If truth be told...
Submitted by Benoit Couture on Sat, 2005-06-25 08:31.
Kerry, here are some details of my training and connection to social entrepreneurship. I'll try to contribute at defining it, seeing from that report that we are in its infancy.
Where does the shoestring of social entrepreneurship come from? Well, here is what I know and how I did get to know some of it. First of all, it has a whole lot to do with having been born the 12th out of a family of 14 children in the Eastern Township of Quebec, Canada in 1958. As the 12th child, by the time I was 5 years, I had been shown by 15 elders how to live my life. They all had one teaching to offer upon which all agreed with ease: "Don’t mind what everybody else says". So on the one hand, by the time I was 3 years old, I was being shaped by the learning I picked up from 15 elders. The 2 parents who would insist on what they know and at the same time, all 15 telling me to ignore them and to just live my life, after having been fabricated out all of that paradox wisdom. In a big family like that, if the authority is stable, the rest follows suit. If something disrupts the peace of the authority, then peace of mind becomes a natural degree of tension and stress that everyone learns to adapt to the best they can and life goes on, as they say, with each one growing up in making their way to repeat each, its own version of boundaries that holds them from the collective blossom of mature youth. If an unstable family situation gets attacked from the outside like having one of their own thrown out of a car at 60 miles an hour and found by the cops in a ditch, the day after she disappears, then you embark in the isolated territory of personal and social irrelevancy. When that happened to us, the best way to deal with the situation was to sweep it clean under the rug to the best possible and to learn to swallow hard. The age of the family's children ranged from 23 down to 3 and 1/2 years old. I was 6. Suddenly, all the attention of teens around me dissolved into the rush to grow up and to get on with life. I was 8 when I began asking, "Why does every one have to move away so far when they marry? Why don’t we sell all properties and get a chunk of land and build houses for everyone and...?" I've been revving up with this compounding energy of unanswered questioning strife ever since. Two of the older sisters went in 2 branches of the psychological field of expertise and most went on with honest and productive lives. By the time I was 15, I had become famous for delighting the crowds with an execution of "legalized" sport violence rarely seen in the history of the sport. I'd face with great anticipation 18 and 19 years old guy with 50 and 75 pounds bigger than me. Add to that getting myself isolated in the enjoyment of LSD and mescaline from 13 years old on and it gets to be quite both, stirred and shaken! As a result, since my 18 th birthday, I have been a net cost to tax payers as a direct result of communication breakdown at a very young age. In order to remain in the language that binds us here on the internet, I'll use the mapping terminology to say that my life has been made of getting really lost at a young age, and I've been walking the correctional line of social services mapping, to guide from being down and out, to personal and communal settling in the course of humanity's trust-flow. So far, at 47, my life in the system is that of an extreme border line case of socio-cultural personality reverberation, bouncing against the walls built from a constant dynamic of repulsive-rejection/// rejecting-repulsion that consolidated at 15 years old while I was being eased, with applauds, to take my societal position with the help of the media, getting myself elevated far above my peers as a star of the local national sport. Once consolidated, that dynamic gravitated me increasingly into the violent forces of exclusive-reclusion///reclusive-exclusion. By the time I reached 20, if ejection wouldn’t have happened from my context of social peers, then the socio-cultural borders that were trying to mould me would have kept me from the recovery road. Another detonation of that explosive-implosion-implosive-explosion of my identity equilibrium and my insensitivity to relational proximity would have swallowed my capacity of appreciation beyond recovery. The personal siege of value's relativity where knowledge of oneself is and where resides the siege of personal relativity with the whole, would have dissolved into conformity of a peer pressure that I had busted out of from within and where recovery from is not conceivable by the peers, still to this day when I try to return. I had nowhere to fit and had I remain in that context, it would have killed my connection to the inner state potential of personal and social capital generating; I had to be regenerated. When my dad passed away a few years back, I was a fascinating oddity for the few who had lived through some difficult times, but to those for who conformity is the norm, my my my...it was hyper bouncing off the walls I described above. I came back from there and I am still crying it out, looking for personal emotional stability while I am talking in writing to someone in Scotland, seeking to feel more at home than I ever could try to do with most peers of where I come from.
