Reflection rewrite

Sometimes my writing goes easy, and sometimes it is a torturous affair. Writing a reflection about collaboration this afternoon for an independent study on eco-theology was an experience with the latter. Not only did my musing take what seemed like forever, I am convinced that when it was all said and done, I got caught up with the details and skimmed through what might have been the depth in the exploration.

I concluded that collaboration was staying balanced on ever shifting ground. It is a concoction that is forever changing.

Now, I’m thinking that it’s a bit like playing volleyball. With volleyball, at least the rules that I played by in high school and briefly in an adult league some 16 years ago, is that the ball had to be touched by at least two people, optimally three, before it could be hit over the net. So even if there was good shot that would send the ball to some unguarded spot on the court, you had to set up the ball for another player. You had to risk getting the ball over the net, by placing it where another could hit it.

That’s collaboration. It involves trust in your teammates.

Second, collaboration demands that you put aside your own ego and need for control, accomplishment and distinction. Consider the volleyball shot again. Can you really take credit for the point if your contribution is setting up the spike for someone else to nail down? Not really. You can say that you assisted, but that’s the extent of it. Can you really be assured that your teammate will get the job done? Letting go is a really hard thing to do, especially if you feel you are responsible for the win or for getting the job done.

So collaboration is about teamwork, placing the responsibility on the team as a whole and runs contrary to our postmodern individualist mindset of “I am all I need.” It involves creating a mechanism for shared leadership and working toward a shared vision. It involves trusting the collective process and letting go of the final outcome.

It’s actually pretty scary stuff, and terribly exciting when it works right. It’s exciting when it works right because it is new and uncontrolled. It’s invigorating when it works right because it is at its root an act of creation and innovation. It’s satisfying when it works right because it has the capacity to be complex or amazingly simple in ways that reveals themselves as subtle transformation of thought or action.

It’s amazing when it works right because it’s a paradigm shift that speaks to a more inclusive whole that has at its root space for all. It’s a methodology that, quite simply, we need to practice.

Not unlike redoing or rewriting a reflection.