or knot :)

p.s. for info, on the Laing page on Wikipedia they talk about a possible mis-attribution of the quote, so is the quote a viral meme?

This appears in Daniel Goleman's book, Vital Lies and Simple Truths, where, on p. 24, he writes:

24 - To put it in the form of one of R. D. Laing's "knots":

In other words - and confirmed by Goleman in an email to me some months ago - Goleman himself wrote this, IN THE STYLE of R D Laing.

Goleman, in his book, never said it was Laing, he simply wrote that it was in the style of one of Laing's Knots.

I don't think it makes it any less worthy of quoting.

regards

Michael

Isn't the internet and blogging wonderful. I'm always curious as to where particular quotes come from and here we have a collective approach to working it out. Thanks for the great investigative work.

Shawn, do you have any thoughts/feelings on what it is about quotes that keeps you 'noticing' them?

I don't know Ken. What I notice depends on what I care about at the time of noticing. It also depends of what I've noticed before. I then take the time of writing it down if I think the readers of this blog might find it interesting. I find quotes, aphorisms, sayings etc interesting because the successful ones are well adapted memes and I think to myself, "if they have survived this long there must be a truth about them."

I loved this poem because it so perfectly fits the theme of a new project I am heading up in my area. I will be facilitating a learning community of practitioners who work with youth that are experiencing poverty and homelessness. The purpose is to improve the services and programming for these youth by bringing together diverse workers from different sectors (and organizations i.e. housing, employment, education). The poem points me towards new understanding about what we do together and making space for new thinking about how we engage youth in our programming.