Where There" A Launch, There's A Landing...

Lance was home again, but still in relative seclusion gearing up for 16 out of 23 days of leadership workshops in September. However,in his few forays out into the town, Lance had been discovered. Suddenly, he is acutely aware that while he planned well for the journey, he totally forgot to plan for a gradual reentry into the role of responsible adult. Over the past few days, Lance unexpectedly encountered old friends almost everywhere he went, a phenomena completely absent over the past 60 days. It forced him back to the surface from the silent depths of his two month submersion in the cool, dark anonymity of his pilgrimage to nowhere. Like a diver rising too fast from the deep, he has felt something akin to "psychic bends"...too much, too soon. He's simply not ready.

Lance originally thought the "leaving behind" of family, friends and daily routine would be the difficult part of his sabbatical but the disconnecting and the unencumbering of daily expectations wasn't hard at all. His careful design of Lance Stiehl's persona, the 3 month format, the business cards, the Gmail account, the BLOG format and the Trinity of Questions were inspired. But he never spent a minute thinking about, planning for or envisioning the Return Scenario. And to his dismay, it has been more wrenching than he expected. Who knew?

Now that he is back home, Lance has discovered by day, there is nowhere to go and be productive. "Home Alone" (hold face and scream...) while working on new materials for his five leadership workshops has been excruciating. Turns out Lance is a social junkie who revels in talking though his new ideas with others, hearing what spurts out, sweeping up the best ideas off the floor, then weaving them into actionable tapestries. Instead, sitting in solitary confinement at his dinner-table-cum-home-office is like drilling for water in a parched desert. Inevitably, checking his Email, Facebook, Hulu, searching ANYTHING on the other side of the magic window of the Internet, is a more seductive alternative for the lonely man than doing what he is supposed to be doing. Hell, he'd rather BLOG than stare at a inert cursor, sitting lonely and blinking on a vast sea of glowing but empty glass. Lance is in a perpetual state of having to stay after school, alone.

It seems coming home is more complex than it sounds. Coming home means renegotiation of roles, reassessment of relationships and renewal of passions, at work and at home. In the midst of the flow of his former life, Lance took all those things in his life for granted. He knew the rules and roles by heart, as did everyone around him. They were so common they became invisible.

David Brooks in the NY Times has noted that "Culture dictates the proven and acceptable methods by which members of a group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. Culture exists when people don't even think about whether their way of doing things yields success."

Lance came from a workplace with a strong, well established culture he helped build. And just when it was working quite well, he unilaterally stepped outside the door to look around at other cultures in other places. Now, as he prepared to re-enter his old world, Lance wondered what rules had changed, what priorities had shifted and what new alliances may have redefined the landscape? Lance worried that he might now be obsolete? In a very real sense, Lance believed one can never go home again and that sense of loss was suddenly palpable.

But he didn't have to go backwards to reengage. Lance could choose to help build the next culture for the next decade of challenges. If his key still opened the door at work, he could choose to address the future every day in the new ways. More Brooks:

"(Instead, we must ask) what are my circumstances asking me to do? What is needed in this place at this time? What is the most useful role for me? The individual is small and the context is large. Life comes to a point not when the individual project is complete, but when the self dissolves into a larger purpose or cause."

Lance had felt that magnificent melding of "individuals into a larger cause" often at his work. In fact, he cherished those magical moments when the group functioned so smoothly that individual achievement was indistinguishable from common victory. Perhaps a successful homecoming isn't about about being someone new and improved, Lance realized, but about becoming who he needed to become in this new place and time, in order to be to useful to the mission. "So it's really NOT all about me", he laughed." Get over yourself, already!"

With that, the pressure dropped away like a veil. He knew he had new gifts to share. He had new insights to guide him and faith in his greater instincts. He had friends he had missed and who had missed him. He had discovered his unique set of talents. And now he had found wellsprings of energy and beauty he could tap into whenever life got too arrid or toxic. Not bad. Not bad at all.