What Women Want 🎁

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Happy International Women's day everyone!

It's especially worth celebrating today, given that one of the primary conspiracy this month: this whole COVID-19 outbreak is the planet rebalancing itself from human's extreme masculinity in conquering the Earth, and that feminine power is rising.

Whatever the case, I want to share this week a video by the late Angeles Arrien, a wise and much respected woman on an apt topic: What women want.

It's a beautiful story, and she's a stunning storyteller. Also, it's GREAT MISLEADING TITLE so listen to it :-)

Here is the transcript of the entire story if you want to read - Lady Ragwell and Sir Gwain.

May we all want to be honored and respected for who we are.
May we all get to hear sweet nothings and affection and love spoken to us.
May we all be protected and provided for and have a sense of home or family.
May we all we have the power to choose and not have our choice taken away.

Cheers,
Khuyen

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Reading

Some of the longer passages that got me thinking this week

• For those who are working or soon to be joining an organization, Peter Drucker's advice on Joining an Organization is thought-provoking.

  • "What kinds of questions should MBA students ask prospective employers about leadership and mission as they make a decision to commit at least a portion of their life to the service of an organization?
    "I would probably tell that student of mine that he should hold that question a couple of years until he knows a little more both about himself and the organization, but then I would ask him, “Are you learning enough?” That is always my question. “Are you challenged enough?” “Does the organization make use of your strengths or what you can do? All together as a group of human beings, “does the organization constantly challenge and make you more ambitious in terms of contribution?” “Are you acutely suffering from creative discontent?” I hope at age thirty that you are not content. That’s for six-year-olds. Being content is being a child, but there is a difference between negative and positive discontent. If you say, “They aren’t any good; nothing ever gets done; and all they want is for me to come in from nine to five.” And if you say, “You know, the nice thing about this organization is that it gives me so much time to play tennis,” basically you are too young to retire. If you say, “You know, I wish I had more time for my family, and my tennis game has gone to hell because we have that big project starting that new trauma unit, and it’s really not my job but I am on the team,” or, “We have that enormous job here in the new school we are building and [we are] recruiting faculty and so I spend all my weekends with the prospective faculty people”—OK, then you are growing but also the organization meets the first test, which is that it mobilizes human resources, challenges them, grows them. My next question is: Look at the mission. Is it one in which you can make a difference? Sure, none of us make a great difference. No institution is that important, but is it one that makes—I wouldn’t say [makes] the world richer; that’s such an ambitious statement—but it makes a difference. That emphasizes the more responsibility we as human beings have. Or is it one that just won’t really be missed? All right, none of us are going to achieve a great deal. But everyone has a chance to achieve.

  • (from A year with Drucker)

• Comment: I am uncomfortable and challenged by the workload he stresses young people to have, but he has a point.

On another entirely different note, but actually related about becoming who we are, Hermann Hesse writes in one of the most beautiful passages about trees and what we can learn from them.

• " In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves."

• "A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail."

• "Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

(from Brainpickings)

Quotes

• "You know why the grass is always greener on the other side? Because we tend to destroy the grass when we go there. Maybe we should all learn how to tend to our grass here so that it won't happen wherever we go. Then grass everywhere can be evergreen." - Anonymous.

What a reminder for us to learn to cultivate our capacity to nourish our inner life first. 🤗

Lastly..

A question for all of us for this week: what can you be wholehearted about, right now, today, in your life?
How will you live differently now that you begin asking that question?
Have a great week everyone,
Khuyen

p/s: Do reach out general conversations about life. I'd love to be helpful.