Looking Up, Moving Forward
“When the sun come back,
and the firs’ quail call,
Then the time is come.
Foller the drinkin gou’d.
Foller the drinking gou’d,
Foller the drinking gou’d;
For the old man say,
Foller the drinkin gou’d.
The riva ends a-tween two hills,
Foller the drinkin’ gou’d;
Nuther riva on the other side
Follers the drinkin gou’d.
Wha the little riva
Meet the grea’ big un,
The old man waits –
Foller the drinkin’ gou’d.”
During the period of enslavement that lasted in what became the United States of America from 1619-1865, many formerly enslaved people who had escaped the plantation work camps where they were held captive, tortured daily, and subjected to wanton violence at every turn, recounted that they had found their way to Canada, and to freedom, by following the North Star. This navigational technique was memorialized through the spiritual, “Follow the Drinking Gourd”, a song whose lyrics, directed its listeners to look up, towards the Big Dipper constellation, which was one of the easiest ways of locating the North Star in the nighttime sky.
On their harrowing journeys, whenever they encountered rivers, valleys, mountains or the dogs of their pursers, villages, towns and what must have felt like seemingly endless open fields, the North Star was crucial, in that it became the only reliable way of re-orienting themselves if they ever were forced off course by a circumstance they could not control.
And yet, even when they arrived in Canada, the North Star was still there in the sky, just beyond their grasp. It was never something they achieved or attained. Rather, it was a point of reference, a way of knowing that regardless of what was happening, if they continued to follow the star, they would end up where they wanted to be.
Psychologist Stephen Hayes speaks of values in the following way in his book, Get Out Of Your Mind and Into Your Life:
“…values are verbs, and adverbs, not nouns and adjectives; they are something you do …, not something you have. If they are something you do…, they never end. You are never finished. For example, say one of your values is to be a loving person. This doesn’t mean that as soon as you love someone for a few months you are done, as you can be done with building a house or done earning a college degree. There is more loving to do—always. Love is a direction, not an object.”
For us as individuals and the organizations that we form collectively, values can be the North Stars that ensure we end up where we ultimately want to be. Knowing our values can help us in the present moment when complex situations arise, or when we encounter something new. Values allow us to reorient ourselves as we journey across the often confusing landscapes of our jobs, homes, and personal relationships. Values serve this North Star role because we can ask ourselves, “Is this choice in alignment with my values? Is this choice reflective of the kind of person I desire to be? Does the way I’m choosing to give this feedback, write this email, or make this hire move us in the direction of our North Star?”.
As we ask these types of questions, we begin to find ourselves and our organizations, slowly but surely, moving closer and closer to being the people and organizations we long ultimately to be. It’s in the practice of looking up, towards the Northern Star of our values, that we can begin to see the incremental change that comes with conscious awareness of our choices and the values that inform them so that when we look down, we find ourselves in internal alignment and on the path to the future we ultimately aim to create.
-Justin Scott Campbell
