Once there was a group of people called “The Falling People.” The Falling People lived their lives while falling. They went to work falling, mowed their lawns falling, and slept falling. All of their possessions, their computers, houses, pets and cups of coffee hurtled through space falling beside them -at the same rate. This is how it had always been.
The Falling People measured things by feet and inches, up and down. They would say things like, “Five feet up I ate bad shrimp,” or “Several feet down I will be happy.” One day it became very obvious to many of the Falling People that there was something happening that was hard for them to explain. The “something” was moving sideways, or floating, or…they were not sure what, but it was happening, it was affecting them, and it was not falling – according to their standard of measurement.
Some of the Falling People got tired of all the talk about the floating, sideways “something” and would say, “If it does not move up or down, we cannot apply feet and inches to tell what it is and anyway we will get to where we are going by continuing to fall as we are.” Some of the Falling People (whom others called the fanatically down-forward) would get overly excited and say, “Our standard of measurement is up-fashioned by 10 billion feet plus and besides we want more of the something and are not sure how to get it.”
Finally, realizing that it was time to take action, the leader of the Falling People called a gathering and spoke the following…
“Our system of feet and inches, up and down, has served the Falling People very well. Our measurement system is an agreement that was made long ago that enables us to communicate with one another about movement within our special culture. Always there has been the “something” that everyone is discussing, but we did not have the time or the interest, until now, to identify or measure it.
Identifying “it” requires that we first come to an agreement about what “it” is -just as we named our falling motion two million feet back. For now we will name it fulfillment. Fulfillment does not constantly fall beside us as all our material or physical possessions do – it jumps around, sometimes landing, sometimes not, and varies in intensity or degree. We do know we are happier and more productive when fulfillment lands and when it is more intense.
Let us fall forward then communicating about fulfillment by measuring it in degrees with 100 degrees being the highest level of experience.”
All of the Falling People agreed that this would be an interesting experiment to see if not only they could measure fulfillment, but if they could also have fulfillment land more frequently and intensely as they fell down through their lives.
It came about that the Falling People began to realize that fulfillment did not jump around landing sometimes and sometimes not – it was always present falling beside them, but indeed in varying degrees of experience depending on the actions they took. They began to see how they could make adjustments to increase the degrees and could be heard saying things like, “Down there, I am planning on taking a walk so I can increase my fulfillment degree,” or “Up there, I noticed that my fulfillment degree is always much higher when I keep my promises.” It was clear to the Falling People that the experiment to measure fulfillment was a good and useful experiment.
Therefore, it was inevitable that as the attention of the Falling People began to shift more and more onto measuring fulfillment someone spoke up and said, “Hey, are we really falling or is how we measure our motion having us experience falling?”
The End This story is adapted from an LEC seminar
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