Is Life Too Full To Be Comprehensible?

I stumbled upon a remarkable quotation from George Keenan this weekend in reading Fareed Zakarai's review of The Keenan Diaries

I cannot help but regret that I did not live 50 or 100 years sooner...life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into any of them, . . . too many friends to have any real friendships, too many books to know any of them well, and the quality of our impressions gives way to the quantity, so that life begins to seem like a movie, with hundreds of kaleidoscopic scenes flashing on and off our field of perception, gone before we have time to consider them.

Zakaria notes that: "It’s a vivid expression of a deep, instinctual conservatism, especially when you consider that it was written in December 1927."

Keenan's lament struck a resonant chord within me. I catch myself sometimes reminiscing about typing correspondence on my old typewriter when being in touch with someone required time for reflection and focused attention. Those days seem to be long gone, replaced by the benefits of instant communication, easy travel, and networks of relationships that span the globe. Such an abundance of resources at our disposal, but I often feel that I am not able to tend to these relationships and opportunities with the same care I could in the past.

I am torn between my unbridled enthusiasm for how much more is possible in our interconnected world and a sense of loss for the deeper connectendess and richer insights afforded by the time when days were less full; when the lack of technology required more time to reflect more deeply on all that we do: learning, creating, and investing in friendships and community.

I don't share Keenan's desire to be born in an earlier time, but embrace the challenge to not allow our hyper-connected world to make life so full it becomes incomprehensible.

Soluble Problems

It's easy to think that our world is drowning in insoluble problems, but it's worse than that. The world is drowning in soluble problems. It's just that the solutions are largely unseen and ignored.

-Chris Anderson, TED

To Don't

This piece from Lao Tzu causes me to wonder if we might not benefit from spending as much time creating our "to don't" lists as we spend creating our to do lists.  

The uses of not

Thirty spokes
meet the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.

Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot. 
Where the pot’s not 
is where it’s useful.

Cut doors and windows 
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t, 
there’s room for you.

So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.
--Lao Tzu

Global Citizen Year

I recently agreed to serve as the Chairman of the Board of a remarkable organization called Global Citizen Year.  My daughter spent most of last year as a Global Citizen Year Fellow in Ecuador.  During the course of that year, I have come to appreciate the mission of this organization as well as its effectiveness in engaging young leaders in a meaningful way as they embark upon their post high school journey.

This is a group doing what I consider to be very important work.

Global Citizen Year runs a leadership development program for young people at a very important inflection point in their lives. The program enables kids to hit "pause" after they finish the rush of high school. They learn about the world and development while finding ways to do meaningful work in local communities and building deep friendships with a remarkable group of young leaders. I believe this corps of leaders will have a significant impact in our world in the coming decades.  Think City Year meets Peace Corps for high school graduates. 

Global Citizen Year has a highly selective admission process and a deep commitment to ensuring all qualified candidates can participate, regardless of background or financial resources. This isn't designed to be a vacation for well-to-do kids who can afford it, but rather a serious commitment to living with a family and engaging in a local community in Ecuador, Brazil or Senegal.  Global Citizen Year makes a significant investment in these young adults through training across multiple disciplines (language, sociology, politics, economics, communication, and many others) before, during and after their eight months in country.

Before there were programs for such things, both my wife and I created our own "bridge years" and it helped us to get much more out of our college educations than we might have otherwise. Upon return from abroad we were more focused, with clearer questions. Current research backs this up, showing that gap year participation positively predicts academic motivation and performance and that this effect is significant over and above demographic factors. 

Global Citizen Year has created a robust process, curriculum, and strategy that enables this bridge year experience to happen with much more intention, commitment and impact than the self-designed approach I took when I was 18.  Increasingly colleges are encouraging students to take a year off before starting, as they know this will increase the odds of their success on campus and in their careers. 

