19. THE RETURN—AND
VENTURING FORTH AGAIN

The incident outside the museum was a watershed in my life. It brought to my immediate attention the power of the principles that had been at play over the past eight years. By this time, my life was a series of connections with people. Making these synchronous connections had become a natural way of operating; in fact, I was unable to operate any other way. I began learning how to move with the unfolding order and to live out the principles, naturally.

Over time, I developed more sensitivity to the inner voice that was speaking to me. I found that I needed to have plenty of reflective time in order to allow the principles to operate. I did this by running early in the morning and taking time during the day, whenever I could, to reflect and listen. When I did, I found the attractiveness principle starting to operate on a regular basis in my life. In some ways, for me, it was an amazing state to live in. I had to do my work, treating it as my ultimate concern, and then simply wait expectantly in the warrior repose with acute awareness for the opportune moment—the “cubic centimeter of chance.” When the opportunity presented itself, I was required to move instantly without conscious premeditation.

Many times I didn’t fully understand the moves I made in this state until later. Very slight, deft movements at just the right time and place would have enormous consequences. Timing was crucial. When that moment came, with just the slightest gesture, all sorts of actions and results were brought into being. This is the principle of economy of means that is in evidence more and more as we learn to operate with real mastery in life.

A seemingly insignificant encounter I had just a few weeks after the incident at the museum is a good illustration of this principle. This thirty-second conversation set in motion a whole train of events that formed the entire next stage of my life.

One evening I attended a meeting of the Houston Lyceum, a group of about two dozen business and professional people from the Houston area who would meet for a couple of hours over dinner every two months to exchange ideas and learn together. Usually, the member responsible for the program brought in an interesting personality to engage in conversation with the members. On this occasion, in February 1988, a member invited Norman Duncan to explain to us the process of scenario planning used by the Royal Dutch Shell Group of companies. I had met Norm Duncan a time or two prior to this occasion, and I knew him to be a highly respected executive at Shell Oil Company, one of the Shell Group’s largest subsidiaries. He reported directly to the chief executive officer. Norm told us that evening that instead of relying on forecasts (which are invariably wrong), the Shell Group does its planning for the future through the use of decision scenarios. Scenario planning, he said, is not about making plans, but is the process whereby management teams change their mental models of the business environment and the world. In the Shell Group, scenario planning is a trigger to institutional learning. A manager’s inner model never mirrors reality, he explained—it’s always a construct. The scenario process is aimed at these perceptions inside the mind of a decision maker. By presenting other ways of seeing the world, decision scenarios give managers something very precious: the ability to re-perceive reality, leading to strategic insights beyond the mind’s reach.

The team of scenario planners in London, Norm said, included experts in economics, sociopolitics, energy, the environment, and technology. They conduct ongoing conversations with fifty or so top managers in the Shell Group and with a network of remarkable, leading-edge thinkers from around the world in many disciplines: politics, science, education, business, economics, technology, religion, and the arts. Every three years or so, they synthesize this information into two or more scenarios—stories about how the business might evolve over the coming years and decades. Considering these scenarios and their consequences provides the foundation for the Shell Group’s approach to strategic management.

We were all fascinated by Norm’s presentation. A number of the business leaders commented that this approach to strategic management had, in large part, led the Shell Group to be regarded as one of the best-managed companies in the world. The conversation that evening was lively and animated, and it lasted far longer than was intended. At the close of the conversation, Norm commented that he had been asked to join the scenario team in London to help develop and produce their current round of scenarios. He would be leaving in two weeks.

As everyone else was gathering their things to leave, I just sat there for a moment, digesting what I had heard. Then spontaneously I went over to Norm and told him how absorbing I had found his presentation and how I admired him for being selected for that new post. “Boy, would I love to do something like that sometime,” I commented. Norm smiled and thanked me. With that we shook hands, I wished him luck, and we were off in our separate directions.

It was about ten months later, in December 1988, that I received a telephone call one morning from Renata Karlin, a representative in New York of the Royal Dutch Shell Group of companies. She was calling to make an appointment to see me, but didn’t explain the purpose of her visit. I assumed it was about our program and the support that Shell Oil Company, the Group’s U.S. subsidiary, had been giving us over the years.

When we met in my office a week later, Ms. Karlin got straight to the point. She asked whether I would be willing to be considered, along with others, for a four-year assignment as the head of the Group’s worldwide scenario planning team in London. I was completely taken aback by her suggestion and told her so. We talked at length about the proposal, and I promised I would get back to her within a week.

