What do we want badly enough: Invest and Pursue

August 29, 2011 Leave a comment

Photo by: Beorange

What do I want badly enough to invest in pursuing it—in spite of the obstacles and competing claims on my time and attention, in spite of the risks and the guarantees of uncertainty, in spite of the risk of rejection and the possibility of failure?

I have asked this question for a couple of weeks running. I offered a few thoughts from a Barbara Kingsolver quote to get the conversation started: “elementary kindness…enough to eat, enough to go around… the possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.


Gibrán Rivera chimed in with “I want life at the intersection of love and freedom, I want the sort of inter-subjective enlightenment that manifests as a more evolve ‘we,’ a collective awakening that maximizes our autonomy while bringing us closer together. Yes – this basic kindness is at the very heart of it.”

Curtis Ogden extended the thought about “Life at the intersection of love and freedom,” by adding “ ‘a profound sense of belonging and becoming,’ of being deeply rooted in my animal body and sensory experiences of the world, my kinship with others, human and other, and to have tasted the deepest of what I have to bring to the others and our shared and inter-dependent reality through the creative expression of my gifts.”

Kindness. Sufficiency. Fairness. Love. Freedom. Belonging. Becoming. Embodiedness. Interdependence.

What would you add to the list? What do you want badly enough to pursue?

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