The Soul of Sabbatical
What Flying Feels Like
When the KOAN method: Breakthrough Leadership for a Divided World came out in 2023, it was already in conversation with a polarized planet. It spawned a year of fascinating KOAN Conversations about leading through uncertainty, and I engaged with people through a series of stories even while the winds of change continued to gather.
The two key principles I wrote about were that: the capacity to sit in true uncertainty while old notions and knowings fall away is a leadership art form we need to develop more deeply and celebrate more fully, and that holding on to structures at odds with our purpose will never take us where we want to go.
Breakthroughs live on the other side of both.
Writing the book gave me a chance to summarize my life’s work and pay tribute to folks whose ideas I admire and have been inspired by.
Then, in the fall of 2024, life asked me to live what I’d written up close and in practice. I had to lean into surrender and let the Universe Take the Wheel. I spent a year Sitting With the Storm, intimately as losses happened to me and through me and for me and around me all at once.
And through it all, I also found freedom and a capacity for creative thinking that felt oddly like the flow states I had so often taught and written about but which can only be conceptualized so far until you surrender fully to Surfing the Tsunami of life.
We get to remember that we belong to our own unfolding story, inside a web of belonging.
Sometimes we want to hold onto something because it feels familiar or we’ve been taught that it is what safety looks like, but it is no longer keeping us safe.
Sometimes we have to reawaken the Wild Within to re-member ourselves into belonging.
I leaned into living my belief that deadlines and deliverables are a deathknell to the dynamism that discovery demands.
My calendar went from crammed to cavernous. The echo was deafening.
But flying always feels like overcoming falling, can in fact only happen if one would otherwise fall.
It might even only be a sort of delayed, decelerated, but still actually very real fall you are feeling while you are there mid-flight, but I have spent a lifetime leading organizations through transition, navigating cultural change, and trying to transform systems from inside old stories about what success looks like.
Hedging against the fall interferes with liftoff. Gravity prevails.
For many years I’ve loved Buckminster Fuller’s notion that if you want to change things, you don’t get there by fighting the existing reality, but by “building new models that make the old ones obsolete.”
I’ve spent a lot of my life sitting inside the question of just how you do that, and I’ve seen again and again that the dream precedes the story which is itself prelude to possibility.
I’ve often said that the stories we tell shape the futures we have available to live, and that’s what makes this moment in history both so simultaneously precarious and potent.
What story we tell, how we tell it, and what gets celebrated or suppressed shapes our seeing, sensing, and knowing. And is not static.
Over the course of my sabbatical, I have written approximately 1 million words. I stopped counting after I crossed through 500,000, but every day, I write.
I have shared a little bit publicly, but most of it has been just for me–in journals and notebooks and on devices, turning over a life of scholarship, and leadership, and success, and struggle, and celebration, standing at a whole collection of thresholds in a world that seems no closer to good solutions today than when I started fighting “the good fight” 40 years ago.
I have spent my life believing that having the ability, and opportunity, to look at the world from radically different perspectives is at the heart of our capacity for creativity, and I believe more than ever that our ability to imagine truly new solutions to the world’s challenges depends on it.
This time between time has given me the gift of looking at the story of everything from the microdetails of a life whose core identities have been rattled in a dozen directions to the macrocosmic and cataclysmic transformations happening in both beautiful and horrible ways all around us.
There is power and beauty in picking up a life and looking it over from all angles.
We can examine the road we’ve walked with its challenges and chapters, or the thresholds we’ve crossed whether we wanted to or not.
We can circle back on old patterns with fresh eyes or a softened heart, and remember who and what had to happen, just so, for you to belong to this moment, right now.
We can play with lenses and prisms and potions that transmute what we were sure we knew into something wholly evolutionary and new and watch a spectrum form.
And we can see that none of those seeings is complete on their own and is each already situated in a tapestry of tales woven over generations, and landscapes, and eras. We arrive in a story in motion.
Every time we surface something unspoken, a new facet comes into relief.
I will be excavating and exploring more new stories here as my emergence continues, but for now, here’s a little take on/taste of what flying feels like…
Look, You Are Flying!
One day, when I felt like I was falling,
I asked myself, what I would say to myself, if I saw myself.
And as I watched myself, I startled with delight and said,
“Look, you are flying!”
How do we know, I asked us
Whether we are flying or falling?
We decide, I declared!
And I could feel the difference.
“What does flight feel like?” I asked
Like not being afraid to fall because
We know we are what holds us.
Mostly it feels deeply, radically KIND.
“And how do we develop that knowing?” I wondered
We let ourselves feel afraid first, and then dare bravely
We trust not that we will never fall or fail
But that the only way to live is heart wide OPEN.
“And that’s the decision.” I acknowledged.
There you have it. You decide to befriend not-knowing.
You learn to live in curious wonder.
This is the state from which you become truly ADAPTIVE.
“Look, we are flying!” I chuckled
Yes. Can you feel the flight in the freefall?
How there can be no flight if we mightn’t fall.
And all the way we are held in a NETWORK of connection.
So today, when I felt like I was falling
I asked myself, what I would say to myself, if I saw myself
And as I watched myself, I smiled and said
“Look at how many of us are flying!”
I looked around, smiling at us
Seeing how clearly we had decided.
We’re flying, I declared!
And could feel the difference.
***
Explore the ideas that make up my star map here. Follow me as I live more and more fully into these principles and practices at aboldervision.com.
