Talking Notes

A few summers ago, I had the opportunity to take a three-day one-on-one coaching experience. It was intense. For eight hours a day for three days straight, I unpacked, and thankfully re-packed my life. In the unpacking, I encountered streams of momentum that I had found myself in that I was battling. I didn’t want them, and yet I didn’t really know how to change them. Frankly, I hadn’t had language, time, or space, to identify them clearly enough before this moment. It was a hard realization. There were aspects of my life that had been and were continually being fueled by momentum in directions that had been good once, but no longer. Now I was tasked with dealing with that momentum to instigate a different way of doing things.

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Almost a year-and-a-half ago I began meeting with a small group of folks. We had gathered with the express intent to explore a particular speech by Jesus, commonly known as the Sermon on the Mount. We gave ourselves a long time to go through the three chapters found in the book of the Matthew. We met once every two weeks. We worked through the three chapters a few lines at a time. During our time together we would consider the text (reading it out loud to one another), our own lives (sharing any relevant context), and what we were seeing or hearing amid the conversation (responding to the moment together). During our time apart we would take up the study of the next small section. It was during one such time apart that I was struck by a possibility…

Related Links

* The Sermon on the Mount

* Tap On Mallorca (tap dance festival)

* the Sagrada Familia

* Jesus claims to the be the way, the truth, and the life.

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I have a habit. Whenever something is not working, I try to take it apart, look at all the parts, see if I can see what isn’t working, and then make the necessary adjustments to get things to work. I do this all the time in Tap Dance Land. If a step isn’t working, I take is apart. I check the movement, rhythm, and sounds for errors – places in which what I’m aiming for and what is happening aren’t lining up. There is a temptation here that I often succumb to. I can get wrapped up in the details, instead of focusing the thing I really am aiming for – a full and complete vision of the step as a whole. The step, then, is the basic unit of analysis.

Related Links:

* Spiritual Formation for Artists Course

* Rising to the Tap (Theatrical Show)

* Identity (Documentary Film)

* My TED Talk on Labels

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In the upper room, in his final moments with his friends, Jesus decided that he would wash their feet. This was a gesture full of symbolism. He, having been their teacher and leader, would take the position of a servant. In doing so, Jesus worked to continue to undermine the stereotypical ideas of teachers and leaders that would often come to mind for his friends. The recounting of this moment, found in the book of John is often used for this purpose – to help us rethink the nature of leadership. However, this week I've been thinking about another aspect of the story...taking part with one another.

Related Links

* Read the whole story in the book of John.

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This past week I’ve been struggling. Publicly you likely wouldn’t notice it. That’s part of the deal, isn’t it? Keep producing content in the manner and aesthetic that you’ve come to be known for over time and keep the internal struggles to yourself. It is the way of achievement-orientation. There is an analog in Tap Dance Land, oddly enough. Executing the most regular of rhythms – imagine a series of evenly spaced notes – requires a physical engagement that feels more like a rollercoaster than the anticipated series of evenly spaced movements would let on. The evenness of the outcome is belied by the frenetic work needed to bring the step to life. What if there was a different way?

Related Links

* Identity

* What We Leave Behind

* Rising to the Tap

* Spiritual Formation for Artists

* My Weekly Step

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In continuing this journey of cross-learning, if you will, it may seem that I’m going a little further beyond my scope of knowledge. After all, time and space are the areas of specialty for those pursuing metaphysics. Maybe others, too, the spiritualists among us, but not tap dancers. Without bringing up any number of valid defenses now, I’ll just say this: I’m venturing here hoping to work out some connections that I’ve experienced. Namely, how our perception of time may deeply change how we see the world.

Related Links:

* A framework about Time

* A note about training

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In the past few weeks I’ve been exploring connections between seemingly unconnected areas of life – oral traditions and organizations and the arts and who we are. This week the connection is a little more obvious, although I find it to be still quite profound. I’ll let you be the final judge of that. In today’s note, I’m exploring the deep connection between how we understand choice, and what we think we can, could, or should do.

Related Links

* My first experience with severe burnout

* From the letter the Corinthians, a statement.

* A question about really good people.

* The experience of being with.

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The arts – heightened expressions that ignite our senses through a multitude of mediums – are something of a wonder. The decision to pursue an artistic craft is often deeply inspired, filled with challenges and hope, and rarely easy. The pursuit itself is filled with choices. At every stage of development – from being grafted into a tradition, discovering how our voice interacts with each medium, and forging a path forward with our craft of choice in and outside of the market – there are choices that we make. One of the more important choices that we make is in identifying the purpose we want our art to serve.

This week we dive into one way the arts can be used.

Related Links:

* Adjusting choices through training

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Ted Levy was the first to teach me to use things I saw in world around me (like exposed pipes) to inspire what I could find in Tap Dance Land. If a set of pipes could inspire a tap dance step, what kind of dancing could come from other areas of inspiration? What other kinds of connections could be possible?

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to attempt to draw out some of the connections I’ve experienced and experimented with in my journey. If they ring true for you, I’d love to know. I’m beginning with a connection between oral traditions and organizations.

RELATED LINKS

* The Broadway show, Noise/Funk

* A note about 2 bars

* Seth Gobin’s TED TALK about Tribes

* Simon Sinek’s description of infinite games.

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Improvisation can be seen as the fountain of creativity. After all, when someone improvises, new things are just coming out of them like an endless flow of inspiration. What we don’t see are the hours upon hours of training that an improviser goes through, immersing themselves in their respective crafts. This week we talk about what those hours might look like.

Related Links:

* 10,000 to mastery recently debunked.

* Share your answers to the questions at the end of the episode with me here.

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