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 As the story goes, a middle-aged woman in her well-to-do life has written Mother Teresa to ask if she could come to help her work in the missions. Mother Teresa, for some reason, declined the offer and gave her advice in the pithy way she's become known for: "Find your own Calcutta," she said.
The words resonate in my mind as I think about the wisdom
of her advice. Far too many adults in contemporary America
are pursuing somebody else's Calcutta - or worse, no Calcutta
at all. And we are all the worse for it.
If Mother Teresa's calling in life is represented by Calcutta
as the capital for the poor and downtrodden of the world,
then what represents your life calling? The real leaders I
have come to know in my work in the world of business and
commerce all have managed to discover their own Calcutta.
The pseudo and would-be leaders, however, have not found their
own Calcuttas, and that is their biggest problem. And of course,
it is still more of a shame that many of us live Thoreau's
lives of quiet desperation, seeking not to exercise any kind
of personal leadership or heroic pursuits at all, pseudo or
otherwise, opting instead to pursue the path promising the
least pain - or the most pleasure our meager imaginations
can conjure. That's not living; it's barely existing.
 I, for one, prefer the pseudo leaders to the non-heroes and
non-strivers, probably because they are at least interesting.
The we-get-by-the-best-we-can, how-much-can-we-consume crowd
commits the biggest sin of all: they bore God. With their
lack of striving for much of anything non-material, they diminish
us all. The pseudo-leaders, on the other hand, at least provide
endless drama, like Clinton Agonistes or King Donald Trump
Lear, who is actually probably more like King Richard.
Now that we've reached the first decade in this amazing century on this incredible planet, it has become obvious that those of us living on the growing edge of civilization in the post-industrial era are no longer poor in things material, like the inhabitants of the real Calcutta. We are poor in things having to do with human psyche. Our Calcutta is not physical, it is spiritual. Paul Hawken says that the two things most middle-class Americans are short of today are meaning and time. We are a time-poor and meaning-deprived society, chasing false gods, looking for love in all the wrong places, as the old pop song goes, and wondering where our hidden paradise lies. Our hearts sing verses about rainbows by Judy Garland, whom we've adopted as the eternal pop symbol of the essence of longing. We wish we could somehow be like bluebirds and fly to a land brimming with pots of gold.
But there is so little time to attend to the matters of the heart and the realm of the spirit. Thanks to an over-emphasis on achievement and electronic time-management systems, we mid-lifers have learned to achieve, but we have so little time and meaning in our lives to show for it.
So Mother Teresa is right, we must find our own Calcutta.
And, as Dorothy learned in The Wizard of Oz, we should
look for it first in our own back yard. The leaders who understand
this will help those of us on the leading edge of civilization
play a new game. Instead of exhausting ourselves with our
new goals and exhausting the planet's air and ocean and land
with unsound production and consumption processes, we will
find our over-the-rainbow challenge very close to home - and
with it, a pot of gold: the understanding that, in matter
of the spirit, less is more.
True leaders who have found their own Calcutta are the heroes and sheroes who have learned what Robert Greenleaf spoke of in his masterpiece of leadership. He said that true leaders are servant leaders, those who have earned the right to lead not because of the old traditional power-brokering stuff, but because they have demonstrated to their followers that they are truly willing to serve their interests.
In a time-poor, meaning-short society, servant leaders will
have sufficiently fed their own capacity for meaning - and
will have lived a rich enough interior life - that they will
always have something to offer to the rest of us. They will
have longed for the joys of the spirit beyond the rainbow
and will have found the courage to deliver hope to this endless
amalgamation of spiritual Calcuttas. |
