Are You a Drifter or a Shifter?

Are you a Drifter or a Shifter? Are you a passenger or contributor?  Are you caught in the seemingly endless tunnel of human experiences and their motion, or will you make a mark, a dent, some sign to show you have lived?  Somewhere, with something, you can define yourself with an activity to make a contribution to history.  Branch out, take steps to change the course of something, make a mark that’s your own.  You enjoy shopping, but hate long lines, so did the folks who started Fresh Direct, a home delivery food service, that’s mushroomed into a multi-million dollar company.  You love making art, but can’t figure out a way to make a living doing it, check out The Abundant Artist, who helps artist reclaim their dreams and make a living doing it.  Don’t let the general drift of human experiences fool you to think you are contributing to anything in a defining way.  And don’t remain disempowered to contribute to something because you are unaware that are caught in the drift.

Participation in the general movement of life makes you a passenger, not a contributor.  You can strive to be an excellent passenger, that’s for sure, and a noble goal itself.  But I‘m interested in rule-changing, rule-expanding actions that newly define a field, or its direction.  It’s fun to alter the course of something.  I had a chance to do this with Camp Huntington when I took over the Direction of the program, and helped improve its overall program design.  This improvement strengthened quality of service for camp participants, staff and clients, and resulted in the sale of the program to a large therapeutic treatment and education company, the Aspen Education Group and the CRC Health Group.  Remaining a little family-owned camp was an option, but I was interested in how to reshape the program while also expanding its services to a wider audience, which was the result. 

This next piece from my first pen series is based on “shifting” the context of existing content.  It’s about opposing forces and their elements.  The rightward facing elements stack together in the same general direction and contain various content, representing the normal flow of human actions.  The object’s points represent forward motion.  The single left-facing shape shows opposing motion that creates a new direction.  It sleekly laced itself beneath the other existing forms, and thus was able to distinguish itself, and open up new pathways of creative exploration.