The Hammock Papers: Revolution.

30 April 2023

Revolution.

Ari Weinzweig on dignity ...

No Friend but the Mountains is an exploration of the best and worst of human behavior. Fear and fighting back, cruelty and kindness. Human frailty and fate. Existential exploration, agony, anger, and an attempt to understand. For me, it’s ultimately about a determination to seek dignity in the face of all odds. Tofighian calls No Friend but the Mountains “horrific surrealism.” Writer Richard Flanagan says the book “can rightly take its place on the shelf of world prison literature,” alongside prose like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, or Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. I’ve come to believe Boochani’s book could be a 21st-century companion to Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning—both men faced the worst of human horror, but found a way to fight back, not through violence, but through finding meaning and dignity. In November of 2019, Boochani was finally freed and allowed to travel to New Zealand where he was later awarded residency. After six years in a prison camp, freedom, he said, meant being able to walk down the street as he liked and listening to music.

Grace Lee Boggs—who passed away at the age of 95 in 2015—asks, “What do we mean by revolution? … It is hard to struggle for something that you have not yet tried to define and name.” The idea of diligently making revolutions of dignity in our workplaces is at least an attempt, my attempt, to “define and name” a practical and powerful answer to Grace Lee Boggs’ question. Making dignity a daily practice in all directions would go a long way to making the world—and our organizations—better places to be a part of. Like all concepts, the initial idea of a revolution of dignity, though, is the easy part. It's the implementation that’s more challenging. Not just trying it once or twice or experimenting here and there with the idea. Rather, to me, this is about a consistent, long-term, commitment to acting with dignity, day in and day out, over and over again, over a long period of time until it becomes an integral part of how we show up in the world.

Weinzweig's Six Elements of Dignity ...

Honor the essential humanity of the person we interact with: Steer clear of stereotypes and assumptions
Be authentic in our interactions (without acting out): Be clear and direct, even when dealing with difficult issues.
Give everyone a meaningful say: Actively include as many people as possible, to invite opinions, and engage in caring conversations.
Begin every interaction with positive beliefs: Opt for empathy and compassion even for those who are doing things that are anathema to us.
Commit to helping everyone get to greatness: The revolution of dignity work calls on us to look in the other direction—the commitment in the context of dignity is to help everyone else we work with to get to greatness. Greatness, I’ll add, as they define it.
Create a sense of meaningful equity: The weak always consider themselves powerful when they see others suffering.

No comments:

Post a Comment

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL