The Frameworks of Meaning: In Conversation with Cedric James
What a beautiful conversation I got to have with my mentor and friend Cedric James! As I’m sure you can tell from this conversation, Cedric is an extremely thoughtful and insightful individual. In everything that he does, he thinks deeply about how he engages with the environment and the people around him. So often we think about our own state and how we are feeling, but if more people were entering their interactions with other people with thinking of others first, and how we can best treat them, I think we would have a much kinder world.
Cedric began our conversation by saying how grateful he is to have the ability to choose. Of course, this gets into a larger question of free will, but taking the metaphysical question off the table and simply thinking about how it feels like we have in our daily lives, we can explore the notion that we all have the opportunity to choose in any situation at any time. Sure, we can never choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we react and what to pursue. In this way, Cedric went on to share his life motto, “I was bad enough for long enough, but I’m thankful I stayed strong enough until I became good enough.” Cedric’s motto is extremely powerful to me, but it is important to draw a distinction between innate worthiness and growth. We all, already, are “good enough” but what Cedric is talking about here is being skilled, mature, and having grown enough to engage in the world in a way he is proud of. At every point along his journey, even at the very beginning, Cedric has been worthy of love and belonging, but his strength and faith gave him the drive to keep growing until he felt like he was starting to become the person he wanted to be.
Another Cedric-ism that struck me was, “You can’t see the picture if you’re always in the frame.” Of course I had heard similar concepts before, but never presented so poignantly as it is in this analogy. If you’re truly looking at your interaction with others from the perspective of their impact on you, you’ll never be able to step outside of your own framework and see the way you impact others.
All of these concepts come back, at their heart, to one thing: valuing the impact you have on others. Wanting to make the world a better place. Wanting to be in service of others. For Cedric, this concept is clearly rooted in Christian faith, but he also acknowledges how his religion is just a framework he uses to inform how he lives his life. For me, being in service of others is rooted in my own personally developed values and ethics. Wherever your set of values come from, it is imperative that you consider them deeply. Once you’ve established your own values, you can establish where helping others plays into your purpose. Then further, you can begin to investigate the difference between how you say you live your life and how you actually live your life. What principles do you want to guide you, and what principles are you allowing to control your actions?
There is something deeply important in what Cedric shares. Religion, philosophy, spirituality - they’re all frameworks that can help us dig deeper into what life means to us as individuals. While we need to deeply interrogate what life means for us, why we’re here, and what we can do about that, we also need to use that to inform how we are living right now. If we spend too much time thinking about principles without living them, we will lose the magic of the current moment. Philosophy is not just thought about, but lived. We always, even when interrogating reality, need to, in the wise words of Ram Dass, “Be here now.”
To further explore the things discussed in this blog post, check out the below resources and recommendations.
Books
Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Be Here Now by Ram Dass
Why Start With Why? by Simon Sinek
Podcasts
Paint and Pipette Podcast by Jeremy Utley and Marcus Hollinger
I hope you all enjoyed this conversation as much as I did! I am truly so thankful for Cedric and the influence he’s had in my life. If you want to contact him about public speaking or life coaching inquiries, you can contact him via LinkedIn here.
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Until next time, so much love!
XX
Reese, Founder
The Cohere Collective
