Who is the great magician who makes the grass green? – Zen Koan
Getting stuck is what we do best. Another way to put it is being consistent, or creating consistency, however you want to phrase it. We are often appraised for how well we do things the same, create sameness, get the same results, and we are often appraised by how well we maintain a level of sameness, not deviate from our course, stay focused, and so forth. It’s like a thing we worship, this habit-making adventure we call our lives in which the prizes go to the folks who become experts and masters of things by forming rigid patterns we identify as sticking to it or best practices, and even that elusive quality we call character.
But then again we also like when people create new ways of doing things, or new things entirely, and we don’t often look at how these two tendencies, that of generating consistency and difference, are essentially contradictions, and what we must do to allow for both modes of being.
Getting stuck is what we do best, at least in part because it is a thing we highly value. We build our floors in our homes with solid materials so we don’t fall easily through them into the basement or the home of our neighbor below. We put up walls to protect us from the weather, other people who threaten us, who might want to run off with some of our stuff, or our family members. We create imaginary attributes such as skill sets, knowledge, experience, and job performance, so it is less easy to steal our jobs from under us.
And yet there is this tendency in us to go breathless and giddy over words like innovation, and the English Language’s newest gumball: disruption.
I remember when disruption was a thing I would get kicked out of class for. It is also decidedly not the thing to do when meeting with a client, in suits and ties, when you’ve got something serious to do or talk about. You don’t just start singing RnB songs when you feel the pressure mount and you think conversation’s going in the wrong direction. You don’t blurt out and do your Michael Jackson moves on the conference table top. And I suppose there’s good reason for that.
But still: disruption. What a maggot that word is, that quality of letting the system breathe, bringing life back in, the starting-over-again-with-fresh-ideas approach we have been agitating against all along.
To be continued…