LIFE'S AWE AND MYSTERY
TOLD WITH HAIKUS
by
GEORGE SECKO
The book is 104 pages long. It contains 52 haikus, one haiku per page, accompanied by a facing page with additional comments, a quote, or a poem—one haiku each week allowing you to mull it over without rushing to the next one.
I always liked to read and take notes. I kept records of what I was learning. Thank goodness I like organizing things (my love of into patterns at play) since I continue to find it necessary to arrange and sequence my clutter of ideas. Currently they are arranged in several frameworks. These frameworks help me to clarify my understanding, values and priorities.
My frameworks are a work in progress —a tapestry or quilt —with many connections within and between them. The key frameworks are:
- Characteristics of reality: uniqueness, complexity, abundance, complication, variety, spectrums, connections, patterns, and continuing change.
- Dimensions of life: spiritual, family, mental (intellectual, intelligences), emotional, physical, hobbies & recreation, social, community, financial, professional (career), and self-improvement. This complex array needs a simplified pattern. I chose “The Wheel of Life and its Spokes.”
- Elements of Life: The broad pattern of “The Wheel of Life and its Spokes” can be broken down into as many as 38 elements, including thinking, feeling, acting: needs, values, expectations, priorities, habits, reactions, problem solving, decision making, commitment, changing, success, and failure.
- Character or Virtues: based on William J. Bennett’s Book of Virtues which discusses traits, among them honesty, caring, responsibility, respect, optimism, justice, humility, gratitude, wisdom.
- Personality, Temperament, Attitude, Style: How do we project ourselves to the rest of the world? Fifty years ago, I began assessing my individual psychological preferences using The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, measuring how people perceive the world and make decisions based on four pairs of preferences or dichotomies:
Extraversion – Introversion
Sensing – Intuition
Thinking – Feeling
Judging – Perception
These preferences result in 16 personality types: I’m an INTJ – intent on mastering the mental process.
- Strengths: One of my favourite books is Now, Discover Your Strengths, by Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton, (The Free Press, Toronto, 2001). It stresses that to excel at your chosen field and to find lasting satisfaction in doing so, you must understand your unique behaviour patterns and what you are best at. It was based on Gallup Poll’s identification of 34 themes, from achiever to woo.
- Relationships, Communications, Language: how we get along with others is crucial to our effectiveness in the many roles assigned to us.
- Rules of effectiveness: All this research and reflection has resulted in a multitude of best practices which I have whittled down to 19, for now. My key sources from the start were Stephen Covey, Og Mandino, and Napoleon HillI
The haikus are not clustered within a framework. Instead, they are scrambled to emphasize the variety and unpredictability of the situations we face daily. In my experience there are no one-line answers, but a multitude of silver bullets, rules of thumb, and varying perspectives (especially opposites) . . . great for discussion and debate, which I enjoy greatly. Otherwise, I’d end up in a rut carved out by the relentless unchanging repetition of my views, values, and habits. Variety is the spice of life. Valuing differences is critical to understanding and growth. I especially love learning about human behavior, first mine, as I recognized early the need for self-improvement. Eventually, I became more fascinated by human behavior in general.
I hope this sprinkling of my impressions helps you to recognize the beauty, awe and mystery of your reality.