That’s what we’re typically looking for and need to know when we ask something.
Here’s the catch (literally):
We must juggle a sentence.
We have to tow a paragraph.
But we can hold a word.
Everything is pointing towards more and more of less and less.
That is your job.
Wherever you are.
You are here to be what connects us to the unconnected.
Without you we would not have known, seen, tasted, experienced, or maybe even conceived whatever you brought our way.
Somewhere in you there’s a light. It could be in your head, in your eyes, in your gut, or in your chest.
Wherever it may be is irrelevant.
Just let it shine.
You are our middle man and we need to be shown the way.
…what they’re really saying is that you have a knack for the unnoticed.
They’re also saying you have an ear that hears what the rest of us don’t.
You connect unrelated dots.
You read the line, between the line, and the next line. Simultaneously.
You shine and the mirrors that reflect your shine spin-off enlightenment…for us…and for your joy. Joy swap.
Or as Antoine de Saint Exupéry once said, “Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
I think we see the soul when we see your heart in your eyes.
Leadership is letting another see with those eyes.
Soul > The Rulebook.
I found an excerpt over the weekend from a letter that Albert Einstein wrote to his eleven year old son in 1915. At that time Einstein was thirty-six. He wrote…
…I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal. . . .
There’s a lot of beauty unfolding here in these words. For one, Einstein is promoting the creative. Could it be that we learn more while our imagination is decoding the world around us then we do reading what has already been decoded? Secondly, he asks his son to shelf the sheet music and get lost in and with the keys of the piano. What romance there is in the three-step waltz of work, art, and possibility. And lastly, Einstein reveres time. He’s aware of just how holy it is and how today is all that is confirmed in our stories.
Of course we can’t always accomplish such a feat, but what a worthy goal of our days to enter into moments where we fully pursue our art, our parenting, our leading, and our serving with such holiness that we lose track of time, but walk away with a vault of codes as to how things are.
LTMP.
You, hopefully, get an answer to act on.
You get a chance to respond and it’s your response that will be the building blocks of your legacy.
Once you know how, when, and why to serve someone you’ve just been given the master-key to two joys: theirs and yours.
The truth sleeps in questions.
You’re here to wake it up.
Ashton.Gustafson 