Life is difficult – Stage 6 speech

http://snc2003.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/ctm6_cb.ppt

Slide 1

Madame Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and welcome guests.

Slide 2

This is M Scott Peck. If you are familiar with his name, you are probably also familiar with the book for which he is most famous: The Road Less Travelled. First published back in 1978, TRLT has been translated into many languages and even now 30 years later, it is still available in bookshops throughout the world.

Scott Peck died last September.

Reading the obituaries and the postings to the websites most associated with his name and his work, I was struck by how much the opening line of the first page of The Road had affected people. It says quite simply “Life is difficult”. In saying that Peck seemed to acknowledge what is most peoples experience of life. And having recognised and acknowledged that, people felt free to move on learn more about how to cope with the difficulty.

Scott Peck wrote many books. But I want to focus on just one of them this evening. It was the fourth book that he wrote and was called The Different Drum.. In it he sets out his vision of what Community might be. Now only does he set out a vision of what might be possible but he also gave us a process by which such community could be achieved.

Peck had a very particular definition of what community was and I invite you now to look at his definition.

Slide 3

What strikes me most forcefully when I read these words are communicating honestly, the possibility of deeper relationships, of having significant commitment to others but most of all the possibility that we could delight in each other and find ways of making others experiences our own.

In laying the process by which such a sate might be achieved, Scott Peck identified a number of phases that it would be necessary for the group to pass through.

Slide 4

Pseudo-community or false community is a phase we are all familiar with. It’s meeting and greet. It’s politeness. It’s diplomacy. It’s politics. It’s the wine and cheese party. It is very necessary for social living. It enables us to get to know people, to decide whether we like them or not and it helps us not to kill each other.

But if we can’t go home afterwards and we intend to share some experience with these people it is almost inevitable that we pass into the next phase: chaos.

The fear that such chaos engenders is very real and people will do almost anything to avoid it especially making tea or having a drink.

You might see similarities with another model used to describe team building: forming , storming, norming, performing. But here is where they part company. Peck says that if we are willing to stay with the chaos and work through it, we have the possibility of entering a very deep way of relating to each other.

Emptiness is not easy to define but it does have certain characteristics. One of these is the ability to listen to what others are saying without judgement, without trying to fix what you believe to be wrong with the other person, without trying to take away their pain, without trying to change anything about the others experience of life. It is also about listening to ourselves and our responses to other peoples experience of life.

In this practice of emptiness, Scott Peck holds out the possibility of entering true community with all its honesty and openness and acceptance. In such a state it is possible to achieve great things, to create great things and to change the experience of peoples lives.