Walk Your Talk | Life-Built Poems

boy on a messy couch playing with a tape measure

MEASURE WHAT MATTERS (Shaper Challenge)

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Okay, listen up all you Achievement Junkies: Measurement matters! Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve heard it all before: “Measurement drives improvement,” it says here, and we’ve got an array of metrics that can measure just about anything…. We can measure how far, how long, how big, how high, how wide, how deep, how many and on and on and on. We can measure anything and everything and we’ve got the numbers and comparisons and indicators to prove it. Yup! Insights on…

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BLESSING FROM AN ELDER (Pete Seeger)

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There once walked a gentle, funny, and very stubborn man, a musician who believed passionately in the power of people singing together out loud. It was his skill to induce crowds of friends and strangers to join their voices together and create transcendent harmonies that lifted up the people’s hearts and spirits and set the world to shining for a while, cloaked in visions of belonging, of unity, and of peace. With his long-necked five-stringed banjos, his 12-stringed guitars, and…

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CHECK YOUR FILTERS: Roadmaps and Story

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The thing about living your life as a poem or a story or any other kind of art is that there’s got to be a theme to the thing. (It’s one of the rules, according to grade school English and art teachers when it comes to analyzing some bit of self-expression.) This online dictionary I am looking at tells me that a theme is “an idea that recurs or pervades a work of art or literature.” It’s how you make…

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TRANSMUTE THE ANGER TRIFECTA (Another IPS)

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Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): an understanding that anger energy can be used to unify rather than divide. [Anger is a wake-up call, a signal that change is needed. If you can respect other people’s ways of dancing while working towards making room to do your own dance, the anger can lead to more understanding, communication, and caring. Not easy, but doable….] Three ‘R’s make up the Anger Trifecta: Resentment, Rage, and Regret. We all know that. And almost every…

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OTHER VOICES: Grace Iwashita Taylor

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New Zealand’s Grace Iwashita-Taylor is a Shaper and a poet. She lives her life as a single mother, as a loving daughter trying to deal with the realities and challenges of her beloved mother’s decline into dementia and as a youth worker in a place that is one of the most expensive places to live on the planet. She is also an award-winning spoken word and published poet, playwright, and performer. The poet’s upu (words) circle around and around the…

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LEGACY-SCHMEGACY, KEEP ON WALKING

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Lately I keep tripping over people who are either “building a legacy” or are trying to convince me that I should be doing one too. It’s beginning to make me all kinds of grumpy. These strangers are telling me that my life will only have “meaning” if I do stuff that will somehow “impact the future” after I’m long-gone. That one makes me scratch my head. It’s even a bit intimidating. Me, I’m still walking towards my dream and I’m…

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BEYOND STUFF-LOVE (PART 6): WAYFARING

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I didn’t get it; really, I didn’t. It took a long time, but finally a light dawned. The whole pseudo-argument about Life being a “journey” rather than a “destination” is a crock. I mean, think about it. How can you have a “journey” without having a “destination?” It’s sort of a package deal. If you’re a tourist yearning to go traveling, you’ve got all kinds of professionals – a whole industry — trying to help you find a way to…

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A MASTER’S JOURNEY: Jim Olson

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The process-oriented mindset is one of several styles of moving to the beat of your own passion. Another name for it is “mastery.” One of the best breakdowns of the requirements and outcomes of pursuing “mastery” is the one the celebrated art curator Sarah Lewis delineates in her book, THE RISE: Creativity, the Gift of Failure and the Search for Mastery. This 2014 book is a fascinating exploration of the constant pursuit of excellence that is pretty much what distinguishes…

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TRAIN YOURSELF TO CLIMB OUT OF THAT BOX

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Who has NOT heard it? If you want to be creative, the ubiquitous They tell us, you have to “think outside of the box.” The only problem is, it takes a different mindset to get out of that other-people-imposed box than our more usual ones. It makes sense that you do need to train yourself to climb or crawl out of that box in the same way that you train yourself to do some sort of physical discipline or other…

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YES-BOOK VS NO-BOOK (Un-Seeing Exercise)

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Poets give each other weird gifts. About ten or so years ago, a friend of mine gifted me with a chewy metaphor that I’ve gnawed on for a while now. He said he thought that, at birth, every person got issued two infinitely expandable notebooks. He said one of the books was a YES-book and the other was a NO-book. I imagined them to be like the kind I use for making my journals but with automatic pages or something…

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