The driving force behind Recovering
Humanity is a desire to connect some seemingly random dots by being more
aware and showing up emotionally, to generate some goodwill that can contribute
to a meaningful and sustainable basis for coming together around common
interests and goals, to tease out a more intellectually honest and viscerally
rewarding set of understandings, and to articulate a coherent vision for what
we can accomplish. It involves two moves. First, there is a move toward
inhabiting that by which we know ourselves to be human, individually and
collectively. That involves becoming mindful of and fully present to what is
going on around us filtered through an awakened conscience, cherishing and
nurturing what our awareness stirs inside us, even as though it can be
disturbing, responding, and actively engaging. In other words, wake up, show
up, and step up. The second move is to become concerned about efficacy, to do
what we can to promote individual and collective well being, and to pay
attention to the actual results of our efforts.
The common denominator is the heart. From the heart come not
only the inclination to be compassionate and the inspiration for spontaneous
generosity that is ennobling, enriching, and uplifting, but also psychological
attributes that enable us to respond with rugged resolve, audacity, insistence
on good faith participation in win/win solutions, mutual encouragement by which
we bring out the best in each other and replace vicious circles with
sustainable virtuous circles, painstaking attention to detail, adaptive
responsiveness, and perseverance. Our words courage and encourage come from the
French word for heart. To have courage or to be encouraged essentially means to
be heartened. Recovering Humanity is about
finding our hearts and unleashing creativity, confidence, fortitude, and the
capability to respond constructively even though the ever present conflicting
demands from multiple directions take a toll on us. It is easy to be discouraged or disheartened, but if we can look beyond the endemic confusion and rise
above the inevitable clashes, we can bring our highest aspirations into sharp
focus and do what it takes to see them through to their fulfillment.
Our only impediments are our excuses, the blame
games we play, the relentless equivocation and prevarication by which we
deflect attention from the obvious and shift the focus away from what we don’t
want to admit, our attempts to buy our way out of being inconvenienced by
reality and to escape what we know in our hearts, and any of the other
abundant, familiar defense mechanisms we so ingeniously construct, anything
that gets in the way of radical self-actualization, everything we use to hide
from the best that life has to offer, what we fearfully cling to, our favorite
certainties, our core assumptions, our most cherished sources of identity, our
most indispensable beliefs, that which we habitually rely on to provide meaning
and purpose, anything that would prevent us from showing up with our shoelaces
tied, ready for the time of our lives, willing to be transported into
unimaginable possibilities.
In short, it is even more deeply challenging than
we might have initially imagined. We can achieve the kind of personal wellbeing that has been a central concern for
philosophers at least as far back as Aristotle, but “the good life”
(what Aristotle called eudemonia) is
more philosophically and psychologically complicated than having a
happy-go-lucky attitude and following the line of least resistance. It is a
life that is not available to the faint of heart. There is no better life, but
it comes with a price – vulnerability, exposure, risk, and perhaps being
stigmatized with labels like “uncool”, “foolish”, “annoying”, “holier than
thou”, “bleeding heart idealists”, and “dangerous radicals”. Transformational
freedom, latent strengths, and deeper satisfactions beckon, but they will
remain forever out of reach unless we can begin to experience the world around
us with a welcoming spirit, however modest, tentative, and awkward the
willingness to venture out of our cocoons might be. We miss the mark because
our interest, our imagination, our sense of purpose, our passion, and our
thirst for experiences that inspire us have gone to sleep and because we
actively thwart and jettison opportunities directly and indirectly.
