Why I need a compassionate network

We live in an addictive culture of repeating cycles of violence and war. We have all been traumatized as victims and witnesses, or as perpetrators, which is even more traumatizing. We want peace, and yet the inner work necessary to manifest the outer peace is much more difficult than we ever anticipated.

Why? Our culture has provided us with infinite varieties of denial, distraction, and delusion. Finding our way through this fog requires support for the process of letting go of the familiar, and leaping into the unknown. We need a map and consistent pathway beacons, friends who remind us of the big picture, accept our wanderings, and celebrate our mileposts.

My analysis of the peace movement: it has been too goal-oriented, task-oriented, and doomed to comparison of itself to other great achievements. The struggle has pushed the goal away. I have observed of myself and other peace-builders that we regularly create the illusion that we are the only ones doing the really important work, that nobody else seems to care or support what we are doing, and that we are martyrs to the cause, an enormously impossible task which we will heroically endure anyway.

I find myself having to back off, relax, go with the flow, and humble myself again and again. I am one 6-billionth of an entire organism that is dissolving and re-creating itself in unpredictable directions every day. We are all (humanity) learning, and learning extremely rapidly in the context of long-term history. We are sailing on the winds of change, we are not creating the wind. Our task is to sense the wind and catch it with the set of our sails, as the crew of the good ship, Mother Earth.

If we are to strive to do anything, I would focus our attention on the resilient survivor leadership model. Given the difficulty that most people seem to have currently in making decisions about what actions to take, I am going to guess that the pressure to make decisions is only going to increase, and the importance of leadership that models sanity will become acute. The strength of detached playfulness in this situation is that it opens the door to the much-needed creativity and resilience that is within us, and simultaneously opens the door for those around us.