This work. . .

Ken Kraybill, training specialist and Director with the Center for Social Innovation and and co-director of t3,  wrote the following.

This work. . .

exhilarating

and exhausting

drives me up a wall

and opens doors I never imagined

lays bare a wide range of emotions

yet leaves me feeling numb beyond belief

provides tremendous satisfaction

and leaves me feeling profoundly helpless

evokes genuine empathy

and provides a fearsome intolerance within me

puts me in touch with deep suffeirng

and points me tworard greater wholeness

brings me face to face with many poverties

and enriches me enoucnter by encournter

renews my hope

and dealves me grasping for faith

enables me to envision a future

but with no ability to control it

breaks me apart emotionally

and breaks me open spiritually

leaves me wounded

and heals me

Discovery, Progress & Imagination

Walter Isaacson just published a new biography on Albert Einstein, Einstein: His Life and Universe.

Likely a must-read.

Isaacson is CEO for the Aspen Institute and a member of the Board of Tulane University. During a presentation at the university back in March, he said this about Einstein:

"His slow ability to learn how to talk meant he thought in pictures. He thought in images. He thought imaginatively. All the great Einstein breakthroughs are not done by really hard applications of hard mathematical equations but by imaginative thought experiments."

It works this way in every field, it seems to me.

Progress occurs, breakthroughs happen when people are allowed to see new visions, dream new dreams, work on new ways of looking at old problems and experiment with their understanding of reality.

While there may be security in the "hard math" approach, advances come when we allow ourselves and our partners to "see" the future and its ever expanding possibilities.