Here was a moment in time when it really did look like there was not enough money. In fact, if we did not do something fast, there really and truly would not have been enough to cover our expenses due. This is what we call structural scarcity. The scarcity – the feeling of not enough – is not in our mind, so to speak; there is a real lack of available resource, in this case, money. But it is tricky because real lack can meet perceived lack and cause havoc. And this, of course, happening: I was scared. Scared beyond what was real in that moment. Fear was telling me I was in grave danger.

Do you remember the court scene in A Few Good Men?

Tom Cruise’s character: Was Santiago in danger?
Jack Nicholson’s character: Yes.
TC: Would you say he was in grave danger, sir?
JN: Is there any other kind?

Which, in factual reality, was not true. So in my situation, while there was structural scarcity, there was also the scarcity that pervades our consciousness, and I was dealing with both at once.

Crazy as it may sound the antidote in that moment to my perceived lack was to give something away. So with marching orders from my business partner inside this sufficiency experiment we are always running, I walked into the food pantry I drive by every day to drop my daughter off at school, and I handed the director a check for 10% of what was in our bank account that day. It felt like sticking my head in the mouth of the dragon, dramatic, I know, but it did kind of feel like that.

I came face to face with where my real scarcity met my perceived scarcity, and something shifted. I felt free. I felt like even if the worst happened and we received no more money for some time, and business completely dried up, that somehow I would be ok.

Standing in the lobby of that food pantry, I could feel at once my incredible vulnerability to the whims of life and my power to shape my experience in the face of any of it. Not exactly Victor Fankel in a concentration camp or Neslon Mandela in Robben Island, but my mini version of standing in the enoughenss of it all in face of both real and perceived lack.

Many of us chose new habits and behaviors to be established as the year turned –at one month in, let us pause together and assess where we are by using an inquiry practice:

• What goals and aspirations or intentions did I set for myself this year?
• When is the last time I reviewed them?
• Did I fully complete my process of creating them?
• When I review what I established last month what do I notice? What do I need to communicate to myself or others?
• Can I declare success in any category?
• What practices do I need to adjust, add or remove that will aid my journey this year?
• What do I need to create for myself for the month of February? (February being the shortest month of the year can be a great month to commit to a new daily practice – 29 days of the gym, yoga, mediation, heating healthy, writing a page a day of my great novel . . . you get the picture)

Take time to pause today – enjoy what you discover, and we would love it if you shared your discoveries with us at Seven Stones.

In the context of exquisite sufficiency, an experiment allows us to name a strategy and then literally play with it. We advise ourselves not to take it too seriously, but to play hard, take on the challenge of doing something we haven’t done before, to be inventive and dig deep into our intuitive wisdom for some new thinking and acting, always asking ourselves what else?

Living in inquiry is radical any day of the week in any decade. In a world with people begging for the answer – answers just make us feel so safe and controlled – asking questions, especially following a question with a question, is mere blasphemy in some industries and organizations. “What do you think of my performance?” “What do you think of your performance?” How should this process work?” “How do you think this process should work?”

Admitting we don’t know adds a particular kind of vulnerability only now gaining some credibility for its honesty. We use it all the time at Seven Stones. Saying “I don’t know” causes an automatic pause in the process, and in our experiments, pauses often generate fertile ground for magnificent creation.

So in this post-holiday season, as we craft our vision for 2012, naming what we want more of and less of…

• Play inside the freedom and structure of experimentation.
• Tell the truth when we don’t know something and give the asker the chance to know by asking them.
• Set up some challenges over the year that are measurable, winnable and worth playing.
• And have fun.

“Tell us, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

The Summer Day

 Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean–

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

 –Mary Oliver

It’s a compelling scene, even for those of us committed to investigating the scarcity myth, More is Better. Even with that haunting comparative photo of the hungry children next to hungry shoppers circulating Facebook this season (if you didn’t see it, I am sure you can imagine it). Because a diamond is a girl’s best friend, right? And the love between the couple in that moment, well, it was sweet.

