After my friend, Joe Shymanski’s memorial service this past September, I found a bit of comfort one morning writing about one of his favorite poems, Desiderata. A handful of weeks later, I’m seeking comfort in the same way after my Father's passing on November 20th, 2023. It's been a rough fall grieving both of these [...]
“Desiderata” means “things wanted or needed.” Max Ehrmann, the poem’s author was a lawyer and poet from Terre Haute, Indiana, which happens to be my father’s home town. (NOTE: See component to this post -- a Cliff'sNOTE on The True Gentleman.) The first time I heard Desiderata (pronounced, [DI] + [ZID] + [UH] + [RAA] + [...]
Kierkegaard succeed in “turning a somersault” over his “melancholy” (what they called “depression” in his day). The “cure” was purpose, in his case -- writing -- that made the day-to-day grind of life more tolerable and livable for others. Paradoxically, that made his own life more tolerable and livable. The bottom line: Help for others [...]
From: American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress,” by Wesley Lowery Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist implicitly discusses polarities (“conundrums” or “tensions”) underlying our common conceptions of racism by probing recent surges in white-supremacist violence. The central premise of “Whitelash” is “a pull back on the rope”: “Each step toward a more [...]
On June 5, 1944, more than 5,000 ships waited to transport more than 150,000 soldiers to France before daybreak the following morning. General Dwight D. Eisenhower hoped these troops would push the German troops back across Europe. Eisenhower knew the fight to take Normandy would be brutal. The beaches these troops would assault were tangled [...]
Created as a nonprofit social change think tank in 2017, the Institute for the Polarities of Democracy joins the tools and processes of decades of polarity approach development with the basic principles of democracy drawn from centuries of literature about freedom and governance under one unifying Polarities of Democracy theory, which the Institute uses to [...]
Walter Cannon suggested emotions originate in the brain and work their way into the body. William James theorized emotions originate in the body, get perceived in the brain, and we form stories to explain them. Welcome to the Cannon-James debate, ya’ll! Summaries of the two points of view appear at the end of this note, [...]
(Cliff Kayser of Polarity Partnerships, LLC is provides this summary w/additions from an August article in FORBES by Roger Trap.) So complex is the modern business environment that leaders are confronting paradoxes on a regular basis. They want to protect their core business at the same time as innovating for the future; they are looking [...]
(Cliff Kayser of Polarity Partnerships, LLC provides this summary w/additions from an August 2022 article that appeared in NEWSWEEK by colleagues Marianne Lewis and Wendy Smith.) Today's world is becoming increasingly fractured. Confirmation bias abounds where people stay within safe circles of friends and colleagues who agree with them, and the opinions they hear mirror [...]
(Cliff Kayser of Polarity Partnerships, LLC provides this summary w/additions from an August 2022 article in FastCompany by colleagues Marianne Lewis and Wendy Smith.) How can adopting ‘both/and thinking’ to move beyond a simple yet often destructive formula and develop more creative and productive solutions. While we want the best of home and work, too [...]