Heaven and Hell

In the The Barefoot Book of Jewish Tales written by my friend Shoshana Boyd Gelfand is "Heaven and Hell", a gorgeous story for children and adults about how our interpretations and practices are constantly shaping the world around us.In the story, an elderly woman named Ariella is given a tour of each of two possible after-lives. Hell, to her surprise, is an elegant palace nestling in beautiful gardens. Tables are set with delicious food and everyone is gathered for a feast. But as Ariella looks closely she sees that they are all frail, desperate, and starving. Their arms are held straight by long splints and because of this they are unable to bend their elbows to bring food to their mouths.Hell is a beautiful paradise filled with longing, sadness, meanness and misery.Isn't much of the world this way?Heaven, even more surprisingly, looks exactly the same. Same palace, same food, same splints. But here everyone is well fed, and happy. The difference? The residents of heaven know about kindness, and have learned to feed one another. The very same physical situation with a change in narrative and different practices brings forth a radically different world.It's so easy for us to imagine that the world we inhabit is fixed, solid. We come to believe that we are a certain way, and the world is a certain way too. But it's more accurate to say that we're always making the world together through our interpretations and actions - what's 'real' about the human world is much more fluid than at first it might seem.

And of course the worlds we bring into being in turn change us. The narcissistic, individualistic, cynical world brought about by the residents of hell keeps their meanness and their resentment going, and their starvation. And the world brought about by the residents of heaven amplifies their kindness.

When we head off the possibility of change by claiming the world is, simply, "the way it is", or when we say "but in the real world this could never happen", we need to understand that we are active participants in having the world stay fixed in its current configuration. The world is never only the way it appears. And that ought to be a reason for great hope for our families, organisations and society. And a call for our vigorous action on behalf of an improved future for all of us.

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The Path

I'm reading, and loving, Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh's 'The Path', a book about how ancient Chinese philosophy can help us understand ourselves and live our lives more fully. It's concise, clear, and beautifully written. And, at the heart of it, is an important and wonderful idea from Confucius (echoed in the contemporary world by Martin Heidegger among others): that we largely become who we are through our everyday actions.This apparently simple claim has some extraordinary consequences.The first is that there is not so much of a fixed way that each of us is. When I say 'you know me, I hate being around company, I don't know what to do in a crowd' and then repeatedly take myself off to be on my own, I'm actively building myself into someone who is more skilful being with myself than being with others. I'm also becoming someone who knows myself in a particularly narrow way. I get to be the kind of person I am through the accretion of thousands upon thousands of actions, both internal and external, and the stories I tell about those actions, bringing some parts of me into view and pushing other parts towards the margins.For Confucius this is an important ethical issue. My story about myself - that I am a particular way - is much too small, leaving out as it does all those aspects of me (less known, and perhaps less tolerated by me) that can be quite skilful at social relating and which, with purposeful cultivation, could help me live a life which has more connection with people and a greater possibility of moment-to-moment care for others around me.The second consequence is that there is a profound and quite pragmatic developmental path to follow, one which can open up wide possibility, and that is the path of practice. Repeated, well-chosen practice - in my example above, the practice of being with and being attuned to others - not only builds skilfulness but allows me to rehearse a different kind of relationship to myself and to life than the one I'm used to. By choosing practice carefully I can gradually find out what it is like to be a social person as well as a solitary person, and cultivate those parts of me which (simply by being human) are quite able to be present with and take care of others.The point made so beautifully by 'The Path' is that in a culture dominated by the detached world-view of Cartesianism, which privileges thinking and theorising about things over the day-to-day doing of things, we've largely forgotten the value of simple, everyday practices and rituals as a support for living well. And we've forgotten how they can widen our horizons, build our capacity to respond more fully to life's inevitable unpredictability, and help us take care more skilfully of life's needs. 

