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Choosing Our Starting Point

When each of us reads, listens, tries to understand, we each do so through a lens or starting point that is comfortable for us. It is key that we each figure out what our personal lens, our starting point is and then seek to add other starting points or lenses to our own. Lenses accumulate in our lives from our identity, our past, our experiences, and our learning.

This is particularly true in terms of our values, things that are important to us and what we are trying to achieve in our lives, both for ourselves and for those whom we love. Money is a powerful status symbol in most societies. With it come freedom, responsibility, security and some forms of freedom. Without it, possibilities are limited. Our experiences of money and what it can make possible begin when we are children. Those first effects stay with us throughout our lives, even when our ability to earn, save, access or use money changes at different times of our lives.

There will still be other sources of information and experience that will provide us with different perspectives. The best image of systemic analysis is a ball with patterns on it. If we were to stand around the ball, there is no way to be able to see the whole without having the perspectives of others. We need the perspectives and experiences of others …their voices.

Is there a “best” perspective? …a truer one? Or should we not be trying to assemble a picture of the whole by accumulating the ideas and perspectives – the Voices - of others and then trying to see how the whole fits together?

To our primary lens we add additional lenses. Systemic analysis will be an additional set of lenses that will hopefully integrate and weave together to create a kaleidoscope through which we can listen, learn and think.

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