We meet gems in life, people who by their own dint take paths other than the deep-rutted ones. Grow Mercy cheers, salutes and encourages you.
This is meant to encourage you: for you have chosen to lead your lives in the messy intersections of human community. This is to salute you: for you have taken the more difficult path of willingly entering that jumble-of-souls with your presuppositions and preconceptions in check–a reflex of humility.
This is to honour you for preferring to learn through listening, to discover through personal engagement, and for being receptive to the present. To you who’s experience has taught you the peerless value of honouring people in their rich and odd paths, to you who refuse to pave over human distinctiveness and peculiarities, we raise our cups.
You, who risk being okay with chaos, letting it have its say; you, who are patient with with loose ends, who understand that chaos and loose ends finally reveal their own solutions and work their own balm…you are our social beacons. You, who seek consensus through a simple coming together are our cultures unheralded leaders. You, who do not miss the faces for the crowd are our agents of grace.
This post is meant to encourage you, and salute you, because in our mercantile world you are misunderstood. This is meant to give you space, because in places where zero-sum is the convening article, where vertical organizational charts are capitulated to, you will be marginalized, even ostracized.
Your allegiance to interconnections, your respect for the organism is a threat to the “bottom line,” the so called “tight ship.” But this allegiance is your candle and our illumination, and it must be protected. And so sometimes you must leave our “tight ships” to their tightness. Perhaps then, when constant constriction cuts off all lubrication and the “lean machine” cracks apart, there may yet be hope. At this point the lesson of liberality and karmic abundance may yet be learned. It is at this point that those who control through diversion and concealment and scapegoating may transcend their fears.
We can hope all this because of pearls like you.