Reason and truth

Over the past few weeks I have been reading, and very much enjoying, Rene Descartes' 'Discourse on Method', a book he wrote in the early 17th century with the intention of cutting through the confusion of the times in which he lived.Insight into the genuine nature of things, Descartes said, had become so hidden behind layers of superstition and dogma that even the most intelligent and sharp thinking people of his generation were muddled and incoherent. It rightly bothered him that wisdom was so hard to find, and that attempts to establish a more solid basis for truth about the world were rewarded with punishment and scorn. He was keenly aware that his contemporary, Galileo Galilei, had been condemned and imprisoned by the Church for showing that the earth revolved around the sun and that human beings, contrary to dogma, were not the centre of the universe. And he became committed to laying out a new way of understanding the world that could influence the very people who held the newly emerging sciences in such contempt.Reading Descartes is illuminating. He is warm, witty, playful and extraordinarily clear. And, throughout, he painstakingly describes a powerful method for arriving at truth that cuts through misunderstanding, prejudice and confusion. In many ways his method is simple. Doubt everything and only take as true that which you can prove by stepwise logical reasoning from first principles. Distrust your own judgements. Distrust your heart and emotions. Distrust your body. Distrust all of your experience of the world. Start with the only thing that you can really know - that you exist and that you are thinking - and rebuild the world from there, rigorous careful step by rigorous careful step.The genius of Descartes' work is that it works. By doubting all that we take for granted, and by establishing a method by which we can observe the world and prove things from it, he cut through centuries of irrationality and provided a firm basis for the sciences that have revolutionised the world in which we live. And not only is his method robust, reliable and truthful, in principle it can be learned by anybody.No longer was it necessary to believe something simply because someone else told us to believe it. With the Cartesian method we could find out for ourselves that something was true. Or we could ask those making a claim to show us the steps they'd taken in claiming it. And so as well as establishing a new way of generating truth about the world, he democratised it, taking it out of the hands of those with power and giving it to all of us. The explosion of creativity and insight in mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and the computational sciences that followed have transformed every aspect of the world - what we can make, what we can understand, what we can do, and what we make of ourselves and our place in the universe.While there are many limits to the Cartesian way of looking at things, which I'll get to another time, his plea for rigour and clear thinking strikes me as incredibly important at times like these when there is such polarisation, superstition, uncertainty and manipulation in our public discourse, our media and our politics. Descartes reminds us that there is a much firmer basis for our decisions than how we happen to be feeling in the moment, than our prejudices and fears, and than the stories about ourselves and others we were handed.He reminds us that in many aspects of human life, doubting is a helpful and necessary orientation. And that there's no substitute for looking closely, for checking evidence, and for talking with one another about how we're reaching the conclusions we're reaching rather than deciding in a vague, muddled or mistaken way on the big issues of how to live together.

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Five Books in Five Days (5) Seeing Systems

This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.

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I have mentioned Barry Oshry's book Seeing Systems before, and I'm certain his work deserves a central place in the current Five Books in Five Days.

It's rare to come across an account of the complexities, tangles, suffering and possibilities of organisational life that is written with such directness, wisdom and lightness of touch, and which offers such possibilities for finding a path through.

Seeing Systems asks us to look anew at our participation in organisational life. Most importantly, it asks us to see our difficulties - and in particular our difficultie with others - as a systemic rather than personal issue, and to respond in kind.

And, unlike many other approaches, Oshry does offer us skilful ways to respond. None of them are easy, and none of them are simple. He describes new ways of both interpreting and acting that can cut through our stuckness, resignation and cynicism.

And he outlines the possibility of working with others in ways that are more dignified and truthful than the blaming and self-aggrandising (or self-deprecating) positions we so easily take up.

"We humans are systems creatures." he says. "Our consciousness - how we experience ourselves, others, our systems, and other systems - is shaped by the structure and processes of the systems we are in."

