Life is an Off-Road Journey

Do you remember what you did when you first bought a new game? Open the box, look at the game board, pick your game piece and quickly scan the rule book to figure out what were the essential things you had to know in order to start playing.   However, it is only in the act of playing, losing, and playing again that the real strategy and tactics become clear.   

In the Decade Game, I have tried to give you some of the rules that have made the biggest difference for me.  These are in the form of axioms that challenge the “old game” that we, as women, have been playing “not to lose”.  The axioms, or new rules of the game, are designed to shift your thinking and feeling about what winning looks like and feels like.  You have heard me repeat many of them: 

• You can’t get there from here, but you can get here from there.

• If you are not having fun, you are playing someone else’s game

• Honor the Resistance; Resistance is futile

• There is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes

As this year draws to a close – and what a year it was – I have been thinking about how amazingly different the next decade will be for each of us, our country, our world.  So much of the conventional wisdom of the way things are and will therefore be in the future are being reimagined.

An axiom reflects the way we all understand things are.  The Decade Game axioms challenge that.  Here is a new one I have been thinking about.  

An epic life worth living is an off-road journey.

We have not been trained to live off road.  We have been taught to be linear thinkers with the future being an extrapolation of the past.  We have been trained to believe and trust in “cause and effect” – that we can trace outcomes back to what caused them.  In our family budgets and organizational plans, we build projections and predictions for what we estimate the future will hold based on a study of past and present trends. It’s not our fault.  Our brains think this way as well.

I spent decades as a world-class strategist for some of the most innovative companies and organizations helping them design approaches that created breakthroughs from the past.  I would tell all of my clients that our job was not to predict the future, but help leadership teams be better equipped rationally, politically and emotionally to embrace an unpredictable future.  I learned this from the Decade Game.

In the Decade Game cause and effect as well as a future based on the past is out the window.  Instead of predictions, we dream of what is longing to happen without needing to know how we will get there.  In fact, we don’t need to know anything other than the next move.  It is an emergent process where our dreams (our destination) and our Level 10s for each of our pillars form the scaffolding that supports whatever is longing to emerge for us, whatever the universe has in store for us that is consistent with our Stands.

An epic life is an off-road journey.  

I want to close with two excerpts from the great epic poem written by Walt Whitman, The Song of the Open Road.

The earth expanding right hand and left hand,

The picture alive, every part in its best light,

The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not wanted,

The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the road.

O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me?

Do you say Venture not—if you leave me you are lost?

Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied, adhere to me?

O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you,

You express me better than I can express myself,

You shall be more to me than my poem.

I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all free poems also,

I think I could stop here myself and do miracles,

I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me,

I think whoever I see must be happy.

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,

Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,

Listening to others, considering well what they say,

Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,

Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space,

The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine. 

I am larger, better than I thought,

I did not know I held so much goodness.

All seems beautiful to me,

I can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me I would do the same to you,

I will recruit for myself and you as I go,

I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,

I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,

Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,

Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.