Cause you gotta have faith....gotta have faith, faith, faith.How was your week? Pretty boring right???I posted some of my (mostly non-partisan) initial post election thoughts on Twitter this Wednesday AM. That tweetstorm serves a bit as a prologue to this preamble.Since then, I have found myself thinking a lot about a topic that is both relevant to the events this week and for this space: the importance of faith. Now, I have to confess that I am not a particularly religious person, so I have been thinking about it more secularly as a cultural and organizational construct.Faith, by definition, is having confidence in a person, thing or concept without really knowing for certain.If you think about it, faith unconsciously plays a big role in our daily lives. For example, faith can be as simple as expecting water to come out of the shower head in the morning as we get ready to start our day. We have faith that when we drive somewhere, other drivers will abide by the rules of the road so we can get to where we are going safely. We have faith that our schools will keep our children safe and properly educate them.When it comes to work, we have faith that not only will we be fairly compensated for our efforts, but, optimally, also that our work is contributing to something bigger that is in line with our personal goals, interests and/or beliefs. We also put faith in our colleagues and ask them to put faith in us as well.And as citizens of a country we have some measure of faith that everyone adheres to the same code of conduct and shares a common appreciation for laws, fairness and values that have been established. We also place a great deal of faith in our leadership to proactively and relentlessly uphold these ideals as well.If you think about it, there is so much more ambiguity than certainty in our daily lives. None of the things I mentioned above are required.It's our ability to have faith (both consciously and unconsciously) that can maintain our sanity, keep us going and can lead to us to accomplish great things -- sometimes things we wouldn't expect would be possible if we stopped to consider them.But when we find that we have lost faith, it can be extremely difficult to get it back. We question the trust and confidence we once allowed ourselves to have -- often we will then even go out of our way to look for reasons not to have faith.It's hard to be successful at anything if you lose faith.I'll confess that I experienced feelings both of hope and of sadness this week. Regardless of who you voted for, you may have felt the same way too.It's understandable because it has been easy to become so cynical: about our leadership, about our democracy and, most sadly, about each other.How we got to this point really is not important. What is important is remembering that having faith can be a choice. Let's find a way to start there and see where things go. What do we have to lose?XOXODave
Share this post
Friends of Dave #203: sassy justice
Share this post
Cause you gotta have faith....gotta have faith, faith, faith.How was your week? Pretty boring right???I posted some of my (mostly non-partisan) initial post election thoughts on Twitter this Wednesday AM. That tweetstorm serves a bit as a prologue to this preamble.Since then, I have found myself thinking a lot about a topic that is both relevant to the events this week and for this space: the importance of faith. Now, I have to confess that I am not a particularly religious person, so I have been thinking about it more secularly as a cultural and organizational construct.Faith, by definition, is having confidence in a person, thing or concept without really knowing for certain.If you think about it, faith unconsciously plays a big role in our daily lives. For example, faith can be as simple as expecting water to come out of the shower head in the morning as we get ready to start our day. We have faith that when we drive somewhere, other drivers will abide by the rules of the road so we can get to where we are going safely. We have faith that our schools will keep our children safe and properly educate them.When it comes to work, we have faith that not only will we be fairly compensated for our efforts, but, optimally, also that our work is contributing to something bigger that is in line with our personal goals, interests and/or beliefs. We also put faith in our colleagues and ask them to put faith in us as well.And as citizens of a country we have some measure of faith that everyone adheres to the same code of conduct and shares a common appreciation for laws, fairness and values that have been established. We also place a great deal of faith in our leadership to proactively and relentlessly uphold these ideals as well.If you think about it, there is so much more ambiguity than certainty in our daily lives. None of the things I mentioned above are required.It's our ability to have faith (both consciously and unconsciously) that can maintain our sanity, keep us going and can lead to us to accomplish great things -- sometimes things we wouldn't expect would be possible if we stopped to consider them.But when we find that we have lost faith, it can be extremely difficult to get it back. We question the trust and confidence we once allowed ourselves to have -- often we will then even go out of our way to look for reasons not to have faith.It's hard to be successful at anything if you lose faith.I'll confess that I experienced feelings both of hope and of sadness this week. Regardless of who you voted for, you may have felt the same way too.It's understandable because it has been easy to become so cynical: about our leadership, about our democracy and, most sadly, about each other.How we got to this point really is not important. What is important is remembering that having faith can be a choice. Let's find a way to start there and see where things go. What do we have to lose?XOXODave