City dumps

There is a strike on and garbage is piling up in the parks.

I am disappointed that this is happening in my city.

Feeding my spirit

I have had three different Palm Pilot PDA's over the course of years, and my experience with them has been that they die after about two years of use. I rely heavily on my PDA and I take it with me practically everywhere I go. I use it to keep my schedule and my contact list at my fingertips, and I use it to jot down ideas that I come up with while they're still fresh in my mind.

My previous PDA was a Palm TX. Recently I have noticed that its battery won't hold a charge any more. I would plug it in overnight so it would charge and the next day I would turn it on and it would tell me that the battery level was still low. So I have been without a functioning PDA for some three to four weeks - not good!

Last week I bought a "new" old Palm through craigslist. It's a Palm m515 - a step up from the first unit that I had. It's functional, and it was cheap compared to the cost of today's smart phones.

While I was in the process of syncing it for the first time, I came across some notes and scenes that I had written for Mission: Dawn. I looked over some of them and found that I still liked what I had written.

So I've become all fired up about writing my books again. I started Mission: Dawn four years ago and to date I've got three partially written chapters. I started That Warrior Spirit and to date I've got three completed chapters in first draft form.

Writing a book has been a life-long ambition for me. It goes back to my first visit to the public library when I came away from seeing all those books on display and said, "Wow! When I grow up I'm going to write a book!" (See The Written Word ). Well, maybe I'm not done growing up yet - but why let that stop me!

I sometimes find it hard to justify taking the time to work on one of my books when I have a business to run. For me, writing a book (or more) is something that falls into the quadrant of Important But Not Urgent. I have no deadline pressing me to write. However, by not working on it I'm starting to feel like I'm starving my spirit. Having two incomplete books on my list has become one of my tolerances, and I'm starting to feel like it's sapping my energy.

So here is what I am going to do about it. I'm making it one of my SMART goals. Between now and end of September, I'm putting in two writing sessions a week into my schedule, each session up to two hours, and I'll be using those sessions to advance my progress on both books.

Perspective of a year

What a difference in perspective a year and a half can make. A year and a half ago I broke off my four year relationship with J. I felt frustrated and disappointed, and after I left I felt grief and a sense of loss.

Only half a year before the break up we had travelled together to Vancouver and Seattle to attend the Twenty First Century Leadership workshop. We had both taken lots of pictures and shot lots of video and done lots of journaling during that trip, and I had a vision of bringing all that content together to make a travel videologue. I hadn't got a good start at that project when I broke up with her, and a year and a half ago if I looked at any of the images from that trip I felt depressed. They reminded me of failure.

Today I look at those videos and I remember with pleasure and fondness that trip. I am looking at those videos now because I have decided I will make that documentary after all, as a portfolio project for my business if nothing else.

J and I have become friends again. One of the tenets of leadership that 21CL teaches is that as a leader I tell myself the truth. I frequently ask myself, "What am I pretending not to know?" I know what were our relational dynamics that often led to the fights we had. I know that she behaves in certain ways and I know that I have a choice in how I respond. I know that if I respond in the way I would naturally respond, then that leads to the same kind of friction that neither one of us enjoyed in the past. For me to continue to respond in the same way that I used to is to pretend that I don't know what I really do know, about her and about how we relate.

Seeds or bouquet?

I was flipping through a book that Fede showed me, titled Jesus CEO. One chapter caught my attention. It's titled He Prized the Seed Rather than the Bouquet. The chapter begins by asking the reader this question, "Which would you rather have, a bouquet of flowers or a packet of seeds?" Most people would pick the bouquet. I know that it was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the question, until I thought about it a little more.

After reading the chapter I thought it would be a good exercise to bring to one of my men's team meetings. I've asked Fede to think about coming up with an exercise based on this idea to next week's meeting.

What choices are represented by the packet of seeds? For me, the answer is growth. Inviting guests to our team meetings - those are the seeds.