"There is a tendency to resist this notion;" he continues. "We prefer seeing ourselves as captains of our own ships; we prefer the notion that we believe what we believe and think what we think because of who we are, not where we are. I will demonstrate how such thinking is the costly illusion of system blindness - an illusion that results in needless stress, destructive conflicts, broken relationships, missed opportunities, and diminished system effectiveness. And this blindness has its costs in all the systems of our lives - in our families, organisations, nations and ethnic groups."

 I'd recommend it highly for anyone who leads (which, in one way or another, is all of us).

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Five Books in Five Days (4) The Three Marriages

 This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.

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There are three marriages in a human life, says David Whyte in his book of the same name. The first is a marriage - whether we call it marriage or not - to another person. The second is a marriage to a kind of work - whether we choose it, or it chooses us. And the third is the less visible, though no less important, marriage to the strange and shifting something we call our self. Each kind of marriage profoundly shapes us. And each can be a source of great dignity and meaning if we are willing to be patient and curious, and if we pay it the kind of exquisite attention it deserves.

The problem we most quickly get into, in the rush and bustle of our contemporary lives, is seeing each of these marriages as, in some way, at odds with the other. From this vantage point we must struggle always to get balance between competing forces - work is at the expense of the other, the other is at the expense of ourselves, attending to the self is at the expense of both work and relationship. And in this way we add to the sum of our suffering, because the only way out is to try to carve out more time for each, or to let one or more submerge beneath the demands of the other.

But there is another way, says Whyte. To separate the three marriages in order to balance them is to destroy the essence of all of them. Instead, we must lift our eyes to a bigger horizon and start to see how each informs the other.

"I especially want to look at the way that each of these marriages is, at its heart, nonnegotiable..." he says. We have to "start thinking of each marriage conversing with, questioning, or emboldening the other two... We can start to realign our understanding and our efforts away from trading and bartering parts of ourselves as if they were salable commodities and more toward finding a central conversation that can hold all of these three marriages together."

By refusing to divorce work from relationship from self, Whyte describes a path that dignifies and ennobles all three. Filled with examples from his own life and from the life of artists, poets and novelists, Whyte's book is beautiful and poetic from start to finish. And it has the power to radically shift the way each of us thinks about, and relates to, the foundational pillars of a human life.

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Five Books in Five Days (3) In Over Our Heads

This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.

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What does it mean to live in a world in which so much shifts and changes all the time? In which we've undone so many of the old certainties - the certainty of authority, the certainty of religion, the certainty of our family structures, the certainty of morality? For we have, over the past century or so taken many of these apart, in many cases for good reason.

This - the way in which we are, most of us, swimming in a sea of complexity to which we have little capacity to respond skilfully - is the starting question of Robert Kegan's monumental book 'In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life'.

What does it mean that we live in a society in which we are, mostly, cognitively in 'over our heads'? And how should we respond to the onslaught of advice - about parenting, education, management, work, good living - that comes our way in the midst of it?

Kegan, a professor of at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is one of the foremost contemporary thinkers about adult development, and it should be no surprise that his response in this book is strongly developmental. It is not enough, he says, to continue responding to the world from the same frame or stock of interpretations upon which we currently rely. Bigger, more inclusive, more complex interpretations are necessary, and these always require us to develop the complexity and nuance and reach of our thinking. All of which, he argues, is a developmental task.

Kegan lays out with clarity and precision the sequential developmental stages available to all of us, with many examples and much grounded, rigorous research. And he invites us into a bold project - living and working in a way that encourages us to deepen and broaden the complexity of our minds, our capacity to respond to uncertainty, and to paradox, and to the shifting, fluid nature of our times.

Mostly, he says, we're not addressing this in our education system (which seems bent on teaching children how to pass tests but not how to learn, how to produce but not how to think or be creative), in our management and leadership education (which is fixated on behaviours rather than on developing complexity and responsiveness of thinking and action), in politics, and in how we parent. And, while he can offer no simple or easy path for addressing all this, he has much to show us that illuminates the possibility of cultivating a deeper, more skilful, more humane way of responding to the world.

