Loving Monday: How We Fall Apart

What keeps a business, a family strong?

Beckett's chapter on 'family strength' focuses on balancing family and work, but I wondered if it might nicely dovetail with another book I've been reading How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In.

While Beckett talked about the need to balance family and work, in some ways adding even more responsibilities to a person's mental plate, I considered whether there might be a subtle alternative.

Stop trying to balance it all, and just trim the "all", on both the business and family side of things. Heck, not just business and family, but also spiritual and recreational. (Yes, Ann K., I did think of Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families)

In How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins notes that companies who are doing well sometimes get "insulated by success" which causes them to "lose sight of the true underlying factors that created success in the first place." This can lead to an undisciplined pursuit of more— "more scale, more growth, more acclaim," characterized by "growing faster than they can achieve with excellence."

Collins sums it up, "Although complacency and resistance to change remain dangers to any successful enterprise, overreaching better captures how the mighty fall."

And this is why I didn't feel guilty on Sunday when I missed church because we missed the time change.

My husband slept in for a long time, my Eldest daughter was fooling around with Spanish guitar (something daddy's been teaching her in the evenings now), and my youngest worked on a book she's writing (which my eldest is secretly turning into a graphic novel). I made a cup of tea, moved around the kitchen cleaning slowly (Sundays always get me down when I come home to the morning mess after church).

It felt good to have trimmed the day, and I wondered why I had to wait for a mistake to make it happen.


Skyscraper in Chelsea photo, by L.L. Barkat.

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Lyla's Loving Monday: Why Family Matters

Loving Monday: You a Philanthropist?

What if you gave your art away?

This is the question Beckett essentially asks in the chapter "Giving Something Back", though he doesn't necessarily frame it from an art perspective. The subtle implication at the beginning of the chapter is that we need to wait before we can "give back." But by the end, when we see Moses holding a simple stick, we get the sense that the time to give is now. The thing to give is whatever we hold in our hands.



I think back to David Sacks. He has given (or sold very cheaply) much of his art to non-governmental organizations... before landing on the cover of an Oprah book-club pick.

At the IAM Encounter Conference, he shared his photography, and his history of giving art away. For Sacks, this opened up opportunities to travel, be creative with fewer restrictions, and ultimately to make money from his art (though that wasn't necessarily his initial goal in giving).



Do we hold our dreams, our small personal wealths, too tightly? What if we gave some of our work, our creative essence away? Would we have enough left over to make a living? What are the risks?

I find a few answers in Sacks, and in Sarah Haliwell's poem too...


don't be worried
there are dreams all over the place
for the hauling up and stacking out
just let it go
the wind will do the hardest work
for you

Photos of NYC and IAM Conference, by L.L. Barkat. Excerpt of Sarah Haliwell's "with faith", used with permission.

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Loving Monday: Blueprints?

"God has a plan for your life."

Does he?

Let me digress. Once, a long time ago, I saw a piece of art that consisted of lightweight cloth and a wind source. I stood there watching it and thinking about Creation. I thought about the sky and how it was always the sky, as God planned. But it changed day by day. I thought about the trees and how they were always the trees, but the wind changed their shape in unpredictable fashion. Water is water, but its flow alters and splashes. The color of day makes a stream silver, then green or amber.

What does this mean for us as people? Are we basically people, free to change with times and seasons? Flexible, responsive, able to decide we don't want to stick with our story? Or are we, in simpler blueprint fashion, called and gifted for a particular path? Are we supposed to be following some kind of "plan for our lives"? Beckett's Loving Monday begins to suggest that, though I'm not sure how far Beckett himself would push the idea if questioned.

The idea of calling and gifting can give us direction in life. That seems good. Some people in history and the bible appear to fit into this model. But the idea of calling and gifting can also hold us back, "I don't feel called." Well, so? Maybe it is enough that you are a tree and today the wind is blowing East and you would delight to bend with it.


Sara Makes a Snow Path, photo by L.L. Barkat.

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Loving Monday: Chocolate Bread and Stripey Cookies

It's been almost a week since most of the flights were cancelled, except one little flight to Pittsburgh: the one where I met (Richard?), who works at Novartis, in the financial department.