Yet, I am asking myself: how does she (the character on the show, work with us here) feel the day after, a week later, a month into winter? Is that buzz still present? Perhaps every time she looks at her wrist she will be brought back to that moment of bliss, of being adored, of appreciating the thought and effort (he did after all sell his hockey collection to make the purchase, a little Gift of the Magi-ish). The bracelet might remind her of the love she feels for her husband. I’d like to believe that.

But, for me, in the wake of the holidays, I can feel a little sad, let down. The buzz, the hype, the activity and togetherness, the opening of gifts, the squeezing in parties and cookie swaps and Secret Santas and hugs and kisses and even coat drives and fundraisers … it’s a lot, and then it’s over. It’s a stunted rhythm. A sharp end to the year with a blurry memory of mounds of paper to recycle and the dread of finding a place to put all the stuff.

What does “this season” even mean? It’s a shopping season, exhausting season, overstimulating season. It’s a season for gathering, and I like that part of seeing old friends and distant family. But what becomes possible if we didn’t have to wrap ourselves up in so much stuff to make it work for us? If we didn’t feel compelled to make it so special, so magical, so big, so perfect, so … Martha Stewart?

There is an art to engaging in something without going into excess, of too much or too little. What does that look like for you this holiday? How can we avoid the hangover? This year I have said yes to some things and no to others. I love to receive the pictures of the children in our life, and per that social contract, have made a holiday card to give and send to our community. I don’t love to bake, so no cookies this year. Rather than buy more craft stuff, we made ornaments out of paper casually one night. We light fires and sing carols as a family, but are keeping play dates to a minimum these weeks. We can do some, and not all, of what’s available, and so far, on December 14th, it’s working alright.

What matters most? As I ask this question, Thanksgiving has come and gone here in the United States, and as I celebrate it, the holiday is a national time to pause and give thanks. Yet my cynical side wonders if all it has become is a day off from work to eat and rest ourselves to prepare for what truly matters most—shopping. And more specifically: the intense shopping in the run up to the holidays of Christmas, Kwanzaa and Hanukkah.

In these next weeks we will be bombarded with forecasts and reports about retail sales, followed by the pronouncement of our collective success or failure as consumers in 2011 by measuring unemployment, GDP growth (or not) and prices. These indices are what we, in capitalist societies, measure; therefore it must be what we treasure. It follows that what matters most are all the things we can put in that moving box. The things we can see, feel and touch that can only be purchased with money that we may or may not have.

I do the same sort of measuring, in a different way—how much did I earn this month? How much money is in my bank account for Christmas? For a spring vacation? And, yes, I have started fretting over what I will do with my sons’ over the long summer holidays. Will I measure myself, my worth, by the vacation we take or how good my life sounds to other people?

As I sit with myself and family over the next six weeks can I name what matters most? Can I see it?

• Is it seeing my sons huddled in corner talking about…well whatever teenage boys talk about?
• Is it cooking Thanksgiving dinner so my mom can rest this year?
• Is it playing Spades with my sister and her spouse?

Maybe what matters most is that to write this, I sat alone in a crowded house, took time to pause and reflect. And that for the rest of the year I will notice such moments and claim for myself what matters most to me.

Children, spouses, neighbors, a surprise windfall, a promotion all can be seen as blessings. What about running farther than I have in five years or a spontaneous lunch with my sister and 5-year old nephew in Manhattan last weekend. Are those blessings?

Is it a blessing that when the snow fell in October my power stayed on while the rest of the state was plunged into prolonged outages?

What about my addicted loved one, the cancer diagnosis, the layoff or divorce? Or the fact that I may have lost my power for 7, 8 or nine days for the second time in two months; could these be seen as blessings? Many of us would say no, there is no blessing in a cancer diagnosis.

But is it true that blessings are only positive? Or could blessings be all the things, events, people that wash over us as we travel through life, the ones we embrace and the ones we have an aversion too?

On www.dictionary.com the definition of blessing is: a special favor, mercy or benefit.

Can we be the judge of our blessings? Can we truly discern what a special favor or benefit is while we are experincing life in the moment? It seems important to ask this question since our mindset and the contexts in which we live determine our perceptions and the outcomes of our lives.

