My car edged along. I was in a traffic jam on the east/west crosstown highway at the south end of the Minneapolis metropolitan area. For over an hour bumper to bumper traffic inched forward. Single passenger vehicles filled the cold air with exhaust fumes--tomorrow's black ice.

I remembered a video of a few years before that showed the atmosphere over large cities. From outer space the air over the city looked like a cancerous lung-dark and unhealthy. Is cancer a fractal pattern--self-similar at all levels of organization?

Impatient and selfish motorists drove on the shoulder of the road to get ahead and then cut in front of others who waited patiently. In large systems there is little accountability for rude and uncooperative behavior. As I sat moving my foot from the gas to the brake and back to the gas, I wondered what this mass displacement would look like from far above us?

The radio announcer told listeners that the whole system was a mess. I already knew that. The issue of the day was whether or not ramp meters should be eliminated so people could get into the congestion faster. Intense drivers, their eyes affixed on the taillights in front of them, sat hunched forward gripping their steering wheels tightly. They could see the detail. Could they see the insanity of the whole?

I would experience this overloaded system, and others like it, many times in the weeks ahead as I drove to meet friends and colleagues for goodbye dinners before I moved to Colorado. Many others spend much more time in such bounded and isolated conformity. Is this lunacy?

I felt angry with myself for being in the mechanized mass of metal where each vehicle blindly followed the bumper in front of it while the whole convoy followed the road most traveled. Not angry so much because I would be late for my engagement, but because the traffic jam represented all that I wanted to escape even as I felt called to the West.

The traffic jams I sat in symbolized, for me, the monoculture life of the machine worldview. A world of denial, conformity, alienation, materialism, paternalism, competition, confinement, loss of soul, inauthenticity, and the "dumbed-down" and fear-based nature of today's world.

This worldview expends more and more energy as it tries to solve problems it created and cannot resolve. This linear and literal system of thought was eclipsed by a living systems understanding of life some time ago but few live or work from this new knowledge. One day this outdated philosophy of life will die from exhaustion, rebellion, and abandonment and will be replace by a saner way of life and work.

This is a world of 15-minute celebrities, pseudo heroic leaders, and mindless quick-fix solutions to complex problems. It is also the world of good people who exhaust themselves as they work to bring about meaningful change in our organizations and institutions. These selfless people are models for all. They are often rejected for their efforts to bring forth a healthier and more sustainable way of life.

I spent my adult years learning how to navigate this system. I achieved some measure of success along the way. I played my role. At the same time a large part of my spirit rebelled against the captive life of a system of thought that denies the human heart. I often felt angry about things I didn't understand. So much of what was real was not talked about in this way of life. We cannot heal our afflictions if we do not first acknowledge them.

I lived in major cities all of my adult life. I've loved the city and often spoke of wanting to live in the downtown area to be near its vibrant heart. But more and more that heart has grown cold and complicated as the buildings get bigger and more beautiful.

I notice that clients (companies and people) are more angry and stressed in the city than in smaller communities. So many people are mean, cruel, impatient, and disrespectful to one another as they comply with their daily duties. Innovation is often absent as poorly trained and mindless employees follow procedure books in linear and literal ways never realizing they could use their minds and imaginations to solve problems creatively.

We know about road rage, airplane rage, violence in schools, the hurry sickness, and the growing variety of addictions in the largest concentrations of humanity. Soon technical rage will be commonplace--loss of temper at the technology we created and cannot manage. We risk losing our souls. Many already have.

Within this context of mechanism and materialism, filled with acts of violence to nature and to ourselves, we mindlessly try to transform our organizations. Then we wonder why change is so unsuccessful. We do the same things over and over again expecting different results. Insanity becomes normal.

I believe it is theoretically possible for the way we lead, follow, and work within organizations to change. Small successes show it is possible even as most of those advancements crumble when their committed leaders move on. Sustainable change requires courage, commitment, and unselfish leaders and engaged employees-all in short supply in many of our institutions.

Therefore, on a practical level, I do not believe our enterprises will change in meaningful and sustainable ways in the foreseeable future-if ever. The discrepancy between the potential and actual life expectancy of corporations will continue to be greater than for any other species on the planet. Mechanistic organizations may just need to die along with the worldview that built them--replaced by new forms that emerge from a new system of thought. I might be wrong. Good people will continue to try to change such organizations. I wish them well.

As others are doing, I want to stop my efforts to help transform the old and focus my energy on helping the new to emerge--within myself and within others and in their work. One can never totally leave the preeminent system, but to quell my rebellion, I chose to move closer to the edges of the system of thought that I live in. From here I aspire to live as authentically as possible in an inauthentic world.

From the edges of the prevailing system, that is crazier than I want for my life, I seek to move more fully into a life of service, creativity, and intimacy with nature. I hope to follow my soul more completely. I want to slow down, increase my awareness, and attain greater understanding.

I know from being closer to nature for only a short time that I have a learn about how to live life more slowly, more simply, and more naturally. I want to learn all I can. I will not try to duplicate in my life the ways of indigenous people, and I will not revert to the life of the world I just left. To do either is reactive. We live in a unique time calling for creative responses that select the best from all philosophies. I aspire to live my life as improvisational art. I want to create my own images from the familiar and the unfamiliar of a transforming world using the materials at hand.

A battle rages within me. The war is between my habitual and conscious thoughts about how to live and a new perspective struggling to be born. I will live with the anxiety of this inner conflict until it produces new meaning for me. I also feel the sorrow of leaving my people, the ambivalence of things new, and the creative potential of the place between endings and beginnings. I am a novice again.

I fear I will do in my new life what I see so many do in organizations--reform instead of transform. I fear I will change locations without changing the inner landscape of my beliefs. I hope I will have the courage to listen closely within myself for a deeper awareness of my purpose in life. I hope my human insecurities will not prevent me from living my purpose fully. Today I cannot see farther than the step in front of me. That is enough for now as I move to a new level of being.

I am humbled by the wisdom of people I meet who live natural lives and have for all or most of their time on this planet. They don't sit around and talk about how to live life better. They just do it naturally. The lives they live speak for themselves.

These people embody the change so many of us talk about perhaps unaware that they are models. I buy the products and services of these people so, in a small way, I can help them sustain the model they offer to the world. This is how movements become institutionalized.

I hope I will bring forth the right livelihood for myself and will attract those who will support my efforts. I yearn for the wisdom, courage, and mindfulness necessary to meet this test of my faith and character. I will spend time in solitude with myself and reconnect at deeper levels with my true nature. I will know the answers to my fears and hopes as I go into and through the undefined potential that is the art and process of life.

I am the only person who should do what I do exactly. We each have to find our own truth. This is not a call for everyone to leave the city and move to the mountains. This is, however, a call for you, dear readers, to check in with your spirit, explore the beliefs you live by, examine the traffic jams of your lives, ask yourself if you have settled for too little, and to think about the right place, the right livelihood, and the right relationships for you.

Learning how to live an authentic life is not easy work.

Perhaps the flaw in man is exactly this: that he doesn't know how he ought to live.

Daniel Quinn in Ishmael

1/29/2001