I Am I Here to Be Right, or to Be Collaborative?

Today I held hands with a friend in celebration of being with each other as people who think and feel about what we think and feel about, and how that creates a context of collaboration.

I feel joy about this because I think that even a month ago, I may not have noticed that this was something to celebrate.

As I track back along the trajectory that brought me to this possibility, I notice something: how easy it is to get stuck in thinking I am right. I don’t mean overtly, I mean subtly. Especially about assumptions I make about others.

For example, I caught myself recently assuming that a friend would be as attentive to her phone as I am to mine, and thus catch, in a timely manner, a message I sent. She did not. I believed my assumptions was right and did not feel or think further, until later, when it was “too late” to communicate what it would have required to do the thing I wanted.

Easy to blame her for not being attentive to her phone, but how attentive had I been to my own senses, timing, thoughts and feelings?

I feel glad that I caught myself on the verge of resentment, and backtracked away, back into a reality where I am responsible for me, for what I want, and do not want and for creating it, or not.

I celebrate that I closed the door on being right, so that possibility for collaboration was not killed.

The next rut I see is the one where I make being right or wrong right or wrong.

What is that experience even like?

To be in reality as it is, without stories about what is right or wrong or good or bad…!

The more I get curious to notice where I am making myself right or wrong, what rules I am following and what is so right or wrong about following or not following them, (and what is so good or bad about how it goes), the more I catch a faint whiff of what it might be to be present, here and now.

Slowly I am doing what it takes to create that experience, more often because it is what I want, than because if I do I am right and good.

Sometimes it seems like a tightrope, energetically.

I feel glad to have a team to learn to be on it… or not.

Another friend wrote and sent me a poem I found extraordinary, with depth of thought and feeling about how he and others think and feel and…go to war about it. He called it The Uncivil War.

He asked for my feedback and so far I have given only GO as feedback (which he called “no feedback”) and what’s happening is I feel scared because I can’t quite find myself in this space of collaboration as distinct from “this and that are right and wrong.”

This writing is my next experiment.

Purpose: to think and feel my way to collaboration, and to watch for my mind to fall in right/wrong, good/bad thinking, even in regard to what works and what doesn’t, as if things that work are right or good while things that don’t are not.

My mind goes to an extraordinary website about Meta Conversations, as doorways into territories of possibility.

I will leave you here, and go there.

I wish you extraordinary expansion into possibility and collaboration.

Love, Nicole