The Call of Desire

Background Series: Spectacle of the Real

This post was first published in 2014.

DESIRE

The physical, emotional, or intellectual longing that is directed towards something or someone that is wanted.

Sarah Coakley, PhD.

Cambridge University

Desire is a longing that bridges our inner life with the outer world. It is a longing for connection, completion, and relationship.

Desire is a longing for fulfillment or achievement. It is a longing that is born in emptiness, frustration, or loss. It is the feeling that comes from a missed opportunity or the sense of unrealized potential when a project ends suddenly, or when love shared goes unrequited. 

This longing is born in our experience of change. It is something we feel inside. It is our inner voice telling us that more could be done or needs to be done.

Desire seeks out that which is beyond our grasp today, but maybe not tomorrow. Our desires define who we are.

Desire precedes and is greater than our goals, strategies, plans, and intentions.

Desire is that deep core within us that we identify as what we love, for those people and causes to whom we give ourselves with passion and sacrifice. It is that place within us where human flourishing finds its source and motivation.

I've seen this desire in people for a long time. Early on, it was that "thing" that emerged when a group began to have a vision for their organization or community. They are passionate about their cause. They see it, feel it, taste it, and smell it as this movie-like visualization of an idea that comes to life and compels them to invest in their shared life to bring it to fulfillment.

Passionate desire is a longing for something better that engages the whole person, mind, body, and spirit. It is who we are at our most central, deep, and intimate level.

The desire for wholeness is born within us. Philosophers, theologians, motivational experts, storytellers, and artists have spoken about desire, passion, and completeness in many and various ways. They know, as we know, that this is the nature of our world. Broken, incomplete, unjust, raw, untouched potential, filled with passionate visions of the good which touch us down deep inside, drawing us out into a life that is better, more complete, and whole. This isn't a new story. It is rather the oldest story of human endeavor taking on urgency for each of us, every day.

To follow our desire, we must think for ourselves, act as responsible persons, and live as the embodiment of that desire. Out of this commitment, we discover a new life and the potential for completeness.

Philosopher James K.A. Smith writes,

“… we are primarily desiring animals rather than merely thinking things ... what makes us who we are, the kind of people we are – is what we love. More specifically, our identity is shaped by what we ultimately love or what we love as ultimate – what, at the end of the day, gives us a sense of meaning, purpose, understanding, and orientation to our being-in-the-world. What we desire or love ultimately is a (largely implicit) vision of what we hoped for, what we think the good life looks like. The vision of the good life shapes all kinds of actions and decisions and habits that we undertake, often without our thinking about it.”

The challenge is to not get lost in the rush of emotion that comes from passion.  We need to treat our passions with maturity, respect, and understanding.  Our passions have the power to create goodness as well as to destroy the very desires at the heart of our passion. 

We, therefore, need to understand the source of our desire. We need to find a way to create patterns of thought and practices of behavior that allow us to see how to bridge the deep reservoir of meaning within us with the world of change that envelops us like the sea does its fish.

What Defines Us?

This whole line of thought began for me many months ago with my post, What Defines Us? 

There I referred to the influence of my family on my sense of identity. In that reflection, I recognized that my story is a part of a larger one, going back at least six generations, and in a specific instance much more. Choices made by various members of my family that led to historic, life-changing moments in time, are today, influencing how I make my choices, and today, are contributing to defining who I am. Their story grounds me in my own unfolding story.

My story unfolds, just as yours is, and every person we encounter. We each have a story.  The closer we get to understanding it, the stronger our sense of who we are as individuals become. My story has not been swallowed up by my family. Instead, I found myself at a young age jettisoned out into the world with the freedom to follow a path that matched my Three Desires.

Self-knowledge is not just about one's self, but about all those people and events that have influenced us. They are part of our unfolding story. This is why, for me, life-long friendship has always been important. There are no cast-off relationships, for each encounter, whether for five minutes or five decades is a chapter in my unfolding story.

Most people I know are not clear about their story. They know parts of it. Like sound bites. "Remember where you were when the Twin Towers fell?" We remember snippets of people and impressions of events. We need to remember these events so we can remember the people. We need to reconstruct events that have been instrumental in our lives in order to remember how we responded then. To know this over time, to reconstruct our past can lead to seeing patterns of attitudes and behaviors that either helped us advance in life or were obstacles that held us back.

Begin with the events, look for patterns, then create a story. Weave in the Three Desires. Show how what took place reveals the things that matter to you. When we know the values that are most important to us, and we see how those values live in the best of our relationships, or their absence is the reason for the worst of those relationships, then begin to see our story.

