Calling the Island

Transcript of this video:

I’ve been thinking about an article about Polynesian

navigators, the people who could sail from Polynesia

to Aotearoa New Zealand long

before the invention of sextants, never mind GPS.

And their practice of wayfinding was based on being

highly attentive

to all the small signs in the environment around them.

So for example, they knew

that birds would probably fly towards land towards the end

of the day and away from it at the beginning,

they understood

that there were subtle differences in the reflections on the

bottom of clouds if they were over land compared

to if they were over water.

They became minutely attuned to all the patterns

of the winds and the currents around them.

And they called their practice Calling the Island to you

because they saw themselves as being at a still point.

And what they were aiming to do in navigating was

to draw the land towards them.

And I’ve been mentioning this as a metaphor

to quite a few people recently,

and in nearly all cases, you get a sense of an intake

of breath when I mention Calling the Island.

What I like about a good metaphor, it’s not

that it necessarily gives a clear explanation of something

to someone, but it does a good job

of slightly disrupting a worldview.

And you get that sense of people hearing this

and having to think of it differently

about what it might mean.

And I get a sense there’s something appealing

about this idea.

So I invite you to make your own meaning of it,

but I’m gonna share mine, which is, I think it,

it’s satisfying to me

because it counters the prevailing way of operating,

I think, in the West, which is to be very goal orientated.

So we see, if we

have an idea of land that we want

to go towards, we then have to strive to reach it

where it sounds like the Polynesians were more attuned

to being in the present in a way that draws it towards them.

Now, this might get confused with what some people call,

call the Law of Attraction, which creates this idea

that if you just wish strongly enough to be a millionaire,

you will magically draw that towards you.

I think that’s bogus.

And also I think it creates enormous amounts

of dissatisfaction, anxiety

because that kind of goal orientation leaves us

uncomfortable and agitated, and I think often addicted.

Whereas Calling the Island suggests a rather

different way of operating.

I talk in my book sometimes about

how modern marketing methods tend to make us attach

to future objects, to homes, to holidays, to cars,

that we may buy, a better version of ourselves.

So what it actually does is it takes our imaginative sense

of what we could be

and attaches it to some object that we have to strive for

and pay for instead of being able

to experience something in the moment, something

that we create for ourselves in the present.

And in my work, I often find

that the most productive insights in groups happen

when we are paying attention to what we are doing now.

And I know in many of my videos, I allude to this idea

that the future is being created while we are busy

making other plans.

And Calling the Island as a metaphor invites us not

to do that all the time,

but to bring our attention into the present.

And instead of fantasising too much about the future,

to be asking ourselves in effect, what is it that,

what I’m doing now, what I’m thinking now,

the way I am operating now…

What is it I’m calling to myself by being like this?

Photo by Joseph Barrientos on Unsplash