Action Not Reflection

After thinking about this through the morning, I couldn't help but be struck by how different the postures of Six Apart and Microsoft were on this panel. Mena Trott made a joke in her intro about how her company was relegated to "evil" status following the license blowup, and that she was glad to be on a panel with M$oft where some, I'm paraphrasing, the negativity would be spread around. But I think that's exactly what's wrong about the industry, we are collectively living in the past where we're all good and M$oft is bad. What I saw on this panel is Microsoft demonstrating what they are doing to be open and transparent about their business, while Six Apart was there talking about how they screwed up and some of the things they could have done, maybe, to not screw up so badly. Maybe that's why M$oft is so damn successful in a number of different businesses, they are a company of action not reflection. - from Jeff Nolan's write-up of the business transparency panel at BlogOn conference

This reminded me of my rehashing post - and the Mark Cuban snippet at the end - an excellent example of "dying to the past." In case you don't click over...Anthony De Mello in One Minute Wisdom recounts a story of a disciple asking his master:

Why should I drop my past? Not all of it is bad.

The past should be dropped not because it is bad but because it is dead.

Got me to thinking that a few of you might think all this talk about awareness means doing a whole bunch navel-gazing around old wounds, hindsight analysis and rehashing. Nothing could be further from what I'm driving at.

There's various practices but it's all real-time stuff. If you're holding onto a lot of past baggage - including resentment, old hurts, anger and even expectations, the intention to drop this clutter and lighten your load. We're talking self-observation in real-time, 100% vitally living in the present, dying to the past, and acting from a clear free mind instead of reacting out of conditioning. (Join the email group at awareness-practice-subscribe at yahoogroups dot com.)