DZUKANI: Online book (one chapter per week) Chapter 2 "What really matters?"

If you missed chapter one you can find it here...

Chapter two

What really matters?

In chapter one, it was suggested that the meaning of life was something along the lines of:

To participate in the joyful act of creation and to do so in shared consciousness with all that is

Of course, this is just my personal expression – and its not the way I would always express it. You too, will have your own way of expressing this meaning. I shall never forget a deep conversation I had many years ago with my good friend Phil Clothier when he was CEO of Barrett Values Centre. He summed up my many words with just one, love.

Activity

Listen to Rupert Spira describe that love is not a relationship, rather it is the collapse of relationship and the reality of unity consciousness.

https://youtu.be/i7MWC_arOsM

Interestingly, when I read my own words, they could easily provide one definition of love, though that was not my intention.

Having got this far, we might assume there is no more to be written but I believe there is huge merit in delving deeper. If love, or the above description of it, or your description of it, is our purpose and the meaning of life, what else is there to know or do?

I come back to some of the things we began to discuss in the first chapter. In fact, the whole of this book will be a journey of deeper and deeper exploration. 

Activity

The day after writing this chapter at home during the Coronavirus lockdown of 2020, a friend posted this video on Facebook. In it, we hear the letter written by Albert Einstein to his daughter on the power of love. His words totally resonated for me and I hope they do for you too. Take this six-minute timeout and make some notes about your feelings. 

https://youtu.be/uilk-wlfpS0

Purpose – a loving response to our context

So the basics are this, our purpose and that of any life form is a loving response to our context, and our context is simply the universe in which we live. I say universe because limiting our context just to this world would simply be too narrow a focus for some people. Think of the astronomers or astronauts who feel a call to explore the depths of space or visit the moon. 

Plurality of purpose

Now if this all seems too big, fortunately there is no cause for concern. Each one of us has a different personality and history that will prompt us to be curious about and attend to a manageable number of aspects of our context. Notice also, that I am referring to purpose in the plural. In my experience it is rare for someone to have a singular purpose. The blend is whatever it is. And we will return to explore this deeper in later chapters.

The conscious assessment of our personal priorities

At this stage it is simply good to recognise that our context will draw our attention to a number of priorities. Our conscious intelligence gives us opportunity to notice this, appraise it and understand it. Are we spreading our consciousness too thinly on too many aspects of life or conversely on too few?

My previous books were “Designing the purposeful organization” and “Designing the purposeful world”. This book could easily be “Designing the purposeful life”. And who knows, by the time it is published, that may be so.

So, coming back to “what really matters”, this seems a good place to fully explore our context in order to determine those aspects of it that we will give priority to at this point in our lives – in recognition that these priorities are likely to shift with the passage of time.

Activity

One way of doing this might be to take a personal values assessment such as the one available free of charge at www.valuescentre.com/pva. This is something I will mention again when we take a deeper dive into who we are in a later chapter.

Purely as an example, I offer my own list of what really matters to me and why, in order of priority, so you can understand the logic of this exercise. Note that this is a list I have attended to consciously for the last twenty years or so. It has been fed by numerous values assessments and programmes of personal development. 

1.    Love (or consciousness or spirit) is my top priority. This is because I understand it to be my eternal nature, worthy of the utmost attention and understanding for the benefit of myself and others. All my other priorities are in fact subsets of this priority.

2.    Vitality (or health or wellbeing) is my second priority. It is high on my list because I realise that I cannot be effective in my other priorities without it.

3.    Family (including friends and colleagues) is my third priority. On a day to day basis, this may shift and feel like my top priority. But I equally recognise it to be the mortal playing out of Love, energised by my own Vitality. If I neglect Love and Vitality, I become unable to attend to and enjoy my family and friends.

4.    Future generations is my fourth priority. I care deeply about the world in which we live (so I could easily have labelled this priority as “Life on Earth”) and the future generations that will attend to it. Right now I feel deep compassion for people in generations to come, including my children and grandchildren and care for them as my loved ones and as stewards of our planet. This priority particularly plays out in the work I do in sustainability and climate change.

5.    Purposeful leadership is my fifth priority. This is my personal strength, specialism and obsession. Apart from Love, it is the topic that naturally receives my highest attention and I have been blessed with personal strengths of thought, writing, speaking, facilitation and coaching which serve this priority. It is fifth in my list because I see this priority as being in service of future generations.

6.    Adventure is my sixth priority. My whole life has been a fabulous adventure. I have worked and travelled all over the world and this has enriched my perspective of life on earth. I have worked with and met amazing people in all walks of life and enjoy discovering what makes them tick. When life ceases to be an adventure, it will be time to “see what’s next”. Whilst adventure is my delight, it is lower down my list as it tends to be a consequence of my other priorities, rather than an intention in its own right.

7.    Creativity feeds my soul. In writing this, I recognise that creativity plays out in all my priorities and in my definition of the very meaning of life. But here, I use it as a heading for the painting, poetry and music that I love to create and enjoy. Like adventure, it is lower down the list because my whole life is creative and my higher priorities will somewhat satisfy this need, even if I don’t get chance to practice my arts.

8.    Financial independence only made it on to my priorities list about ten years ago when it dawned on me that this would enable me to choose the work I do in life without being overly concerned about how the bills would get paid and where our next meals might come from.  Since making it a priority, it has provided freedom to be authentically me.

This could easily be regarded as a list of my values, but listed in this way, you will notice that it blends values with beliefs and rationale. I use this list, or versions of it, for all my life and career planning, year by year. It keeps me focused. Note that it is “multi-purposeful”. When I get ideas to do something, it gives me a sense-check by enabling me to ask which priority the idea might be supporting – or indeed detracting from.

Activity 

Anyway, this book is not about me, it is about you and those you love and do life with. Take time compile your own list of priorities, using mine as an example if you wish or do so in whatever style and format makes sense to you.

Now compare your list to the statement at the end of the last chapter and the beginning of this one. To what extent does your list put you “in love” with life? Does it feel like a “joyful act of creation”? And is it something you feel able to do in connection with others – or to put it another way, “in shared consciousness with all that is”?

When you examine your list, notice how much (or little) of it is to do with you personally. The more I contemplate my own priorities, the more I realise that this isn’t about “me”. And, the more I “do life” with others, the more my personal sense of self fades and my joined up sense of connection and consciousness with others becomes profound. As my personal years roll by, I progressively feel the feelings of others and of the world as a whole. Those who have heard me speak at conferences will probably have noticed me holding back the tears when I speak of the needs and suffering of people and our ecosystem or indeed of the amazing accomplishments of individuals or organisations in service of a better world.

This has been a deliberately brief chapter. I hope that, in contemplating what is important to you, you have drawn closer to your own meaning of life and feel ready to delve even deeper still.

Chapter review

1.    What are the three most powerful insights you will take away from this chapter?

2.    What are the three most powerful questions you will continue to explore?

3.    What would you like me to explore with you as I continue to write this book?

I would be delighted to hear from you with your responses to these questions.

In the next chapter, I will be asking the next big question, “Who are we?”

 Join me online for an informal conversation on this second topic

If you'd like to join me for an hour on Zoom for an informal conversation about this second chapter at 1400 UK time on Monday 18 May, just click this link to register.

Footnote

I'll be publishing a chapter on Linked In each week for eight weeks. As I do, I'll add links to join the chapters together for ease of reference.