When ownership is taken away…

Posted by danielle on Jan 14, 2012 | 0 comments

I’ve owned a lot of stuff thus far in my relatively short life.  I’ve also had a ton of stuff lost or taken away in all aspects of my life from the physical, to the mental and spiritual.  Sometimes those losses have found their way back to me or I to them, like in rediscovery of lost friendships or the return of stolen property.  Sometimes those losses are permanent as in the death of a friend or loved one.  All of these instances have something in common:  A sense of ownership was taken from me.  I did not chose to lose.

I’m going to try and challenge you to see that I owned the contents of my burgled car as much as I owned my relationship with my friend or grandparents, my sense of how the world operates and even my sense of self.  To say that I owned them is to say that I believed that all of these things were deeply, in some way or another, mine.  I acknowledged their existence and took responsibility for each of these things.  They all mattered and I cared for them on some level whether small or great.  That acknowledgement and responsibility led to a sense of possession, of ownership.  I’m going to challenge you to try and look from this viewpoint as I tell you a little bit about a work situation this week.  The commonality in all of these things may also apply to training.

In software engineering it is not uncommon for people to be reassigned mid-project.  Usually what happens is that a problem is larger than originally scoped and additional people are needed.  On rare occasion, in the middle of the project another completely new project may even come along and need funding.  This week, the project I’ve been working over a year on, the bit of work I owned, was given to another team so that my team could focus on something else.  We are, out of the blue, transferring ownership of our project elsewhere.  When we ship our product, the very thing that we’ve sunk all our effort into for over a year, the very thing that we executed well on, will not ship as ours.  It will be owned by some other team within the organization.  Priorities dictate that management take this project away from us and give it away so that we can work on something as equally important. 

The reactions of my coworkers have been more than a bit varied.  Some people are angry – “They are taking away my hard work!”  Some people are disappointed – “I won’t get to see it to completion!”  Some people are nervous – “I’m going to have to learn something new and quickly!  I already knew this.”  Not a single person appears to be happy with this change.  Not one.  I guess you could say that I represent an oddity in this situation.  I can’t say that I’m happy about the change, but I am rather ambivalent about it.  When I found out, my response was to merely shrug my shoulders and say, “Okay.  So what am I working on next?” 

For me, letting go of a work project is relatively easy.  It’s not because I don’t have passion for what I am working on.  It’s because I understand my work is never my own.  Each sentence in a specification, development or test plan I write, each line of code that compiles into the binary representing product or test harness is owned entirely by the company for which I work.  The company may pay me to create, but the results are entirely owned by the company.  I don’t get to take it with me when I go.  So they are taking away my hard work and replacing it with new hard work for which I will have to generate new results.  I won’t get to see the results to completion, but all that means is that they are relieving me of one responsibility and replacing it with another.  And yes, I will have to learn something new and at breakneck speed, but that is an opportunity for me to expand my knowledge.

To me this work experience has clear parallels to my experience training.  Every promotion across element boundaries is like having a project taken away.  In earth, I had to learn to give up not reacting or running away.  In water, I had to learn how to not hold my ground, how to skillfully retreat and return.  In fire, I had to learn to give up the retreating of water.  In wind, I’m beginning to learn how to wait and not jump in, giving up the preemptive nature of fire.  In each of these elements, I had the potential to posses only the element of the element I was in.  I could only own the experience of the element in the moment as it were.  Not only does the hard work of one element get replaced with a new one on promotion and not only can I not take certain aspects of one with me into the next, I also don’t get to see an element through to completion.  I never own it because there is always more.  But because there is always more, with each new technique, each new refinement of movement and each class, comes that same opportunity to expand my knowledge, to go beyond what I think I might know today.

I will never own this art, but I will always own my experiences and reactions training within it.  I will acknowledge and accept responsibility for them, but only in a single ‘now’ moment at a time.  Because I am accountable for those experiences, because they are my own, they will always be there to draw upon even if I do not own the greater lesson of the same experience.  They will be relatable even if it means they are the opposite of new opportunities.  They are the only thing I can take with me even if I am not allowed to use their lessons in the moment.

I believe that you can’t lose something that you never owned in the first place and that the only thing you can ever own is your experience.  If you evaluate the things you perceive to be losses or gains in your training or within your life as a whole, what have you really lost or gained?  If ownership was taken from you, was it really?  Did you ever own that which you lost?

Danielle DeBlois
SMAC Student