Men and women

When men say they cant understand women, they mean they cant understand their emotions or emotional experience of the world. The truth is the best a man can do is study cause and effect and gain understanding that way. Women are physically wired to experience emotions in a much more rich and colorful way than men so it's not possible for a man to experience emotions the way they do.

Yin and Yang

The lessons of the yin yang symbol.

1.. Light and dark, order and chaos, man and woman, pragmatism and creativity,  you would think are polar opposites but  they are both equally capable of extremes.  Pragmatism for instance, just has a delayed effect, the solution that works right now and is simple, is often not the solution that works in 6 months or under different circumstances at which point chaos ensues to bring about a necessary correction. Both yin and yang when they go to extremes need the other to bring them back to the Tao, hence each side has the seed of the other in it.

2.  Chaos, left untamed,  is the dragon that will devour you.   Order, left unchecked, is the prison that renders you useless and unable to change in response to an ever changing world, a world which will also devour you.

In the yin yang symbol, the Tao is the the line that weaves its way between chaos and totalitarianism sometimes leaning one way sometimes the other but never becoming part of one or the other. Always maintaining a form of balance, not unswayed completely,  yielding and acknowledging the dominant force of the time but also always striving to prevent the extreme, bringing us back to the center even momentarily before we are pulled one way or the other, like the supple tree that bends in the wind so as not to break.

The Tao acknowledges good and bad, light and dark and knows they are not all good and not all bad and have the seeds of the other in them and that BOTH are necessary as the energy they provide propels us forward, the Tao is shown as a wave, like an oscillating sound wave, harnessing the energy of both and moving forward in one direction.  Like a snake, the life force of the universe, represented by the tao, uses the constant energy required to move right to left and visa versa to propel itself forwards. Without the struggle to come back to the center there,  is no progress, humanity would die, the faint ember would go out and there would only be darkness.

Applying the Tao to life gives a certain amount of perspective and understanding of why things happen in life happen, on a personal or global scale, and with that knowledge comes a certain peace of mind, that the universe always attempts to bring about balance, and that it is always a necessary struggle, as the struggle is the journey and the power that moves us ever forward to a better future.

Some reasons why big companies just cant get their sh@t together

I've been involved in lots of types of businesses and see the same bad decisions made thru lazy thinking, emotion and unilateral decision making,  especially in project teams where the decisions can be far reaching and long term.

Examples I have seen. The project manager who says "let's not give them that option, it's too hard and they dont deserve it anyway".  Being both unilateral and letting their emotional baggage influence their thinking.

The senior technical people discussing an issue at the coffee machine, making a decision when they haven't examined all the options and certainty haven't done a pros and cons analysis or involved those affected by it.  Instead they indulge in an "infomal" discussion, they allow themselves to be lazy and unstructured, a recipe for a bad decision.

I see this constantly and it makes me sick to the stomach. The companies bottom line and front line staff suffer and thru them the general public too. 

In my experience,  companies that dont engage in laziness and power tripping of this nature are the exception not the rule.

If you see it, I encourage you to speak up, although it's hard to take on the elephant in the room without being trodden on.

A fear worth having

I overheard people in a cafe recently discussing what their fears were, things came up like being afraid of starting something you couldn't finish,  wanting something but not being able to afford it.  We are evolutions greatest creation, apart from the natural fears that keep us safe from physical harm, there is only one fear that should drive us, the fear that we might die without having fulfilled our potential.