On Lost & Found
What if you lost everything?
David Hoffman is a documentary film maker. This four minute clip from TED tells his story of losing every in a fire, nine days before his talk.
As I write this, I’m also listening to the unfolding tragedy of the Italian earthquake with hundreds of people dead and lives destroyed.
And behind that, there’s the on-going distressing rumble of people losing jobs as economies struggle to flow.
There’s something important, delicate, shocking about these reminders of our fragility and our mortality. It stops us from the rush into busy-ness and the ordinary rush of life, and forces us to face some important questions.
Hoffman asks one of them early on: “Am I my things?”
At the moment, I think I know the answer to that one, but that query opens up the door to ask something different:
“What’s most precious to me? And how am I nurturing or looking after that?”
It reminds me of how few things really matter to me and how many people really do.
(Looks like I’ll be spending some of today on the phone.)
What have you found?
In the same TED video, Hoffman repeats a couple of times a mantra that has obviously helped him cope with his loss:
“You gotta make something good out of something bad.”
I can’t really argue with that. The new-ish disciplines of change such as Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Psychology and Positive Deviance all talk about finding what’s good and amplifying it.
And I’d also cast the net a little wider.
I want to ask myself: “Am I learning from this? “Am I noticing what I need to notice?”
Here’s what I’m learning about myself.
Here’s what I’m learning about the world.
And knowing that, what really matters?
Where’s the wisdom for me to find in today, today?
Tags: David Hoffman, found, lost, TED
