Best of All Autumn

I share what has caught my attention lately. Enjoy.

Lin Yutang on the beauty of autumn:

“I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age.

It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death.”

Source: My Country and My People via James Clear

“Much like we find ourselves by getting lost, Iyer suggests, we inhabit the world more fully by mindfully vacating its mayhem:

Going nowhere … isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.” via Maria Popova

On the Value of Walking

“Walking is a smart way to experience a whole host of physical, mental and psychological benefits. Introducing it into your daily routine will help you benefit long-term in your cardiovascular and aerobic fitness goals. It will help extend your lifespan and help you meet your weightloss goals.” — Darebee

On Reimagining Remote Methods

“Situated Immersion: Instead of defining the “field” as somewhere to go spatially, the field becomes a practice, a way of relating to people, places, and activities. Home and field come into new relation, just as “private” and “public” distinctions are reworked on digital platforms.

Situating fieldwork means locating one’s self in the research, building on existing ties or seeking new field sites based on how and where you are — whether or not that entails geographic proximity. As with autoethnography, situatedness risks limiting the communities researchers can access, but can equally offer new resources for understanding lived experience.”

“(…) Being immersed in remote fieldwork meant switching attention between Zoom and good-night hugs, just as my interlocutors negotiated boundaries of digital and co-present, public and private.

Situating research in these partial connections, to embrace fragmented, patchwork methods, means rethinking remoteness not as across distance but as potentially enabling new forms of mutuality and care.” — Jordan Kraemer

On Distributed Work

“I just wish every single executive, their teams, and from there onwards the entire employee workforce!, would take such workshop to understand the network dynamics, the necessary digital skills & capabilities we would need to acquire and excel at, so that we can then focus on those enterprise community building programmes to thrive in this brave new world we have just entered with distributed work.” — Luis Suarez

On Community & Engagement

“Community is much more than belonging to something; it’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter.” — Brian Solis

 

“Healthy engagement resists instrumentalization of persons, despite efficiency imperatives: engaged people are genuinely “seen” by their peers and their hierarchy, respected in their diversity and in their free will. Healthy engagement rises in environments that favor cohesion, offer tangible support, focus energy towards the same direction (through buy-in, not coercion), over time and in action.

Engagement calls for reciprocal and protective leadership – leadership understood not as a title or a function but as a dynamic partnership process.”

At a time when civic and professional engagement seem to be a response to many contemporary challenges, this issue raises the urgent and vital question of our practices of command and leadership.” — Céline Schillinger

 

“There are four types of conversations that are broadly applicable to any situation, and that are especially necessary for harnessing a group’s thinking during adaptive challenges:

1) conversations for relationship-building,

2) conversations for mutual understanding,

3) conversations for possibilities,

and 4) conversations for action.

We are using the term “conversation” to mean, the interaction that occurs when each person is actively working to understand the meaning the other is trying to convey.” — Nancy Dixon

On Activating Strengths

“When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” — Audre Lorde

“(…) How will your strengths interplay with your lived experiences?

What will shift for you, those you serve, and your communities of practice?” —Shirley F. Rivera

On Unleashing Your Community Potential