That evening, when Mavis and I got home from work and the kids were in bed, we sat down to talk. I was excited about what had been presented—a real gift and an opportunity to learn that was unparalleled in scope. Yet, our personal life was so complex. In a way, it didn’t make sense even to discuss the possibility of moving to London. Mavis was in the midst of her residency at Baylor College of Medicine. She had made a real mark there and loved what she was doing. The very last thing that would ever cross our minds was her leaving the program. It just wasn’t in our scheme of things.

Furthermore, we had just finished building a large new home in Houston near the Texas Medical Center. In three years Mavis would set up her practice there. We had spent over two years planning, designing, and building that home. We had been in it for less than nine months, and we had both vowed never to move again.

So when I began telling Mavis of Renata Karlin’s proposal, I was in a really conflicted state. On the one hand, I was being offered an opportunity that was right at the center of my interests. Yet at that moment, my highest priority was to help Mavis fulfill her dream to become a physician. Everything else was secondary.

In the midst of telling Mavis the story, she smiled at me knowingly. I was puzzled and stopped in the middle of a sentence. Then she broke into a big grin and said: “I told you so—remember, in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral?” I drew a quick breath. It was true. Five years earlier Mavis and I had taken a trip to London where I had showed her all of my old haunts that I had told her so much about: my law office in Grosvenor Square, my flat where I had first read about David Bohm that Sunday morning, my favorite restaurants and parks, and little streets in Chelsea that I loved to visit while walking and thinking about things.

One evening Mavis and I had taken a taxi to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Just as we began walking up the steps of the cathedral, Mavis stopped and took me by the arm and said: “Joseph, I want you to know something I am certain of. In the next few years you will move back to London with the family and me. You’ll be doing important work for a very large multinational company.” At that point, I was in the midst of forming the Hartford Chapter for the Forum, so her words seemed too farfetched to take seriously. Also, at that stage in our relationship, I hadn’t yet learned to take Mavis’s premonitions as seriously as I do now.

From the instant Mavis reminded me of her premonition in front of St. Paul’s, she took the lead in the conversation. She said it was our destiny to go. She said there was nothing to question about it. She said ALF was moving from a startup to a more operational phase of its life. It had always been my intention to turn things over to more capable operational hands when that point had been reached. “Besides,” she reminded me, “you always said your ultimate intent was to take the ALF principles and apply them globally. This is your chance to learn more about how you can do that. It’s all part of the larger scheme of things.” The conversation from that point on centered around the possibilities presented to us—how we would arrange our lives and affairs “when,” as Mavis put it, this assignment was offered to me. This turn in the conversation was completely contrary to what I had expected. But Mavis simply said, “It’s what’s meant to happen. It’s obviously the thing to do.”

In view of the involved nature of our personal lives at that time, the discussion around this sort of issue could have been horribly difficult—trade-offs, negotiating individual situations, hand-wringing about leaving the house. Yet the decision to go for it was made that evening in very short order. All of the other issues were subordinated at that moment to what was meant to happen.

Mavis and I talked about following our inner voice, the voice that helps us to understand what is wanting to manifest in the world, and we reminisced about the lessons that she and I had learned together over the years about following that intuition. Mavis has always been anchored in this way of being—attuned to her inner voice and her inner capacity for high perception and precognition. This way of being comports with life in the bubble chamber, where time-space processes sometimes run in reverse causal sequences, and notions of earlier and later are no longer clear.

Over the years these incidences of Mavis’s precognition occurred on a regular basis. I came to accept them as a way of life and usually didn’t think much about them. When I had been in London with the Shell Group for about two years, Mavis and I were rushing down a hotel corridor on the way to a meeting when she pulled at my arm and stopped me. She turned to me and simply said: “We’ll be living in Boston when you complete your assignment at Shell.” Of course we had never even thought about Boston. Our game plan was to return to Houston and to pick up where we had left off. But I guess it goes without saying that at this moment, almost three years later, with my assignment at Shell completed, I’m writing these words at our home in the North Shore of Boston.

As I traveled around to the chapters during those final months, I found much to celebrate in the Forum. In meetings with the senior fellows—the amalgam of classes that had graduated in prior years—I saw one of the most visible results of the work we had done: the extraordinary high energy of coherence among such diverse groups. In those settings, I could feel their collective mind at work. Sometimes at those meetings national figures would come to sit in dialogue with the fellows—people like Jack Kemp and Warren Bennis and John Gardner. They would consistently comment to me about this high energy of coherence and the love among the fellows. This coherence and love are still characteristic of ALF, which continues to flourish long after my departure.

