Let’s fish!

The title winked at me from the shelf: Fish! I approached it tentatively. Good graphics, written by the same team of business gurus who wrote Who Moved My Cheese? I enjoyed that one, a business novena – short, inspirational, a cure for close-to-impossible corporate situations. But I’m out of the corporate life, I thought, spontaneously censoring myself. The last thing I need is a business novena. I’m no longer in the game. But another part of me took the floor rather petulantly. I want it, this part demanded. If I don’t get it now, it may not be here when I need it. The Censor interjected, "Stop spending money on things you don’t need, conserve resources, you’ll be nouveau poor again." That did it. I reached for the book and told my censor off. I don’t like poor house talk. The good thing about internal or external censors is sometimes they make you rebel and inadvertently give you the right attitude.

Or maybe it was just a case of "When the student is ready, the teacher will come." Fish! had something to teach me. This little book – you can finish it in one sitting – tells the story of a young lady who is promoted to head of a department well known in her office as the "toxic waste dump." Her job is to turn it around. She doesn’t know how she’s going to do it but she knows she has to because she needs the job. Depressed over her dilemma, she takes a walk and finds herself at the Pike Place Fish Market, a real world-famous place in Seattle. Watching the fishmongers at work at the market she finds the spirit she wants to see operative in her department. Eventually, she also finds her next husband. That was to give the business book a touch of romance. Why not? The song says love comes from the most unexpected places. Why can’t it come from a fish market in a business book?

I bought Fish! early in May while I was starting up my new venture – writing classes – but it wasn’t until this week that I read and finished the book. In the beginning, I was so busy getting organized, I had no time to read a book, not even a small one. Now, things are more settled. We’ve graduated one class and have a few more onstream. We, my witch’s apprentice Lampel Luis and I, the witch, have no motivational problems at work. I teach and she, a freshly-discovered natural poetess, is motivated by writing along with every class that she helps me organize. We are motivated by the transformations we witness in class. Reading Fish! made me want to do little somersaults of pure glee because now I see that if you need to build spirit in your workplace, then you should be calling me to inquire about private lessons at your corporation. That is, if you go by the tenets of the Fish! book.

Early in the book there’s a poem by David Whyte, a present-day business guru who wrote a book entitled The Heart Aroused, Poetry and the Preservation of Soul in Corporate America. He wrote this before the Andersen fiasco so put your cynicism on hold. Just listen to me or read Whyte’s book that "shows that the best way to respond to the current call for creativity in organizational life is to overcome our habitual fear and reticence and bring our full passionate, creative human souls, with all their urgencies and unnamed longings, right inside the office with us." Fish! makes the same suggestion less directly though it begins with a lovely poem written by David Whyte. For those unsettled by poems, it is the only poem in the Fish! book and it’s short and easy to read.

The gospel according to Fish!: To become as successful, world-famous and joyful as the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, there are four things you must do. First, you must have the right attitude. Second, you must learn how to play, how to make work fun. The office should become an adult playground. Third, your customers must also have fun, must join the game, must have an unforgettable experience of their visit with you. Fourth, you must be fully present, there, alert and sensitive enough to intuit what’s happening around you. You bring your full self to everything you do. Now think about this. How can you be truly present when you are taught from childhood to repress your emotions and consequently your passion, your "urgencies and unnamed longings?" You’re not taught what to do with them, how to handle them creatively. You are only told not to bring them to work and please, if you don’t want to drive your parents crazy, don’t leave them at home either. Where then would you keep these vital parts of you not welcome at home or at work? Maybe you acted them out in parks, bars, other dark, secret places, where creative forces turned around and became destructive, if they stayed alive. They might have been so repressed and suppressed that you became a functional zombie, completely numb, frozen, unfeeling at home and at work. Zombies are never in the present moment. They are just never there or they are always elsewhere. Often at home, they hide behind newspapers or sit blankly before the TV set communicating with no one.

You may not find Fish!’s four pointers in your office or home but you certainly find them in our writing classes now held at the Filipinas Heritage Library. Our first and only rule is: No judging of self and others. This way we create a safe place for creativity to emerge, for the right attitude to grow and flourish. You cannot have a negative attitude when you’re not allowed to judge yourself and others. The technique I teach encourages play, liberates the mind to imagine, to remember, to become a playful child again. It’s amazing how difficult this can be for some but we have tools that make it easier for people to hang loose, let go and just play. Lampel and I teach, watch and join. To enhance our course, we have started to bring in other forms of creativity expression. Now, students will take turns decorating the table so each class features a different arrangement that enhances the room for relaxation, playing and letting go, sort of a reprise of the bulletin boards in the classroom when we were in school.

Everyone in the writing class participates, even I write and read along with the students. No one, unless we have an observer, is a mere spectator. Work is read out loud so we share and appreciate each other’s progress. Teachers and students, suppliers and customers, we all have fun together. We know that our students/customers enjoy themselves because they fly or bus in from Baguio and Nueva Vizcaya, Bacolod and Dumaguete, and insist on having classes even when it storms. That must mean something.

Finally, we have skills for being fully in the present moment. There is no reason for anyone to leave part of him/herself elsewhere. The class is a safe place, a haven from the storm. When there’s no censoring, what prevents us from being fully ourselves? Nothing. And because we share this, the classes become real "heartful" events. We become friends who are there for each other.

I am awed by what the writing class does to students who are nervous and wary on their first day. Slowly over the next 10 weeks, they come into their own. The Spanish have a good word for this – desarollar, which means an unfolding, opening slowly like the petals on a rose.

I am pleased that when the book winked at me, I picked up Fish! It validates what my writing class does and it affirms that the writing class is the one thing you want in your workplace if you want it to become as successful as the world-famous Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle.

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For comments or inquiries about writing classes, e-mail lilypad@skyinet.net.