You’re on trip, strolling by a small European city. Your senses feast on the blueness of the sky, the feel of the clouds, the perfume of the bougainvillea, and the sound of your sneakers on cobblestones as you comply with the highway much less taken.
You occur upon a stone bridge arching over a broad canal. You cease, mesmerized by the rippling of the present, the sunshine glinting off the water, and the music of the mild rapids. Your eyes are drawn to the small boats making their manner up and down the waterway. The various different delights you’ve skilled abruptly fade out of your consciousness as you gaze on the flowing channel beneath your ft. Even the anticipation of native pastries awaiting you throughout the bridge can’t pull you away.
What’s it about water that fascinates us, that captures our consideration and creativeness, that appears to override all different sensory impressions and relegate them to the again burner of our minds? What’s it about watercraft crusing slowly alongside that we discover so entrancing? And if this phenomenon is so commonplace, why isn’t there a phrase to explain it?
The truth is, there may be. And it’s this week’s addition to the Moral Lexicon:
Gongoozle (gon·goo·zel/ gahn-goo-zel) verb
To face and stare idly at boats transferring by a canal or watercourse
Theories abound to clarify the magnetic attraction of water on the human psyche. Some counsel that the push of water echoes the sound a fetus hears surrounded by amniotic fluid in its mom’s womb. Others hypothesize an elemental connection to the supply that gives for and sustains all dwelling issues.
Past that, it’s the motion of boats alongside the floor of the water through which you discover a compelling allegory for our personal journey by time and life, for the interconnection of previous, current, and future.
Water flows from unseen origins, whether or not the deep recesses of the earth or the snowcapped mountain peaks. And, whether or not it emerges from the depths under or the heights above, it drives inexorably towards the ocean, as all issues return to their origins in quest of their final future.
Water flowing in its course appears to inform a narrative, and that story turns into our personal. We would like our lives to be significant, to think about ourselves as captain of a vessel upon a river, whose voyage is outlined by a starting, a center, and an finish. We need to keep inside the river’s banks and see ourselves as companions and contributors within the function for which the river got here into being. We need to really feel that sense of progress, route, and attachment to one thing larger than ourselves.
Whether or not in society or enterprise, this mindset underlies any wholesome tradition. And it’s one we are able to purchase by asking ourselves a couple of easy questions:
- The place have we come from?
- The place are we going?
- What are we right here to perform?
- What is going to stay of us after we’ve gone?
- How will we depart the world higher than we discovered it?
Merely asking ourselves these questions will increase the probability that we’ll discover our option to significant solutions. In fact, each for-profit enterprise is designed to generate income (or must be). However the way in which to draw loyal and enthusiastic clients and shoppers is by welcoming them into your story, inviting them alongside in your journey, and offering them with a product or a service and a way of partnership in a better mission.
A lot of branding makes an attempt to influence the subconscious thoughts by using fonts, colours, photographs, phrase selection, and messaging. However when the tips and techniques ring a bell that resonates with a real, aspirational message, clients will come again time and again, and staff will really feel fulfilled in offering actual worth reasonably than phantasm and deception.
So the subsequent time you end up gongoozling by a river, lakefront, or harbor, mirror on the questions of route, vacation spot, and future. Even higher, visualize the course of your life and your work. Compose the story of what you prefer to your journey to be, then share it with others, and invite them to change into your companions in making it so.