Bucket Brigade

This one was sent in by Robert Perry, an author and head of an organization…well, he explains it in the story. The synchronistic elements involve precognition.

I am the head of a small nonprofit organization called the Circle of Atonement. It is dedicated to serving students of A Course in Miracles, a contemporary spiritual path that utilizes forgiveness as the primary catalyst of psychological healing and spiritual awakening. As with most nonprofits, money is usually tight, and we often find ourselves wondering how we are going to pay the bills.

In February 2003, we were facing a particularly serious financial crunch, so serious that we were wondering if we would need to make changes in staffing—maybe let some people go, cut back on people’s hours, or institute a temporary pay cut. The way our board processes such issues is to first discuss them, then close our eyes, pen and paper in hand, and ask for guidance. What we “hear” comes in different forms. Some of us receive a flow of words, some see inner pictures, some just get an inner sense or feeling. Our ability to hear is not unusual and what we hear is not infallible. However, it is almost always wiser and more helpful than the discussion we had before we asked, and it often sends us in completely new directions.

In this particular case, the guidance of one board member—my future wife Nicola—stood out. She saw an inner picture and heard commentary that explained the picture. Here is her description of what she saw:

I got a picture of a group of people forming a “chain gang” (where items pass quickly along the chain of people). [She saw this as happening in what we call our mailroom, where we ship out our books and tapes]. Everyone was in the exact right place in order to be a useful part of that chain. There were no overlaps, no missing people, just a united and well-functioning group. Part of its efficiency was down to the fact that each person knew their exact spot in that chain, and that others, too, knew exactly who was where. You can’t throw an object to someone if you’re not sure where they are! Another part of its efficiency was simply because people were operating as a team, and everyone was joined and working together towards the same goal.

The commentary Nicola heard said that in order to form this “chain gang,” we needed to reevaluate how the organization functioned. We had already chosen a focus for the year: to get our message out through publishing an introductory book. Now we had to look at everything, from top to bottom, and ask ourselves how well it served that focus. We were told to reexamine the who—people’s roles—and the what—the organization’s activities, all in light of our larger goal. According to this guidance, we must leave no stone unturned. We needed a shakeup. We needed to shift people’s roles around (the “who”) and set aside certain activities (the “what”), all in order to weld ourselves into a tightly coordinated team that served a single goal.

We sensed that this challenged the whole way we had traditionally functioned. We had always stressed the importance of each individual pursuing his or her own special calling. As a result, our organization tended to do a number of disparate things at once, which were only loosely coordinated. If, then, we actually implemented this guidance, if we saw each person’s function as determined by the needs of a team effort, it would turn our whole way of operating upside down.

However revolutionary the idea was, something felt right about it. While we were discussing it, I pointed out that someone else’s guidance had made similar points, which seemed to lend strength to the basic idea. I also put my finger on the appropriate term for the picture Nicola had seen. She had called it a “chain gang,” but she had told us that wasn’t the right term—since a chain gang is a group of convicts linked together. What she saw, she said, was like the chain people form to put out a fire. It finally hit me that this was called a “bucket brigade” and I mentioned that to the group.

Shortly after I said that, something totally unexpected happened. Our meeting was taking place downstairs and we heard what sounded like falling water in a nearby room—the mailroom. We burst into that room to discover that water was literally cascading through the unfinished ceiling onto the shipping table. Without thinking, we moved the table aside and grabbed several large plastic buckets stacked next to it and arranged them in a row to catch the falling water, which happened to be pouring through the ceiling in a straight line. Staff and volunteers ran downstairs to help; they got rags and began mopping up what they could. Everyone was in motion. As it turned out, a repairman was upstairs fixing the washing machine. He had mistakenly turned the wrong knob, causing water to pour through the floor of the laundry room, which was also the ceiling of the mailroom.

Only once we returned to our meeting room and sat down to catch our breath did we realize we had just performed an eerie reenactment of the picture from Nicola’s guidance. In response to a crisis, we had dropped our usual roles and activities, mobilized as a single unit, and formed a line of water-filled buckets. We had formed a bucket brigade!