Dead Kings and Queens

My wife and I love to travel. Oops, let me clarify that. We hate to travel but we love the place we are going to once we get there. In many ways, traveling is like going to the dentist. You hate like the dickens to go but you like the results once the dentist is through poking, scraping, cleaning, drilling and flossing. Travel is like that. You love the people, customs, rituals, food, music, weather and all of the other things that make each place the unique micro-world that it is once you have arrived. You just hate the packing, waiting, standing in line, delayed planes, canceled flights, horrible meals (or peanuts) and cramped quarters you have to endure before you arrive. It’s like sitting in the dentist’s chair.

I say all of this because we recently traveled for a month to Great Britain. It had been twenty-five years since we had been to our motherland and it was with great interest that we returned. We hung out in the smack dab middle of England (Nottingham as in Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood, Maid Marion, and the Sheriff of Nottingham) and made numerous side trips all around before spending our final ten days or so in Scotland. Actually, we stayed near Nottingham in a little village called Colston-Bassett. Our first day (arrival day) was spent getting acclimated and trying to stay awake until our normal sleep time so that we could be up and at them bright and early the following day. So, we walked all around our little village where we stumbled upon the new church built 200-300 hundred years ago before then stumbling on the old church built 1300-1400 years ago. We were just like an excited St. Bernard drooling over all of this history.

Of course, this was just the first of many, many castles, cathedrals, monasteries, old walls and ancient ruins. We actually enjoyed all of the history, not tiring of the old digs until the very last of our visit. I think the reason is because they reminded me of something that I had written about in The Leadership Teachings of Geronimo, published by SterlingHouse. Teaching #85 is entitled, Remember: Others “Were There Before the Rocks Were Hard.” Part of that teaching reads:

Geronimo and the Apaches occupied the southwestern part of North America well before the Spaniards colonized the area. The Apaches have a story that describes how long they occupied the land.

A “white eyes” approached an Apache on one of the reservations. He asked the Apache if he was an Indian, to which the Apache simply replied in the affirmative. The man then asked what tribe he belonged to and the Indian said that he was an Apache. The next question was how long the Apaches had been there. The answer was, “My people were here before the rocks were hard. Your people came afterward.”

As newcomers to an organization, work place, club or group of any kind we tend to see things that we believe need to be changed. Often, they do but just as often they do not. The mistake that newcomers make is that they forget that intelligent, well meaning people were in those positions before they joined the group and had thought through the very same situations and problems that the newcomers were now facing. Procedures, processes and rules were put into place to best handle the problems.
Newcomers would be wise to examine closely the current environment to see if it has significantly changed since the established rules were instituted and to examine if a change is required. It may very well be but it is a bad mistake not to remember (and honor) those that were there before the rocks were hard and to not make changes when they are not needed.

So, the castles and ruins reminded me that there were many good, noble and accomplished people, kings and queens, who lived in the ancestry of my country. It caused me great pleasure to contemplate these folk as I walked the same ground that they had walked and to remember that they were there before the rocks were hard.