Where there is life, there is change
I vaguely remember from secondary school biology that all living things change in response to their environment. If the environment changes and the thing doesn’t change with it then the thing isn’t alive.
Whilst pausing and reflecting over the Christmas and New Year break, I felt a nudge to expect lots of change this year and to adapt by becoming more “agile”. One of my short journal entries reads: “Become able to respond quickly to opportunity and need. But also don’t fill the pauses with stuff, recognise them and use them for rest”.
The term “agile” is part of my engineer’s geek vocabulary. Wikipedia defines it as “… iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams … adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach … rapid and flexible response to change”.
I lived this stuff when I worked as an engineer. I coached others in it. But how does that apply to me now as I manage projects in the voluntary sector and coordinate teams of volunteers? Unsurprisingly, quite a lot.
We’ve not even reached the end of January and everything is changing rapidly. Opportunities are opening up for the various organisations and projects I’m involved in. New growing pains are emerging. “New” issues are coming to my attention and I’m learning “new” things. Networks are growing and changing. There’s a shifting emphasis from output at the desk to input into groups of people. It’s getting harder to schedule time for desk work, and it’s becoming more likely that desk work will be severely interrupted.
Which is good. I want to invest myself into people, not paper.
But it’s also hard. The part of me that associates peace with being in control and having some predictability is having the odd grumble. The part of me that remembers Chronic Fatigue is a little scared of becoming over-busy. The part of me that likes to please people is not too happy at the thought of a backlog of unfulfilled past good intentions. All of these voices have varying degrees of validity but they all need to find a new way to be heard. They don’t need to be silenced. But they do need to mature with me.
I find vision and courage in the account of Abraham in the Bible. God called Abraham out of a dead-end situation into a growing, life-giving situation. However, that call was not to a revealed final comfortable place, but “to the land that I will show you”. In other words, it was an invitation into a lifetime of discovery and growth, to live in ways that we might describe in the 21st century as “agile”, and a state of existence which any school biology student would instantly recognise as “living”.
