Nature vs Wildness with Rod Taylor Part 2 (of 2)
“Nature has the power to transform our lives.”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM Rod Taylor
Rod Taylor, Ph.D. is an award-winning educator, scholar, author, and musician who’s been active in teaching and training for over twenty-five years. He’s the Founder and CEO of Performance Learning Concepts, a training and development company whose clients include Fortune 500 companies like Deloitte, Nissan North America, and DCI-Artform. Advance degrees in education, literature, writing, and philosophy have influenced his approach to working with leaders, teachers, and those in the business world, and he has published, presented, written, and taught in all of these areas over the last two decades.
Rod has taught at Stanford, Indiana University, and the Honors College at Tennessee State University and has served as a Design Fellow in the D. School in Paris, France and an Artist-in-Residence at Lipscomb University in Nashville. From academic publications like Oxford University Press, to college textbooks, to popular press magazines like Bass Magazine, Rod has published on the topics of literature, music, creativity, education, and cooperative learning, and his interdisciplinary approach to the arts and business has led to him traveling internationally to offer keynotes and workshops on these topics. Rod lives in Nashville, TN, where he has also long been involved in music as a performer, educator, and writer and has been fortunate enough to play and/or record with Krista Detor, Jenee Fleenor, Victor Wooten, Cindy Morgan, Chuck Rainey, and a variety of other great musicians.
a heightened sense of focus
“Fly fishing when I start getting into that zone, it becomes a singular focus and goal at that moment. And there are all these other things going around when suddenly you're quiet and listen. And all of the sudden you hear all this stuff that's been going on around you the whole time you've been there, but you weren't quiet enough to hear it. But when you take the time to just be quiet, it's a heightened sense of focus. Neurologically, that's a good practice to be in. Because as leaders or as people attempting to be successful in music and business, we have to have these moments where we can just go boom. I don't buy into the notion of multitasking very well. I think that's just divided thinking. It's the notion of slow down to speed up. That statement is part of what nature provides for me, because when I'm sitting up in a tree, or I'm in the middle of a river and there's no one else around, I'm slowing down. My pulse is slowing down everything. I'm very observant, wide angle vision, I see things that I wouldn't see, I hear things. And that to me, re-energizes me and the other parts of my life.”
nature vs wildness
“And for me this is an important distinction, I differ nature from wildness. Because Central Park is pretty in Manhattan in its nature. It's not wild. And there’s just something about getting yourself safely out to wilderness or wild places, because the world is unpredictable there. I remember one time being given at a nature event or something. And this guy was given talking, it's like nature is just peaceful. It's just tranquil, and I'm looking around like, that is not my experience with nature. Yesterday, I watched the hawk eat a squirrel for 30 minutes while it was alive. That wasn't peaceful. There was no ethic involved in that. It was just crazy. It’s unpredictable.
And I just think, as horrific as that sound, we know that goes on. Just watch a nature show. But I think as humans, that's part of the beauty of it. It's not some model for humans in one way. It’s because people say animals don't kill each other. Yeah, they do all the time, you're either being chased or you're chasing in nature. And it's a very anxiety filled life to be a thing in nature. And as humans, I think that's true, too. And so I think when we go out, then we can kind of see the connections. Using the hawk example, I have an ethic as a human, I'm not going to do that. That's not good. We're not the sum of our base desires, right? Because we can pull back and that's what I think was beautiful about nature is it can give you that time to reflect on that.”
Slow down to speed up
“I think we talked about slowing down to speed up. When you find moments, whether it's 20 minutes, it's an hour, or it's a week, I think they're all very important. To me what you do mentally with that space is important. And Emmanuel Kant, the philosopher who kind of defined the notion of enlightenment, wrote a essay called what is the Age of Enlightenment. He says, “we should have the courage to use our own understanding to navigate the world.” And when I think about that, I often wonder do people know how to reflectively understand? And so to me the reflection part of what we're talking about, are those moments in your thinking, and using your own understanding unpack or focus. I think it was a Wordsworth that defined poetry as a spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility. And the idea is that poetry comes from not the moment itself, but the reflection of that moment later. And so sometimes, to me, when I get out in nature, I just want to be in that moment, but at some point, when I get back, I want to share it, journal it, do something. So that moment becomes more powerful and didn't just fade away. And so I would encourage people, even if it's a walk to Central Park, and you notice something, at some point, come back to that moment and reflect on that, so it ingrains itself more powerfully. But just going through that process later, is powerful. Reflection is a big deal for me in that I encourage people to not just do it, but then to think on it after you've done it.”
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