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From "Connected (with Abe + Isaac) — Volume 40"
Good morning (?), friends. :) A tune for you: only love will save this place. Recommended listening, as you make your way here.
Hopeful eyes
… are mine, today. Eyes that are actively seeking the light in what they perceive, that take the light and call it wonderful, that take the dark and call it a meaningful part of the path. Eyes that appreciate. Eyes that are not ignorant of the alternative, eyes that know how to criticize, but eyes that have chosen not to. I am looking with an eye for what may be built, from here.
We, Abe and me, have found a ton of mileage lately in bringing conversations down to the core desires in play. The sequence typically runs like this:
A proposal lands on the table that someone finds confusing, or upsetting, or unsettling, or what have you.
Operating under the theory that it’s always the specifics that are points of friction, we open up the proposal and figure out what the core desire is. (Example: Maybe the proposal was to fly to Thailand tomorrow. Maybe the core desire is to express freedom of time.)
We have yet to find a core desire to which everyone else involved can’t find an earnest/honest connection. Core desires are simple, and human. With the core desire on the table, and with everyone finding their way to access empathy therein, we then rebuild the specificity. (Example: Maybe the core desire is freedom of time. Maybe we cancel everything for the next two days and fly a friend in.)
Putting it more concisely, yet expanding slightly for clarity, we have:
Putting forward something specific
Experiencing resistance to the specificity
Uncovering the core desire beneath the specificity
Discovering empathy via the core desire
Rebuilding specificity together, creating a direction we all feel naturally connected to
This is hope in action, for me. Hope is a gentle choice—it’s that space where we at once carry a yielding spirit, but still are expressing choice, dammit. Hope receives whatever is, accepting it fully, and it anticipates the good that is yet to be revealed. And in doing so, hope invites the good forward. Gently, safely. Hope is not so far up the emotional scale that it alienates the discouraged. Hope is not so far removed from disappointment that the two cannot speak. Hope sees the light in your eyes, even if your truth feels hard to speak or hard to trust. Hope will hold you, until you know yourself again.
In relationship, hope is how we build. In this, we afford each other the safety to put an experimental foot forward, to see how it lands—and if we pull that foot back to reconsider, we do so because it wasn’t about the specifics of that particular movement, it was about a desire to move. And movement we can redesign as much as we need to until it feels right, sounds right, is right. We move together, full of hope, and the hope gives us room to play.
Hopeful eyes. :)
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