I’m sitting at the kitchen table, enjoying my coffee and doing a lot of thinking. I’m thinking about my stories, what matters to me and how I want to express it. I am literally doing the work of forming and refining my point of view, piecing together the disparate strains of thought, belief and experience that make me who and what I am. Gathering the source material, the kindling, that allow the fire of my imagination to start quickly and burn long and well.
I am doing this out of my desire to formulate a message, my message. About development, about learning and about leadership and about my experiences playing with, experiencing and struggling with them in both thought and practice.
What started as an exercise – sorting through paper, organizing old notes, surfacing past presentations – has become a sacred, almost spiritual experience. I didn’t expect to feel this way, but I do. And I am grateful for it. It tells me I am asking the right questions, moving in the right direction.
And, in this moment, I recall Derek Walcott’s poem, “Love After Love.”
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