When the story begins to be clear, then we begin to see those times when we felt at our best. Identifying that moment in time when I was my happiest self is typically one of those revealing situations. We may see for the first time the impact that we want to have through our life and work. The point when we can define the difference we want to make with our lives that matters, is the point when the story has come together.

The point became clear to me during the Questions & Answers session following a conference presentation on leadership. I had been speaking on the Circle of Impact. One of the participants asked me, "What's the impact you want to have?" Up to that point, I would have said, I want to help leaders build better organizations. Instead, at that moment, my desire for impact became crystal clear to me. The Three Desires melded into one, and I responded …

"I want to see people who don't see themselves as leaders, taking initiative to make a difference that matters. I want to be present for that moment when they make a turn in their lives, to step out and take leadership initiative. There is no more powerful and exciting moment for me than when a person changes their life to become the person they've always wanted to be."

My story unfolded into a new wholeness. My philosophy about leadership was already well-developed. My desire for happy, healthy relationships had been born into me as a child, and now, it was clear to me the difference my life was to make. It was then that I realized that I had my story.

Each time a person takes initiative to do something whose impetus has risen up from within them, that person is being an impact leader. They are leading, not as a positional leader within an institutional structure, but rather as an individual human person.

This call to lead comes from within us and is stimulated by our engagement with various settings of our life and work. The call to lead through one's own initiative is born in the three desires that define us as individuals.

The desire for personal meaning roots us in values that define and guide us in life.

The desire for happy, healthy relationships provides a social environment where we find not only affirmation and love, but also the challenge and encouragement to reach beyond the edge of social conformity.

The desire to make a difference that matters leads to becoming agents of positive change.

These desires constitute a call upon our lives. They beckon us to cross over the threshold from hanging back, going along with the crowd to stepping forward to leadership.

This is not a call from someone else, or some group asking for us to take a responsible position of leadership in their organization. Even though it may align well with the opportunities that others present to us. It is in knowing what our desires are, and especially, the difference we want to make with our lives that begs us to walk across the house that is our life, cross the threshold of the door that has been opened for us, and enter a space that from which a new story of lives unfolds.

Initiative is born in our own desire to cross over from feelings and notions of what is important to actions that validate and confirm the importance of our values, our relationships, and the desire we have for a better world.

This is why all leadership begins with personal initiative, and why leadership in this sense is open to every human being.

In order to embrace our desires, and, move towards taking initiative, we must confront reality as it exists right in front of us. The hyper-reality presented to us in all forms of media is an alternative reality that is many situations is meant to divert us from seeing the real world as it is.

If we are serious about making a difference, we must develop a healthy skepticism of all those who identify themselves as advocates for one position or ideology or another. To lead requires us to abandon narrow special interests in favor of looking at the larger realities that affect us.

The Three Desires

Over the years, as I've listened to what people say and have observed what they do, both in private and organizational settings, I've seen that this inscrutable thing called desire is always present. It is evident in the passions and visions that people have for their future. It is also evident in their response to situations where they are frustrated, disappointed, anxious, or angry.

I eventually came to see that this desire from down deep within us is a mix of three desires. I've concluded that this is the spiritual core of our humanity, or, what we mean by our human spirit. It is the center of our individual humanity that is the platform for the life and relationships we nurture in the outer world. It is what is celebrated, what elicits tears, cheers, and commitment to making sacrificial gifts of art, wealth, and time. From my own experience, I see this as the mark of divine intention upon our humanity. Nourish these desires, and we see why we exist, and what our lives are to mean in practice and difference. Our desires carry that kind of singular importance.

The Three Desires guide how we function in our work, our communities, and our families. Our desires are revealed when we plan, in how we address problems, in our celebration and mourning of life's transitions, when we succeed or fail, and, in how we go through the changes and transitions of our lives and work.

What are these desires and how are we to understand their function in our lives?

Our Three Desires are

for Personal Meaning, for Happy, Healthy Relationships,

and, to Make a Difference That Matters.

The desire for personal meaning roots us in values that define and guide us in life.

The desire for happy, healthy relationships provide a social environment where we find not only affirmation and love, but also the challenge and encouragement to reach beyond the edge of social conformity.

The desire to make a difference that matters leads to become agents of positive change.

We desire for our lives to have personal meaning.

Our minds sort through our experiences; sift through the sensory data we are receiving; categorize the information that we absorb; identify patterns of behavior and recurrence of ideas; then, our minds establish order, perspective, understanding, and finally meaning.

Most of the time, all of this takes place just below the level of our conscious awareness. Learning from childhood onward to think this way becomes second nature. Physicist and philosopher Michael Polanyi describes it as tacit knowledge. It is that knowledge that we know, but we don't know how we know it. We just know it. It is learned in the experience of life.