The Global Citizen Year team envisions a world in which this bridge year becomes a common expectation and opportunity—transforming education, and unleashing the potential of our next generation as social innovators and global citizens.  As such they are committed to reshaping American education so that future generations of young leaders benefit from a year deeply immersed in a foreign culture. To shift expectations and behaviors that are strongly ingrained in our educational culture, the organization is partnering with colleges and raising awareness through the media and among policymakers.

I am enamored of this work because we need better leaders. I believe that twenty years from now, when these students are shaping our policies, business practices and commitments globally, there might be a community of several thousand leaders who have come through this program. With first hand experience and a deeper sense of what it means to be part of a global community, they will challenge one another and ask the hard questions as they navigate the role the United States plays in the world.

I recently had a chance to speak with all the returning students during their "re-entry" training in California, and can tell you I was incredibly impressed by these Fellows' perspectives, resiliency, and wide-eyed realism. Their experiences, their hunger, their commitment gave me hope.  It was inspiring. 

But Global Citizen Year is just getting started.  We currently send 100 students a year abroad.  We hope to increase that number significantly in the next few years, as well as add new countries to our program. We are actively looking for creative ways to continue to fund our expansion and operations, to recruit the team needed to deliver on this vision, and to find supporters and advisors willing to help make it happen. It is with this in mind that I am writing this today. I'd love to engage with you in a conversation about the work of this organization, the importance of its mission, and any role you think you might be able to play to help us.

Do yourself a favor and watch this 2 minute video by a returning fellow.  And if you are inspired, make a donation to our scholarship fund so we can send another remarkable group of Fellows abroad.

Václav Havel on Hope

I have been reflecting lately on cynicism and hope. I recently had a chance to visit with my daughter and a number of her friends who are spending a year before college doing community service work in Ecuador with an organization I have come to love called Global Citizen Year.

As I chatted with these Global Citizen Year Fellows in the small, rural town of Mindo, Ecuador in early March, I was struck by the wonderfully positive energy they had, despite having endured some difficult months in a foreign country, learning a new language, living in a different environment, and being exposed to a world many of them never knew existed. I was also struck, I must admit, by a slight tone of cynicism. In their seven months in the country, they had learned enough to realize that good intention is not enough; that creating real and lasting change is not something one can do in a brief time; that promises made by well intentioned bureaucrats are often broken; that commitments by well intentioned philanthropists often have unintended consequences; that advice provided by well meaning experts often doesn't translate to action on the ground. In short, that in spite of our best efforts and intentions, the world remains a fairly messy, often unjust place.

When one sees up close the challenges of creating positive social and economic change in a foreign country, it can lead to some fairly sobering reflections on one's motivation and one's own contribution to the challenges that the communities in question face.

I have been wondering, then, how to acknowledge the validity of some of the cynic's observations without losing the sense of joy and purpose found in the commitment to doing what you can to make a difference?

I've been reading a wonderful book by Paul Loeb¹, and in it re-encountered a couple of authors whose words help me overcome this sense of cynicism while avoiding the naiveté of simple optimism. One selection comes from Václav Havel, the playwright and former President of Czechoslovakia who writes in Disturbing the Peace that:

The kind of hope I often think about...I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do now.

I believe Havel is pointing to a profound truth here for anyone who wishes to do good in the world. That hope is a deep seated conviction, an "orientation of the heart" that prods us to engage. Not to engage with the naive optimism that our singular efforts will make the critical difference in a situation, but rather with Havel's sense of certainty that to do something "makes sense" - regardless of whether or not we succeed. Hope is that "orientation of our heart" that insists we try. There is meaning and purpose in that orientation and that intention. I have also found there is openness in that orientation. It is not a pig-headed determination to impose one's will on others, but rather the acceptance of an invitation to engage, to act, to partner with other like-minded individuals who wish to do their part to honor their own sense of hope.

The more who are willing to try, the less lonely the journey becomes, and the less prone we become to cynicism.

^{1. Loeb, Paul (2007-03-21). The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear (pp. 183-186). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.}