Mary Oliver, poet.
They say Autumn is the season of the sticks, but the sticks are always there. Most are off there in the trees, harmless; some we step on, and break as we go; and some we are hit with; turns out every season is the season of the sticks.
George Orwell couldn’t have written the book ‘Down and out in Paris and London’ unless he had been. Adversity often brings out the fire in people: from Socrates to Van Gogh to Dostoevsky to Beethoven to DH Lawrence to Franklin Roosevelt to Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela and Dickens and Ghandi and Joni Mitchell: Shakespeare’s slings and arrows of outrageous fortune were both the spark and the fuel to their spirit.
We don’t instinctively search for adversity, of course – Kerouac’s bold life choice aside – but that doesn’t make it a less potent catalyst.
Albert Einstein may have said, ‘It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer’. By which he meant that the thing is to keep focus and keep going. Values help with that. Chew on this question: What are your three or four most important values?
Some of mine are to stand up, to do what I say I’ll do, and to try to help other people – at least I aspire to those. Being human means frequently coming up short. And going again. I don’t give up.
This much I know:
1. Actions become habits, and habits become character. And with character we can change the world. Even if it is just in a small way, we all have a duty to try to do that.
2. Leadership is about people, not process. Unless we can do it on your own – and mostly we can’t – we have to have people with us, or we have nothing.
Now, where are those sticks …
