I thought about tonight listing a list of things I needed, but they are not really things, because when I think about the origin of the needs for things, it appears that it is really a list of ways. And in some cases, they are a lack of things I need.

Phoenix turned out to be incredible in many ways.

I found myself on the other side of an education business, where before I had stood at a triangulation point, watching commerce, ideas and people go back and forth, merge with each other business and go their separate ways.

Thing I Want 1 — A Scaled Down Life (Focus on the Elementals): I want to fulfill a personal mission to focus on education and develop results for other people. Call it a fulfillment of a need to be socially good. It’s also karma, inviting an examination of a cycle of good and bad, and adding as much good as I can to eliminate a seemingly inherent focus on the bad. I’m like Schopenhauer trapped inside the mind of a monk.

Walking to the hotel room after my friend Taylor dropped me off after dinner, I saw two Great Horned Owls mating in one of the tall scrub pines that ring the hotel property at the Biltmore.

Thing I Want 2 — An Appreciation of the Wild ( Focus on the Flow of Nature ): There’s this suddenness to nature. When has it not surprised you when it was there to be witnessed? I can’t think of a time when nature, as grand as it is, arrived in my senses and didn’t surprise me. In this sense, I am a man wrapped in a bubble that has not allowed nature to live with him, and being in Phoenix brings me back to nature.

The other things that make sense:

A Way to Introduce New Ideas for Social Greatness Using Technology — There are ideas on bringing social good into action hidden in minds that are not tapped in to how it was done by others. I have thought recently of getting CEOs at major corporations to put their corporate responsibility dollars into play purchasing tech for students, like Kindles, and then choosing books that students can read.

The CEOs can then come in to the classrooms like long lost rock stars and teach that book to the students, show them what life looks like expressed in social, commercial, and business action. What did they take away from the book that led them to their version of greatness?

I talked about this with Matt Mello at Holly Area Schools. He thinks that in some cases we should be able to work with Amazon to find ways to use the Kindle as an assessment tool. It works so well to help students read. You can have all kinds of problems reading, but nobody will know if you are falling behind or going ahead, stuck on a word or even using the device to listen to reading. You have a private world made more private by the tilt of the screen. Here you have helped someone, by including them in something.

A Friendship — My friend Taylor introduced me to a remarkable young woman from Tuscon and we talked in between sessions during the forum. Bold, inquisitive, and poetic in her musings about life, I was instantly startled to find a person who had a very similar outlook on life to my own.

Here’s a great quote from a conversation we had about flying, which led me to an appreciation of life as a metaphor for flying. Or, is it flying as a metaphor for life?

“It’s like something is cradling you that is so fragile and not meant for you to be in.”

In the end, I am in search for a way to find these ways. And that leads me to a final thought, from Rumi:

“Out beyond ideas of right and ideas of wrongdoing, there is a field. Meet me there.”