Spleen song

I was writing in my journal yesterday morning, as I do, having woken up and found myself without the gumption to take off my flannel pjs and slide into something more lycra, to run or to stretch.

I craved stillness and quiet and reflection and talking with myself about topics various and sundry. You know, really get in there and poke around in the layers a bit. See what’s popping.

So there I am, sitting on the floor by the coffee table, writing as I sipped my matcha latte, and I noticed this:

Organization and organism both have organs in them.

“Huh,” I mused. “That’s something.”

My mind wandered, as it does, remembering the grand pipe organ on the Rive Gauche of the Seine in Paris, inside the Gothic revival sanctuary where my family used to attend services.
Organ as musical instrument.

But then the cruise director of my mind waved my attention to mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum, as revealed in the biology classes of my youth.

Aren’t those organs, too?

(Really, in a delicate and lovely sounding bit of language, they are organelles).

And then I thought about kidneys and lungs. Hearts and livers. Brains and guts.

Organs as body parts.

Which got me musing. Maybe my work is an organ, too. Maybe it’s part of a larger body, a larger organism. A writer who listens to the song someone sings through their work is one organ. The person who is singing that song is another one.

And so on.

So what if that was the metaphor that gives shape to how we think about the interactions, projects, collaborations, conversations, and activities with which we engage in business?

I’m a vital organ, and so are you.

Hearts are important, but they don’t work alone.

Brains are important, but they don’t work alone.

Intestines are important, but they don’t work alone.

They all do their work alongside the work that kidneys do, the work that lungs do, the work that spleens do (O, how I cannot bring myself in this moment to google what spleens do).

And so on.

Hmm. That’s interesting.

Now what if each of us bodily organs is also a musical instrument?

And the organism, then, is a kind of living, breathing organ orchestra?

That would be pretty neat. Wouldn’t it?

So I’ve decided that this is how I want to think about all of us living, working, and practicing business together.

You’re over there playing your organ with the pipes you’ve got. I’m over here turning the crank of the street organ with my little dancing monkey. And someone else is wherever they are, playing their accordion (which may not be an organ at all, but please let me have this one, eh?).

And we’re all part of this larger body. This larger organism that’s alive and breathing and moving and bigger than any one or any two or three of us.

I suppose it could be said that there’s a kind of organization to all this.

But for me right now, the juice is with the organism.

Each organ singing its song as part of a larger chorus.

Or at least, that’s what I found and am taking with me in my satchel this week.

Big love,
Stella