Elinor saw a boat. We were a few miles from the river and surrounded by trees. How could she possibly see a boat? She has good eyes, but I don’t believe she has x-ray vision.

Not wanting to discourage her by simply stating she was wrong, I tried to explain why she could not possibly see a boat. I explained that boats need water so they can move around properly. Satisfied with my explanation the exchange ended and we both moved on.

Later, as I reflected on the exchange, I realized that I had offered an incomplete truth. It is true that boats need water to work best, but they are not always on water. Boats can be washed ashore, boats can be hauled around on a trailer, and of course boats can be seen in our imaginations.

Being okay with incompleteness has always been a challenge for me. I like easy to understand, hard facts, that I can sink my mental teeth into. I like it when something is clearly and fully explained. And I continue to seek it in all things.

It is this search that has lead me into philosophy, and this search that has occasionally lead me to madness. All of the most interesting things in life are incomplete. Furthermore, they will likely always be incomplete.

When it comes to the human body, mind and spirit our explanations are often incompletely. And there in lays the challenge and what appears to be the lies. The overlooked assumption of completeness. When someone offers you their theory on the meaning of life it encompasses what they have considered and excludes what they have ignored. We tend to operate this way because truly encompassing the ‘all’ of these great mysteries is daunting at best and impossible at worst.

This is even true on science and physics. When describing large bodies from a baseball to a planet there is a theory that works for that, newton’s laws of motion. You can calculate gravitational pull and other factors with his equation and laws… But they are incomplete. And when you travel down to the molecular level they completely fall apart and we’ve developed additional models to try to explain how they operate. But they don’t work when you scale up again. They are all incomplete.

So while it is frustrating for me to struggle with the great mysteries and their incompleteness. My struggle for completeness is also part of the driving force that keeps me searching and seeking.  And with that thought in mind I am aware of the blessing of incompleteness. If everything was explained and correctly understood there would be no joy left in the search. So I make peace with incompleteness while at the same time embracing the drive that it provides.

The important things in life are all incomplete…

As time passes friends gather around and greet each other with friendly and quiet joy. Elated but respectful to the man in the gray wool cap with the long gray goatee. He sits to the side of the cafe like a minstrel of old, guitar in hand and singing out stories of love gone awry or moments of insanity (crazy for loving you). People talk gently, sharing thoughts of compassion and connection, always with one ear to the music reverberating through the room.

Rain falls outside in it’s relentless assault on the dirt and grime lining the streets of San Francisco. A frequent reminder sounds outside as the rolling tires of passing cars rip the water from it’s resting place throwing up rooster tails into the air behind them.

I sit in my chosen corner. Observing, thinking, reflecting, applauding. What a charmed life I lead. How gifted I feel when I have a moment of reprieve to reflect on the situation that is my life and can be aware of it’s content and not it’s crisis.

Thank you to the universe for my situation and shift. The blessing of the moment of awareness. The gratitude I have in this moment compensates for so many moments of feeling lost and abandoned. The chance to see the world as it is, and not as it was perceived.

I am certain I will lose prospective once more when I leave my moment of reflection and return to my life of immersion. I can only hope that as I document this I can use this to remind myself that I am truly blessed.

Namaste,

Kevin

When I was a young man I didn’t care much for history. It didn’t have much value for me. Why do we have to remember all these names and dates? Why do we remember this person, and not another?

I always appreciate the warnings about not forgetting history to avoid repeating it… But it seems like bogus wisdom. No matter how much history we remember the cycles always repeat. Good and evil always play their game of tug-o-war with the average folk caught in the middle.

As I age and become more familiar with my mortality, I am starting to get it. Slowly. And I have come to appreciate more the stories from our past. (Though I’m still not clicking with geneology, sorry mom).

As I walked to the bus in San Francisco on Monday, a walrus caught my eye. There is a mural along the side of a bank building with a string of walruses (or is that walri?)

In my youth I would have walked by and ignored it. But my mind, building on the value of memorial, triggered me to go back and investigate.

There is a placard to the bottom right that tells about the building and it’s walrus string. It turns out the building is over 100 years old, built after the 1906 quake destroyed the original. And before the original was built there this was probably a short area of sand. This location was a block from the beach before landfill projects filled in and stretched the land another 1/2 mile into the water. That project traces back to the 1850s. Imagine, gold money from the 49ers probably funded the landfill!

Found history is much more fun than forced history. This felt like a discovery instead of a requirement. And I was delighted to realize as I continued my walk to the bus that I would have been under water 160 years ago (give or take a few).

History is random in its remembrances. When the artists carved these walrus heads did they have any idea that they would still stand over 100 years later? The names of the carvers are long forgotten. But today, I took notice and my world was impacted more than 100 years later.

There is no way to guarantee your legacy. There is no way to know what you will be remembered for, or if you will be forgotten. But remember that the work and interactions you perform today, may, be around for another 100 years. Your name may be forgotten, but your impact will not.

Namaste,

Kevin

around:

200 Battery St
San Francisco, CA  94111
United States

Let me start by saying, you are all leaders. It’s not that this blog is elitist. And it’s not that you are each CEO’s and leaders of industry. It comes from the fact that you all care about the direction the world is going, and you’re conscientiously making an effort to understand and improve yourself to be the change that you want to see in the world.

That is leadership.

When you set out to find your own path, you are leading, simply because, you are no longer following.

When you lead in this manner you won’t always see your followers. You won’t always see your impact. But it is there and it is powerful. As surely as a wake of air ripples out behind a jumbo jet, it is very hard so see, but when the wind hits you, it’s impossible to deny.

So it is in this spirit of speaking to leaders that I share my quote of the week:

Our job as leaders isn’t always to teach something new. But it is mainly to remind people of something they already know.

People don’t always need to hear the new and novel. All too often, in this modern world, everybody has heard everything that the world offers to them. But they haven’t thought through it all. There are ideas in their minds that have been seeded, but not fertilized. There are thoughts that have not yet been processed. And in that, lays the value of a repeated message.

One of my favorite movie quotes comes from the movie ‘Twelve Monkeys’ with Bruce Willis. This movie involves time travel, and at one point in the movie Bruce Willis’ character (James Cole) finds himself sitting in the same theatre movie as he watched as a young boy. After watching part of the movie he looks at his companion and says ” The movie never changes — it can’t change — but everytime you see it, it seems to be different because you’re different — you notice different things.” I often paraphrase this when sharing with others “The movie hasn’t changed, but I have…”

And in this concept comes the value of repeated lessons. Each time a story or an idea is repeated to us we can process some subtle input that eluded us before. This can be the result of concentration or perhaps a side benefit of life experience. But whatever the reason, as we change so does our ability to learn and process different aspects of the lessons around us.

So approaching the world as leaders, don’t be afraid to repeat yourself. Don’t feel like the slowest person in the class when you approach an old book and read it for the 3rd or 10th time. Don’t be surprised if the mundane world that you walk through today, where nothing ever seems to change, offers you a new exciting lesson that you never saw before.

Namaste,

Kevin