The Roots of Meanwhile.

Moons ago, I diverted from a planned career in journalism to work with university students on campus and help them find their place in the world with purpose. I wanted to understand more about what made people “tick.” I received quite a glimpse.

A decade later, I was focused on adult learning and development as a doctoral student while also taking on increasing responsibilities inside of a company, one that believed it was investing in its people. I was struck by how difficult it was for various institutions, including my employer, to support people as they were experiencing periods of uncertainty about what they wanted to be doing often while they faced many constraints that seemed to limit new possibilities. Universities focused on the young or anyone whose need could fit into a degree or a certificate program. Professional associations tended to stay in their lanes, and families and religious organizations tended to be out of touch or unconcerned directly with a person’s work. I kept wondering: Where could people turn?

Looking back, I can see transitions of my own. In one, I hit a period when I felt trapped, with choices limited by earlier decisions and not knowing how to plot a new direction. Luck and privilege made the struggle shorter than it could have been. Secondly, over a longer period of time, I realized that I didn’t fit well into anyone’s job-like boxes; from there I learned to trust myself and my instincts more about how to generate value uniquely in the world. 

My early interest in vocation, or a sense of calling to good work, was distilled in  Frederick Buechner’s beautiful advice urging us to find where “our deep gladness meets the world’s deep needs.” As I became busier in the trappings of corporate jobs, I became increasingly interested in the patterns by which we live our lives, for better and worse. Notions of sabbath practices percolated, as I read the venerated Abraham Joshua Heschel as well as the fine contemporary writer Judith Shulevitz. Eviatar Zerubavel highlighted how historically 7-day cycles--weeks--help organize us and keep us whole. Much more recently Tim Ingold’s exposition on how we map our traveled landscapes and find our way reinvigorated me at the same time a global pandemic was leading many to reconsider so many things. Inspiration also has come from research on aging and a movement supporting “encore careers,” while products from The School of Life and program formats from the Modern Elder Academy show innovation is possible. It still seems like there is more to learn and do.

About Meanwhile

In 2016 I began looking for ways to listen to people. I experimented with The Busk Project to collect stories about how people saw their lives changing. Then I began practicing what I called The Interview, a format in which people could ask someone to listen to them as they talked about what was moving them, or moving in them--or not--at this stage of life.

The newest iteration, Meanwhile, is about exploring the meaning of life, tuned in and connected, as it changes and us with it. And with ourselves right-sized in our importance within it, and our work right-sized within our lives. Meanwhile is most focused on what I call your “life’s work” and what keeps your work sustainable. Your life’s work can include many things, generating revenue and not. And for most people it changes over time, as we change. We also live within constraints that make some things easier and more difficult, more satisfying and less. I have come to believe that we all need some interests around which we can organize some amount of curiosity and creativity, even if they start on the margins and feel more like moonlighting. 

Forming and sustaining vital interests keeps us going--whether we think of them as hobbies, side-hustles or--like me--an organizer of R&D projects in what I now call my studio rather than my office. 

Fred’s studio in Austin, Texas, and my home for my vital interests.

We all tend to see ourselves as heroes in our own story. But the mythic “hero’s journey,” while long inspiring as a kind of a map through life, doesn’t fully fit the complex challenges of the modern world.  Carol Pearson’s adaptation of archetypes as they can overlay that journey--as our own journey--is wonderfully flexible. Still, Meanwhile is interested in exploring what I call “a new hero’s journey,” one that more of us can see ourselves in, one that we can shape and in which we develop. What I draw on most for this comes from adult development theory, and most specifically from Bob Kegan and my Cultivating Leadership colleague, Jennifer Garvey Berger. Their work has kept me hopeful that we can become complex enough to stay with what our world keeps throwing at us.

While we’d like to believe there are reliable maps for how to go through life, the markers really aren’t all that clear. Not for where we are supposed to be or by when, much less where to go next. Or what forms our life’s work could take. Wayfinding, the capacity to orient yourself to what’s happening, is central now to the Meanwhile inquiry. My interest in the difference between wayfinding and navigation was set in motion by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans at the Stanford Design School. I have incorporated their “designing your life” perspective and tools as a part of my coaching, especially what we can do to reframe and redefine what we are experiencing such that other paths become possible. 

I’ve also found solidarity with Diana Renner, co-founder of Uncharted Leadership in Australia, and the co-author of what can be seen as companion books, Not Knowing and Not Doing. She asked me, in the spur of the moment, to join her in leading a conference session a few years ago, and she’s been a partner since in shaping experimental ways to support people as they need to shift how they live their lives.

This project is about drawing on insights and experimenting. Meanwhile continually makes new connections with related work and welcomes contact.