Remembering Our Connections…

Our connections. Networks. My time in Denmark.

Thirty years ago, I went to Denmark for a year and lived with the Jorgensen family…and this past weekend, I returned to visit them and see some good friends…

My family had changed, both through marriage, birth and death, but I was oddly surprised at how much we all remained the same. I mean it seems obvious that the core parts of who we were would remain, and yet I also felt a degree of relief that we could simply drop back in and enjoy each other, and share our lives again…

The town had also changed a bit, some new housing on the outskirts and all, but where we used to live above my Dad’s hardware store was the same…

and, thankfully…

…so was the neighborhood bar!

My friends, Lisbeth and Niels, and their son, Jacob, hammed it up for me in front of the old drinking hole…(it was their daughter, Mille, who tracked me down on the Internet and reconnected us!)…

and when we went inside I could easily remember the cold, rainy Danish nights we spent drinking and talking and smoking; living, basically, and connecting with eachother, our neighbors and through each of us, to the larger world beyond.

It is not hugely deep nor insightful, but after spending a weekend re-connecting with my Danish family and good friends, I was really struck by the level of deep connection we each share—and how easy it is to move through one’s life forgetting that very real fact.

Rafting on the River

In my mind, I thought of my Danish family and friends often and it seemed like they were there, just around the bend in the river, but i was floating on a different raft now, off in new currents—looking ahead.

It is all too easy to forget that upriver, above our current rapids and behind our present swirls, we remain part of lives and communities we have touched as we move along and forward. We stay linked and a part of things that went before and still live just around the next turn of the river.

When I watch the disaster in Pakistan or New Orleans or the Tsunami events of last year, it is very hard for me to imagine these people on TV as being strangers—they are too real and their lives too close to my own. Through the Internet, we can see and learn about their communities and lives. I can hop on a plane this morning and (allowing for some time changes!) step into a new world in the afternoon, meeting these same people should I choose to… One simply can’t help but wonder at how incredible it is to be a part of the Whole.

Do the Captains Know The River?

Yet, when we listen to most CEOs and managers, when you hear the captains of industry, most would have us believe we can divide the world into employees and management; shareholders and “others”; us and them.

And it’s not just companies…when you assess the performance of capital, it is an FROI for a fund, but with little mention of externalities of value that stand just beyond—yet fully connected to—our metrics and measures of capital performance and return.

We are seemingly able to divide our selves, our firms and our capital from eachother—But that is not the case.

Our efforts to do so and seeming unflappable belief that it is correct to act as if we are separate from each other is just one more example of how, confronted with truths that are beyond our current capacities to think, act and manage, we parse and snip and eliminate in order to get reality down to something we can handle and understand—we speak more in terms of companies than communities and nations than world, and in doing so cut ourselves off from the ultimate “bigness” of our lives;

We eliminate opportunity and promise in favor of the four bullets that can fit on a powerpoint slide and the few thoughts we can balance in our brain as we run from meeting to meeting and day to day—-all too often ignoring the reality that it all adds up to not simply one (our individual) life, but rather our all having lived and been a part of the larger world and eacthother’s life experiences.

Now, i’m not doing a stupid, “We are the the World” group hug here or anything…

and, again, I don’t pretend this is in any way new or particulary deep…

Yet, I think we should pause more often to remember people in our lives, and to reach out to re-connect with those who have passed on the shoreline…

And we should try to remember our communities—while separated by culture and continents—are in the end, a single community.

Returning to our lives and organizations,

working in our own sphere,

we will then be all the more effective and sound in the decisions we make for moving forward, since we will have re-affirmed the truth that when we decide for each of us as individuals, we are actually making decisions that affect us all.