(Here is the beginning of a long plea of forgive-me-if-I've-forgotten-or-altered-your-name-I-met-so-many-people-in-the-span-of-six-days. This coming week I will be sharing about my time at Geneva College and Jubilee... I do remember your faces even if I somehow slip with your names).

What does it matter that I met Richard? And that someone flew the plane through blinding snow? What does it matter that someone made the seats we sat in, or that another man refused to move his small bag from the overhead compartment so I could put my big suitcase somewhere?

And the pizza I ate that night in haste, due to a mixup about speaking times (we rushed from the airport to (was it Joe's?) and on to a group of waiting students at Geneva College).

How about the inn that greeted me late, with the promise of a clean bed, a quiet room, and quiche in the morning?

What of the all the presentations (six in total), one where I spoke of chocolate stripey cookies, and their potentially honorable place in the world? (a story from Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.)

How about the (Slavic?) woman with a heavy accent, a tired face, and beautiful golden eyes (I told her, "You have beautiful eyes," and she poured out a brief story of the day's weariness. Later, I came back to a fresh room, fluffed white comforter, and I found her down the hall to say, "Thank you for cleaning my room so beautifully.")

And the chocolate bread? What of that? Special made by Raymond's, who took the order late at night (called in by a waiter who knew him and wanted me to have my chocolate bread I remembered from last year).

In the dualistic mindset Beckett speaks about, what of these things?



Shoes at the College Inn photo, Chocolate Bread photo, by L.L. Barkat.

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Loving Monday: My Messy Life

I have to be candid: this set of chapters in Loving Monday didn't really work for me.

Maybe it was the written structure— every chapter neatly leading into the next, with obvious signposts. Or maybe the structure was supporting a dynamic that was the real source of my discomfort...

it felt like Beckett's life was too neat— not without trouble mind you, but still too neat.

Why should this bother me? Isn't it possible that his path was indeed that directed, that overseen?

Well, yes. It is possible.

The problem is I have a tendency to want to describe life this way, in my own messy life. And it feels too simple. As a writer, I've especially struggled not to give in to the "happy ending" syndrome, even while it's true that there have been some unarguable happy endings in my experience.

Perhaps it's a matter of what's in vogue. But I wanted to see the "messy" in Beckett, in a way that connected to the messy in me.


Messy End Table photo, by L.L. Barkat.

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Loving Monday: Show, Don't Tell

We are fond, in the writing world, of saying, "Show, don't tell." In other words: give stories, pictures, an embodiment of what you're really trying to share.

Today, rereading The Pastor as Minor Poet I was struck by Barnes' assertion that the "pastor is less interested in making an argument for the presence of Jesus Christ than in simply showing him to the congregation."

Seems to me that's true for all of us: our lives should show Jesus more than arguing for Jesus.

How does this happen in the workplace? I love that Beckett's book Loving Monday: Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul doesn't begin with the question of how we show Jesus in the workplace. It begins instead with the story of a career change— from the aerospace industry to the oil burner business. Neither of these arenas seem, on the surface, to offer obvious ways to show Jesus to the world.

That's why I'm waiting for the rest of the book.

Suffice it to say, by beginning with his story, Beckett grounds everything that's to come squarely in the details of his life.

A little aside now: recently I've had the privilege of beginning to work with Laura Boggess, one of the new Content Editors at HighCallingBlogs (who'll be leading the discussion of Beckett's book). A psychologist who works with trauma patients, Laura embodies Christ to her clients through the details of her life.

She embodies Christ to her HCB co-workers too, in the way she offers to help, often without waiting to be asked. There's something comforting about working with a person who doesn't just do what she needs to get by, but who lives creatively and generously. (Speaking of creativity, you'll want to check out her blog The Wellspring and, if you know a teen reader, her book Brody's Story.)

Barnes, Beckett, Boggess, you, me, how do we show, not just tell, Jesus? I think it begins with the details of our lives.


Reflection on the Stairwell at the Armory, photo by L.L. Barkat.

OTHER BOOK CLUB POSTS:
Lyla's The Optional Downgrade
HighCallingBlogs' The Power of Story