Now, can this work resolve the whole issue? Of course not. But I will not forgive myself if I don’t act in the face of those challenges.
Bill. So, it’s like your father in that sense. One of my colleagues, Walter Truett Anderson (1990), has written a lot about postmodernity. He writes about our responses to post-modernity. One is nativism- that we can somehow return to some native style and all live off the land. Second would be some sort of escape we can take our money and run (and there’s a fair amount of this here in Colorado). A third piece is to fight the battle, and you’ve chosen to fight the battle. How does this link with your statement that it’s in the experience itself? It sounds like the very meaning and purpose for you is in the experience itself—not in the outcome but in the experience.
Julio. Of course, I’m interested in the outcome, but there’s something more here. I don’t believe that coaching was born just because a couple of guys one day had an insight. I believe that coaching is here today out of a dramatic breakdown of our times. So, I’ll articulate that to go to your question.
I have said that we invent a new practice only when old practices do not address emerging concerns. So, people said, “I understand that. What are the emerging concerns that coaching was born to address?” For me, it is the crisis of our epistemology. Coaching wants to connect the fullness of human experience, instead of only dealing with an aspect of it. Here I’m going to quote a contemporary philosopher, Ken Wilber (1996). Ken speaks about the fact that basically from the Middle Ages, when modernity was born, we divided the world between what he calls the “interior” and “exterior.” He uses that to say that we focus so much on the exterior aspect of things – knowing as materialistic, positivistic, and reductionist – that we’ve left completely out all inner aspect of our experience- the emotional, the archetypical, the spiritual, etc. And we create (and this is my word, not his) what I will call “cognitive schizophrenia.” We haven’t been able to put these two worlds, our interior life and our exterior life, together.
So, you have, on one side, a phone like I’m holding in my hand that can connect me with China, Chile, or Romania right now. And at the same time, I have a hard time communicating with my son or my wife. That profound dichotomy is not just an anecdote; it is a description somehow of the issues of our time. The world for us became raw material. It lost its sacredness; it lost its divinity. So, we have no respect for woods, for the oceans, for anything. Animals and everything else are just raw materials to be consumed, and all the crises that we are facing definitely have to do with that.
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