We think this way, finding meaning in our lives and in the world until there are too many discontinuities. Increasingly, in the modern world, these discontinuities are markers of societal and intellectual change on a grand scale. All the meaningful continuities of the past, of belief in God, in the goodness of humankind, in the power of government to do good, in freedom, opportunity, and progress. Each of these points of personal and societal meaning is in transition. It doesn't mean that the foundational truths are changing, but rather how they function in the world is changing.

Personal meaning is not just a set of intellectual or spiritual beliefs that are important to us. This sense of meaning rises from down deep in us. It is not just an individual, but a shared feeling. I've seen it in working with businesses. There is something that draws these people together. Some vision or desire compels them to join their lives together to venture forth in some great endeavor.

A vision of this sort, as my Circle of Impact Leadership system conceives, is formed by ideas. They provide a core belief or meaning for us to make the commitment to work together towards goals that we define as our organizational purpose. A vision, then, is a picture of shared meaning that is acted upon by the people who work within an institutional system to create impact.

We articulate this order by telling stories. We share our opinions, make decisions and practice ethical discernment because of the clarification of the values that form our desires or are the product of our desire for personal meaning.

We act on what is personally meaningful, by defining our purpose, elevating values that underlie our purpose to a central place in our relationships with others, and, then, together, implement a vision that leads to the impact that is a fulfillment of that which is meaningful to us.

Unless there is constant attention to sustaining a culture of founding values, future generations only see those values as relatively meaningless, and possibly, irrelevant cultural practices.* In other words, Personal Meaning is not private meaning, but meaning that is shared within the social context of our lives.

We desire to have happy, healthy relationships.

In a previous post in this series, Fragmented Boundaries, I write,

I am who I am, always have been, always will be. Though I live in the external world, I am who I am, in an always changing interaction between this person who I am and the world in which I live. Therefore, I am always becoming the person who I am right now.

Crossing the boundary from our inner life to the outer world requires an engagement with that world. It is in our relationships with one another that we find our most tangible connection to the outer world. Let me describe what I see.

Recently, I took a salsa-making class. In this class was a retired couple who had been married for six years. As we prepared our salsas, they talked about all the cooking classes that they had attended, from Santa Fe to Boston to Paris, and soon, in Tuscany.

I asked them, "Which one of you was the foodie who got the other involved? They said, "Neither. When we got married, we decided to do something that neither of us had ever done. We took a cooking class, and found out that we both loved it."

What was it that they loved? Sharing the experience of learning, of being creative, and establishing a whole new circle of friends in their hometown.

In the context of their relationship, individual desires, long dormant, came to life. Joy and meaning, and a life that matters resulted. For not only has their experience provided them a context for a happy, healthy marriage, it has also brought them into relationship with people that they may never have had the opportunity to know.   

We are social beings, even the shyest, most introverted, and individualistic ones of us. It isn't that we want to hang out with people all the time. It is that our engagement with people, more than in any other facet of our lives, is where our inner selves meet the outer world. To speak, to know, to share, or to love, requires something from within us to form into words or actions that communicate to the other person, who translates what they see and hear into something that touches their inner self.

We are not random objects bumping into one another, like billiard balls on a pool table. We are purposeful, desiring beings who seek connection with other purposeful, desiring beings.

Our shared connections make us tribal beings as well. We gather around the things we love that release our passion in life. My tribes are the church, social entrepreneurs, organizational and community leaders, people who desire change, the Red Sox Nation, Tar Heel basketball fans, jazz and classical music aficionados, lovers of history, philosophy, and culture, and travelers through landscapes of mountains, oceans, and open spaces of the world.   

We learn in the context of our relationships. It is a living context where our inner lives touch the outer world in a less mechanistic, more organic way. To know someone, to interact with them, requires us to live in a shared story of meaning and expectation. This is true for our oldest friends and family, as well as the person that we have just met.

Our human relationships are the embodiment of particular values that are intimate, social and practical.

A happy relationship is one free of doubt, open to vulnerability, peaceful, affirming, with genuine compatibility, and love.

A healthy relationship is built upon the mutual practices of openness, respect, trust, honesty, and responsibility.

There are two distinct contexts for our relationships. One is personal, the other professional.

Happiness and health in our relationships with friends, lovers, spouses, children, parents, and in-laws function in a long historical arch. Live with someone for ten or fifty years, and our lives are bound together in ways that are invisible and continually present. We nurture the health and happiness of long-term relationships by giving our attention to the core desires that we each have individually and those we share. It is by this daily practice that we produce happiness and health. The ancients believed that happiness and health came as the virtues of life were mastered. This is the intention that is needed in our closest, most intimate relationships.

