Do you have a Sadhu in your life?

The Parable of the Sadhu has been a required case study in ethics for many b-school students. I had to study ethics at some point in my educational background  and was introduced to the story.

The case goes something like this: A Wall Street money dude goes to Himalayas to climb his mountain and runs into an old "Sadhu" on the ice pack in near death condition. A Sadhu is a spiritual person who shuns clothing and complicated ways and practices meditation and yoga. So the climbing party puts some clothing on the Sadhu and passes him off to the Japanese climbers, who then pass him off again after giving him some tea. Eventually the Wall Street dude's buddy takes the Sadhu down to a better elevation and points him in the direction of safety. No one wanted to stop and help because they were on their own difficult  journey. Wall Street guy gets haunted later when back in New York about his greedy selfish actions.

I think the actual case is now owned by Harvard Business Review and so if you want real knowledge of The Parable of the Sadhu, you have to pay them for it.

Thinking -we can still do for free.

 

 

Of course there is a method to my madness, I have a Sadhu right now I am tripping over. Someone in my summer exercise class is getting increasingly forgetful. No, not like losing the keys, or forgetting where you left your glasses, this is real forgetfulness. You see the rest of my community of friends take the class all year round, and I take during the summer only. So I can see the decline from year to year where my friends cannot.

 

What do I do? Does she have family? I met her mom at exercise class last Christmas, so she must have family. What if I intervene and upset her natural routine of getting on the community bus and spending the day exercising? What if she wanders away from the facility when it is dangerously hot or freezing? Lately she can loose her way back to her exercise chair spot. It's a real possibility. 

 

This Sadhu of mine is haunting me. Ethical decisions are difficult to make. So many would say it's not your business, stay out. Or that's HIPPA privacy territory, you cannot discuss medical conditions of people. And the most frequent of them all----it's not your responsibility.

 

Who are we accountable to if not to our fellow human beings? Since when do we need to be assigned responsibility? I thought that was a birth right. You take care of those in need. Don't you?

 

Do you see the person holding the cup out or do you blindly look past the ruffled disheveled person asking for help? Do you rationalize that they must have tons of disability income or social security? Do you reason that you paid your social security taxes and that took care of your responsibility? Can you actually look into the eyes of the beggar?

 

 

 

 

I am beginning to think we all have a Sadhu somewhere in our lives, but we are so keen on getting to where we are going that we don't see the Sadhu. Where is this temporary trip on earth taking you?

 

Blind Faith

Besides a nice restaurant in Evanston, what do we mean by blind faith. What is faith? I am not just speaking of the religious experience.  What do we believe in that we cannot see, yet we have faith. If I begin reflecting on this word, I know that faith in Spanish is two simple letters: "fe."  Can a word so simple have such deep meaning and wonder?

Is faith something we can rely upon and trust? Do we have faith in the monetary system? I heard a politician once say in defense of his monetary indiscretions, that he had no faith in the monetary system. I wondered why I should have any faith in the political system. In ancient Greece, faith translated to mean: trusted, reliable, of firm persuasion, to be counted on at all times, loyal.

Have you ever embarked on a project that was blazing new ground and you were not sure you could do it? But you relied upon faith to get you through the project. Faith that other people would behave appropriately. Faith that the system would support your project. Faith that decisions made would be the correct ones and when not that they would be recognized and changeable to correct ones. Faith that people will be flexible and adaptable to change that a new project brings. Blind faith.

Placing your faith in other humans can be a risky thing. We have faith that people will embrace diversity in people, yet we are constantly disappointed in the news just about everyday. Faith is sticking to the belief regardless of the disappointment around you. Faith is trusting bankers even after they caused the mortgage meltdown.

There is a story in archeology that when they dug up the city of Pompeii, they found people cowered in basements and hiding in rooftops, but only the Roman soldier was buried in the hot gaseous ash standing guard at his post. Faith is a consistency in your character. It borders on stubbornness and it is hard to tell the difference. Acting with faith is for other humans, things, ideas, and stubbornness is just an all about me attitude.

Faith is what Steve Jobs and Bill Gates relied upon when they quit their jobs at Hewlett Packard after getting turned down to develop personal computers. Faith is what launched FedEx and DHL into the standard of shipping today. Faith is at the core of many Black Swan events.

Things can never be right 100% of the time. Faith gets us through the failures of man. (collectively speaking men and women)  According to Robert Strand, an author of Nine Fruits of the Spirit, if things were right 99.9% of the time there would be:

• 2 unsafe landings at O'Hare every day
• 16,000 pieces of lost mail every hour
• 500 incorrect surgeries every week
• 50 babies dropped on the delivery floor every day
• and 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions every year

I have often wondered if the waitress at the restaurant was just picking on me when the order came incorrect. Somehow even with disappointments and failures we maintain a faith is systems that all will turn out well. The stronger our faith in a spiritual being , or faith is God, (whatever your choosing) the more we should be able to see that the incorrect meal that waitress delivered was meant for us. That a higher spiritual being caused us to miss that plane. If we truly have faith in our lives there is a surprising release of negative energy from failed expectations.

Accepting faith actions from others, and acting faithfully toward others is the balance of living in blind faith. What do you believe in that you cannot see yet trust?

+TmC