My years of LSD were not spent with peers of the drug scene too often either. I would get the supply that I wanted and then go get high on my own or with one friend, but no more, and I or we would question life. The underlying question of each investigation was always: "Why am I happy with this effect and not without?" After 2 disastrous hockey seasons and hair-raising experiences of mental abuse from the unhappy owners and operators of my talents, I finally went down the tube on the weekend before my 18th birthday. From the Friday to the Monday evening, I found myself where God alone knows the way out. For the last few years, I read that psychiatry is beginning to see faith in the patient as a healing reality that cannot be explained nor denied. Like social entrepreneurship, it is in its infancy of observational confirmation. When I went down the tube on that last weekend of March 1976, the Monday evening took me to a place where I met up with some nomad kind of Christians. The guy at the centre of it turned out to go over board and to become the enemy that he was fighting. But I still spent 2 years there, recovering with that group of evangelists on a crusade to convert French Quebec from deceived Romans to true Catholicism. It took me 9 months before I could start holding a conversation for longer than one sentence. I was lost in some sphere of interpretation that travelled at a speed that no one related to. Once I began conversing again, I started itch hicking and going into schools and churches to tell of my story, while trying to make it fit into that group's mission. The best part of that time was to absorb the real stories of the people who were hosting us for meals or sleep, while we knocked on doors in their area. At 20, I left that group and I spent 8 months slowly returning to the investigative ways of seeking my good health and happiness. November 22nd 1978, I come to announce to my parents that I am leaving on the plane on the next day for Alberta, 2500 miles away. As I was about to say so, I got told not to come in the house, that I had to leave and not return for at least a year, for having influenced the youngest in the family away from the roman church. November 23rd 1978, catastrophe beyond temporal repair happened. On that morning, I had insisted to have breakfast with my mom and somehow, in one f****d up moment, the signals got so screwed up that I scared her into thinking that I was about to kill her. I was walking back and forth in the kitchen and as I had my back turned to her, out a fidgety I pulled out my hand from my pocket with whatever happened to be there at that moment. It could have been a comb a coin or a nail clipper but it happened to be a pocket, camping knife, as I had spent 3 months in camping up to shortly before that day. When I turned around in her direction, she had both hands on her face and she was begging, "don’t kill me, for the love of God, don’t kill me." I take full responsibility for my stupid insistence to get in for breakfast and for all my unawareness of the tension I was causing and for my looking like an owl after a night on the hunt, but poor mom. She heard me say something that never left her. That moment of curse was never healed. We slashed through the temporal fabric without finding the renewal needed to bond from our personal reconciliation with eternity. We've been in parallel but with a trans-generational gap that stayed, as if never having been weaned. Our paths will only cross in communion again, when we see one another on the other side of death. I know for a fact that we will not recognise each other because of the rift. When we do, it will be at a point of eternity when a spontaneous party will erupt with God Himself dancing His all being away with His family of over comers, for that is whom and what we both are! That distance between my mother and I, is what I've been forced to journey through with my wife and children for the last 25 years. We live to raise from the dead, my personal identity that got burred in the physical stresses and conformity binds of a past that has been conditioned through the deceit and ignorance of Rome's infalabity and of the crown's upside down justice of imbalances, competing with business and social systems of inside out economic theories. We are looking for our identity through that maze while hosting people from all over the world, into the hunt of a better present. From 30 years on the recovery road, we have become part of the social entrepreneurship(s/e) by seeking a better present one day at the time, knowing that it is the only true path to a better future. Like the Chinese proverb says: "The road to happiness is to discover that happiness is the road." As long as we are trapped in the illusion of accepting hard times now for a better future, then we are missing out on all the beauty passing us by and on all the youthful effervesces of learning, growing and maturing. The difference between social services and s/e is that for social services, you are trained to deal with how can bureaucracy offer help, whereas for s/e, you are trained and positioned by life itself, to help first and then to adapt bureaucracy to one's needs. Social services are established so that conformity of the command and control structures remains undisturbed. S/e brings people from where they are and on the road to where they are in control of the commanding in their life. Social services compete for grant money and makes sure that budgets are spent so the decrease of the next year’s budget does not happen. S/e invest funding until it turns it into recoverable investment, thereby creating personal recovery and financial regeneration form debt situations. The infancy of s/e in the system is the biggest threat there is to the non-sense of authorities that insist to govern like the enemies of King Arthur and of Robin Hood. Because it is the renewal force of the human spirit who says to herself and to himself, "enough, I am here to be and now to live...” S/e is the healing of the meaning rising from the faculty of living to flood of its light the heart, spirit, soul and body of all who seek to find truth in love... The work of net integrity and of net honesty produces networking of the kind that heals all the wounds of personal and societal immaturity. There is no future without the serenity of the moment. S/e is growing out of the necessity to reconcile people to the serenity of the present, beyond bureaucracy, beyond the deceit of addictions and compulsive behaviours and beyond the reach of greedy manipulations. Justice, peace and joy in the Spirit of capacity, of wisdom and of love are the agenda here and now and for the whole recovery road. As each one recovers, we know that we become contagious in spreading the healing of the meaning around us and that the sovereign Crown of sanctity glows from our life. S/e' s job is to work ourselves out of a job, not to perpetuate it in ongoing taxes of each other but in ongoing natural care and devotion to well being and to one another's welfare, like a big healthy family. Help first and watch the investment grow, such is the nature of s/e.
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