Or, are blessings only countable when looking over our life from the long view, when looking over the lessons learned from the good and the bad news or the the skillful moves and the colossal mistakes? What about the relationships that thrive or the ones with great loss? As I open myself up to creating my life and my listening from what is enough, is it time for me to say that all my experiences are blessings? That being alive is in and of itself enough of a blessing so that all that occurs in that life is such?

Maybe in these final months of the year as I sit with family and friends I can count all of my blessings regardless of their wrapping.

• What blessings have I received this year?
• When looking back over the past few months did blessings come wrapped in experiences I would not have said were positive?
• Can all of these “blessings” open up a space for me to treasure all of my life?
• What blessings can I bring to others in these final holiday months?

One of the ways I am allowing the information to flow through – not to ignore the story through blocking it out, or getting enmeshed and devastated by it – is to integrate it through inquiry. Here are some questions I am looking into right now:

• In what ways am I not telling the truth about something difficult to the people in my family, my organization, my community?
• Where am I being silent? Where can I speak up about my own needs, or the needs of others?
• Where, if anywhere, am I withholding information that might be difficult to hear, but important for the group?
• Is there anyone I am protecting out of fear?
• Are there any ways I am projecting my own discomforts onto people around me? E.g. could I be more gentle to my children and husband when I feel tired or stressed out? More thoughtful to my colleagues?
• Where am I out of integrity in any part of my life?

Guest Blogger Bonnie Harris

Ever get an “I don’t know” or “She did it” or “I don’t have any homework” when you ask, “What happened?” or “Why did you do that?” or “What do you have for homework?” Defensive reactions are in abundance in most children’s behavior—in most adult’s as well. Defenses are shields we throw up to protect ourselves from what we perceive as a threat or attack. Many children have built tall, solid walls of defense in a mere few years of life and have a hard time finding their way around or through that wall back to genuine responses.

Why is the number seven billion so important? I am not sure the number in and of itself is that relevant. What I think is important, is that this event gives us all an important reason to pause and take a look at what we have created. We have doubled the global population since 1960 and demographers are saying we will be at nine billion by 2045.

There are many great reasons for this growth:

• The dropping of infant mortality.
• The rising age of our average life span.
• Countries, historically resource poor, finding ways to create sustainable work and environments for all.

I was surprised to discover that we can easily fit seven billion people on the planet. According to National Geographic if we stood shoulder to shoulder all seven billion of us would fit within the city limits of Los Angeles, California. The space we take up is not the problem.

We cannot sustain the way resource rich countries measure and define success and wealth. If we continue to measure success and wealth by the current process, GDP – which emphases consumption and individual gains, then this Spaceship Earth will continue on its current trajectory. This will have us all off balance. Most research shows that we cannot sustain the levels of consumption and waste that we take as a given. We are already off balance and the scale will continue to tip towards greater inequality, loss of natural resources, energy crises, and other symptoms of a dying Spaceship.

If we truly treasure what we measure then it is time for us to put down the measuring of growth and consumption and look to other ways to create meaning, find opportunities and define success. Last month Shea Adelson challenged us to find other possibilities to define and claim wealth. This is a place we can start, not as an individual, or family, nor even as a nation. This is where all of us – all seven billion, need to begin.

It is time to pause and awaken. How do we do that? First, look at this as a thought experiment. If all of us could somehow put ourselves – all of our life, all we have, all we own, all possibilities that are available to us individually into a simple raffle ticket – would you be willing to put that raffle ticket in a bowl with the other seven billion and randomly draw out a new lot, a new life?

If the answer is no, then you see what work has to get done on a global scale.

There are now seven billion reasons to pause and reflect on a world transformed. What is available if seven billion of us embraced the truth of sufficiency? If we treasured interdependence, transparency, sharing and love, and then measured these in a profound way… What kind of world will the eight billionth person find when he or she arrives?

What actions are you willing to take now that would have you say yes, “I’ll take any seat on this ship?”