I learned one word of Arabic: A-ma-zing

I don’t know what it means, but it sounds good.

“A-ma-zing!” Says Robe, the young Bedouin man, while cooking a delicious meal for us on the wood fire in the desert of Wadi Rum. An hour later he leaves after several attempts where his car gets stuck in the soft sands, with the promise to collect us the next morning.

Dees and I are alone in the desert, no roads, no network, only the moon and stars to guide us through the night. We find a place for our mattresses under an overhanging rock, a couple of meters above the valley floor. This image, the total silence is carved in my memory and soul.

We just have finished a six-day Transitionstudio program Movements of Transformation in a camp in that same desert. We all know that one of the phenomena you have to face during transformation is the context. Your family, friends, colleagues, other teams, companies and society might, even unconsciously, try hard to keep you in your patterns and the state you were the last time they met you.

Here the desert creates the context. Hot, cold, dry and easy to get lost in a minute. Beautiful and ruthless at the same time. Emergency exits closed. No wonder that for each of the participants deep transformational processes took place.

And: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. How will you react on your context once back into day-to-day life and work? What will be guiding you? Your inner compass? The evolutionary force? The patterns and expectations of society?

Transformation is a-ma-zing. A kind of small or larger miracle. A miracle, because you don’t know the outcome until you get there. You even don’t know if it’s worth it when you start. Maybe the good old life was better.

Anyway, whenever there is a call for transformation, you will have to face your context.
For me, facing the context might start with the sentence: ‘We need to talk’. Opening up and threatening at the same time.

How do you do that? Facing your context when something wants to transform?

~ Jan Jacob