The final months before I left ALF were also a time of deep reflection about the events of my life since the beginning of the Forum in 1980. What had occurred during those years was in itself a representation of the generative order. The generative process is a continual unfolding, and we are here to participate in it. In fact, we are most deeply satisfied when we are participating in that creative process, whether through being a parent, forming an organization, or working on a project.

In looking back, I thought about the birth of our son, Leon, in 1982 and our daughter, Shannon, four years later. The joy and wonder I experienced then are beyond words. I participated in those births as a full partner, sadly unlike when Joey was born during my earlier life.

When Leon was born, the doctor gave him immediately to Mavis, who was fully awake, having given birth naturally without the aid of anesthetics. He suckled on her breast for a minute or so, and then he was given over to me. That little infant, smeared from head to toe with the remnants of his world in his mother’s womb, was screaming with his eyes shut against the bright light. I took him gently and began to place him in the warm water of the Leboyer bath. As I did, I spoke softly to him, just as I had each night when he was in the womb: “Leon, this is Daddy—your old pal. Don’t worry little fella, it’s all going to be all right.” As I spoke, he abruptly stopped crying, opened his little eyes for the first time, and looked straight into mine. In that instant our souls connected. He clearly recognized the sound of my voice. With tears streaming down my face, I placed Leon into the warm bathwater to wash him and comfort him. As I did so, he kept looking straight into my eyes, not uttering a sound, just relaxing in my hands as I continued to speak gently to him. This moment of our connection for the first time in the “outside world” will remain forever.

The connection with my son was one of the real gifts my years with ALF had given me because ALF was itself an expression of my own development as a person. As the years passed, I learned more about myself and what my real priorities were. My marriage to Mavis, the bonding experience with Leon at his birth, and later with Shannon at hers, are three gifts of unspeakable importance that came my way in this unfolding process.

There’s one more, though, that is just as important. That gift grew out of the discipline of journal writing that I learned to appreciate more deeply during the development of our wilderness curriculum.

As a result of the work I was doing with my journal, I began to recognize some of the anger I had toward the Colonel. So one day I went to him in the living room of the ranch and said, “Colonel, I don’t think you’ve ever told me you love me. I believe you do love me, but why haven’t you ever told me so?”

He just kept quiet. He didn’t know what to say. After a while he looked down and said, “Well, you know I love you.”

And I said, “Well, why can’t you tell me?”

He said, “I’ve always loved you, and you know I have. You know I love you.”

I said, “I don’t know it, and it hurts that you never told me so.”

Then, as we got ready to go our separate ways, I just put my arms around him and hugged him real hard and held him. He was stiff as a board. There was no response from him at all. He was rigid. I held him and patted him on the back and said good-bye.

I imagine the Colonel wasn’t expressive about love because his father never told him that he loved him. He came from the old school, where to say “I love you” to another male was just not a manly thing to do. A man was always in control. A man never wept or cried. A man took care of everything, particularly in his family, and was the authority figure in the house. In the older paradigm that my father came from, the man was a little set apart from the rest of the family. He showed his manliness by being tough—tough-minded and tough-willed, never admitting he didn’t know. Expressing emotion was not part of that picture.

I kept on hugging my father whenever we met, and gradually, over the next year or so, he began to come back to me when we said good-bye so I could hold him. Eventually, it came about that every time we said hello, and every time we said good-bye, he would give me a great big bear hug. He also got comfortable enough to say, “I love you.” Our whole relationship became more expressive.

During this time, the Colonel established a kind of tradition between the two of us. Each Friday we would meet together for lunch at the Coronado Club in Houston. These Friday lunches meant so much to me that I now carry on the tradition with my son Joey whenever I am in Houston, which currently is quite often. Joey is a highly regarded trial lawyer there, establishing quite a name for himself. He and I have learned over the years, with a lot of hard work, how to build a loving and healthy father-son relationship, and today I consider that relationship as one of my most important treasures.

One Friday at lunch the Colonel looked at me and said, “Bud, when I die, I want to die with my boots on, chopping cedar at the ranch.” We got up to go, and as we were leaving, we hugged one another good-bye. It was very natural; it wasn’t a big deal. Just two days later, while clearing a hillside at the ranch, he died of a heart attack.

I keep thinking what it would have been like for me if we had never made this transition, if we had never really learned to express our love for one another. I wonder what it would have been like had I just shaken hands with him that day at the Coronado Club, and he had turned around, and I had never seen him again.