A relationship between two people is between individual persons. Each is defined by its own distinct values. Each is defined by what they desire in a relationship with the other. Together they grow into an understanding of the difference their lives are to make. When there is compatibility and a sharedness in each of these three parts of our lives, then happiness and health can grow.

In the professional sphere, our relationships are less personal, more detached, and more difficult to be qualified by the terms happy and healthy. Modern organizations have become increasingly dehumanizing, unreceptive to human interaction (communication), and lacking the supervisory space to allow for the expression of individual initiative to create a collaborative environment for relationships.

As the old, dying models of the 20th-century hierarchy fail to adapt to the rapid introduction of technologies for individual autonomy and collaboration, resistance to change grows. Defense of institutional positions of power and influence creates a weakness in the operating structures of organizations, making them less agile and more prone to corruption and violation of founding values.

Outside of many of these corporate structures are networks of relationships that are spontaneous, open, and collaborative. Leadership is not directed and delegated but shared and facilitated. A network of relationships is marked by the practical presence of shared values, responsibility, and impact. The structure of organizations rises from the purpose and desired impact of their work together, and by design is agile and adaptive to contexts of rapid, discontinuous change.

The weakness of these networks of relationships is that it is difficult to scale and sustain the work of these kinds of relationships. As a result, they need a structure within which to work that can accommodate the energy and ambiguity that exists in these relationships. The challenge of hierarchy is nimbleness for change. Networks of relationships emerge out of the discovery that we - WE - share similar desires that call us together for achieving impact.  These structures need one another to counter their inherent weaknesses.

We desire to make a difference that matters.

The desire to make a difference that matters is the most fundamental expression of human desire. It is what we do, and the effect of what we do that we see as validating the value of our lives.

For some people, the obsessive need to prove their worth in achievement is the extreme expression of this most human desire. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the lack of desire towards achievement or fulfillment is the product of the weaknesses or absence of the other two desires.

To make a difference is to create impact.

To create impact is to take some idea or value and create a living expression of it.

If there is a forward movement through the three desires, it is towards making a difference that matters.  It is the most logical place where achievement and completion are realized.

There is some satisfaction in finding what is personally meaningful, as well as in having happy, healthy relationships. But it is this third desire which brings wholeness to our lives. If values strengthen the mind, and friendship enriches our physical life, it is making a difference through the expression of values in our relationships that brings the three parts of ourselves to fulfillment.

As a result, it is what we do, create and the impact we have which is the greatest expression of human spirit, and where wholeness is realized.

The Leadership of Making a Difference That Matters

Early on in my exploration of leadership, I came to see that all leadership begins with personal initiative. This initiative is specifically an act of decision in response to an inner desire for change. In effect, leadership is a form of our inner selves' engagement with the outer world.

This perspective is vastly different from views that are hierarchical or inspirational. Neither view places the source of leadership in human desire. Instead, these views see leadership as either a position of responsibility within a management system or, a kind of sloganistic pumping up of one's emotions to do various kinds of work.

My early inspiration for seeing leadership as a function of human desire towards creating change came from Peter Drucker, one of the preeminent management thinkers of the 21st. century. His book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, was the spark that led to the creation of my own leadership consultancy a decade later. Drucker writes about entrepreneurs.

“Entrepreneurs see change as the norm and as healthy. Usually, they do not bring about the change themselves. But – and this defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship – the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”

Drucker's view from three decades ago remains true today. Change is the norm. Effective leaders, as well as managers, learn to work within the context of change. This requirement is now no longer limited to people in positions of leadership, but the necessity for each individual, regardless of their place, standing, or position in life or work. To respond to one's desires is to accept, not a leadership role, but a call to take initiative to make a difference that matters.

The Call of Desire

Desire rises from within us as a longing for connection, completion, and fulfillment. It is expressed in the desire for personal meaning, happy, healthy relationships, and, to make a difference that matters in one's life. This movement of desire bridges our inner selves with the outer world. When we act upon our desires to make a difference that matters, we are exhibiting the character of leadership.

Our desires, therefore, are a call upon our lives. A call to step out to make a difference in a way that fulfills one's desires.

The Call of Desire is a call to meaning, friendship, wholeness, and impact in life.

When we respond to this call, we are deciding to change not only our outer world but also ourselves. When we do, we turn away from the world of the Spectacle of the Real with its artificial hyper-reality. We claim a reality of direct experience that can be touched, created, and replicated. This is how we reclaim the real for our lives and for the people and places where our lives make a difference that matters.

The call begins within, must be answered, and lived out in the world of change. As a result, our lives take on the character of an unfolding story. It is this story that I'll explore in my next post.