“We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains” What we see is only what our brain tells us we see, and it’s not 100 percent accurate.”
— John Medina, Brain Rules
— and my Dad, a coupla decades earlier: Can you see with your ears?
And we feel what we’re meant to feel
“For too long, people have disparaged the emotional brain, blaming our feelings for all of our mistakes. The truth is far more interesting. If it weren’t for our emotions, reason wouldn’t exist at all” When we are cut off from our feelings, the most banal decisions became impossible. A brain that can’t feel can’t make up its mind.”
— Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide
Initially, vision can trump all other senses
Most people flying into our Keahole Kona airport here, on the west side of the Big Island, are surprised in a rather unsettling way. They hope they haven’t made a mistake.
The approach to the coast is fairly barren, and the airport runway is surrounded by the stark nothingness of black lava fields and ugly invasive fountain grass. The lava plain is fairly new in geographical measurement (1801); greenery hasn’t seeded and rooted in any triumphant way yet.
If you’re a returning resident, it’s secretly fun to watch the faces of first time visitors peering out the windows. You can see them thinking, “But this is Hawai‘i! Where are the coconut trees? Where are the flowers? Isn’t this the tropics?”
It’s secretly fun because you know what will happen: We who live here are happy for them, and for the experiences we know they’ll soon have.
I always want to tell them, “You’ll see, just be patient.”
And I want to coach them: “Once we land, be a courageous explorer. Go off the beaten track, and get lost in the feelings here. Converse with the locals, and ask them to share their aloha with you. Talk story. Share yours too.”
To us, this landscape is beautiful. It’s not barren at all. As the maxim goes, “Looks are deceiving.”
The Big Island is the kind of place you have to explore further, so you can learn about it more fully. Once you do, feelings tug pretty quickly, and quite deeply. You fall in love, and you fall in love hard. To do otherwise doesn’t seem possible.
But that’s okay, for you no longer want it to be otherwise. Feeling deeply is wonderful.
It’s the same thing as when you feel the Calling of Alaka‘i Managemeant.
You’ve got to explore that calling, digging deeper, and allowing it to get personal.
You’ve got to make connections with the people who surround you — especially with those you work with, and doubly, triply so with those you are supposed to ‘manage.’
If you can open up, and allow yourself to get a little vulnerable, you discover all kinds of things in the partnerships you create.
Thank you for reading Talking Story. If this sounds good to you, you’re in the right place. Start digging for the calling of Alaka‘i here, and for managemeant here. You need not go too far back.
You might like this one too: The instinctive, natural selection of wanting
Purchase Managing with Aloha at Amazon.com in hardcover, or in the Kindle Store.
[…] We see what we want to see […]