A rigorous, stretching read, blending developmental psychology and philosophy, with acute observation about our society and what ails us, I think this book is essential reading for anyone who wants a more skilful, subtle response to the world than the latest fad or management-parenting-leadership technique. And vital for any of us who want to take more responsibility for the world in which we act, whether close in or in the leadership of bigger communities and organisations.

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Five Books in Five Days (2) The Great Work of Your Life

This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.

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'Discover your true purpose' they tell me, 'and everything will be well. A life of effortless ease, happiness, and joy beckons.'Some go further and include the promises of financial reward and security too.I've long thought such promises to be rather empty and hollow. Yes, sometimes it works out this way for people. But often when we find something approximating a 'purpose' that moves us, we find it takes us away from any kind of easy certainty. It might have us give up possessions, relationships, and a tried and trusted sense of personal identity in order to respond to something new and alive.More often, our attempts to work out what kind of purpose might fit us turn up little of note. We draw on the same old stock of possibilities handed to us by our families or education, and nothing seems to fit. In this case, we're struggling because in a way we have it the wrong way around. We're approaching 'purpose' as a way of getting what we want from life - an easy life, a happy life, a secure life - rather than asking what life wants from us. It's when we turn towards life this way that it becomes possible, for the first time, to listen for a future that meets our uniqueness, responds in a more open and wholehearted way towards the world, and gives us a chance to contribute.'Purpose', then, or 'calling', becomes an opportunity to discover what the world is asking for, and mustering a suitably creative and life-giving response. Stephen Cope's book 'The Great Work of Your Life' is a practical guide to all of this, in particular to what it takes to create the conditions in life from which a calling or purpose can be heard and responded to. The conditions in which we can respond to our deep desires and fears. The conditions in which we learn, as Thomas Merton so eloquently put it, that holding back what is in us ultimately destroys us; and that bringing forth what is within us has the capacity to save, in many profound ways, our lives.The book is filled with examples of both well-known and more ordinary people who found themselves called to do something beyond their original conception of life, and many suggestions for reflection and practice. And it's well placed for anyone who is opening to the idea that there's something profound and important worth doing with our lives, beyond the narrowly conventional ways we've defined ourselves.

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Five books in five days (1) How We Are

This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.

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"You keep saming when you ought to be changing"Lee Hazlewood, 'These Boots Are Made for Walkin'

We live our lives by treading beaten paths, hardly aware of how we are held the same by the bodily force of habit, the stories we tell about ourselves, the familiarity of our possessions and houses and workspaces, and the expectations of those near to us.Vincent Deary's wonderful book, How We Are, charts this territory with lucidity, clarity, and humour.

"We live in small worlds..." he says, "... and, usually, we prefer to maintain ourselves in the status quo, in comfort and predictable ease. It takes a lot to get us out of that - a compelling call, an overwhelming imperative. Or maybe we were pushed. But sometimes it happens."

"We are creatures of habit," he continues, "and we live in worlds small enough for us to come to know their ways and to establish familiar ways within them. Unless we are uneasy, unless something disturbs us from within or without, we tend to work to keep things the way they are."

The first of a promised trilogy, How We Are charts the many ways in which we keep our lives within familiar constraints, and offers a path for opening and responding to the call of a bigger world.It is enormously valuable reading for anyone who wants to understand themselves - and others - with increased insight and humanity. And a huge gift for any of us who want to chart a course into our own futures with more depth and responsiveness to life than offered by the slew of technique-oriented, brain-obsessed self-development books that fill the market.

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In praise of shadows

Although there are clearly constant qualities that each of us carry from place to place, relationship to relationship, there's also much of us that gets expressed - drawn out of us - by the places we're in and by who we're with.The offices, public areas, homes, living spaces, kitchens and meeting rooms we inhabit, each with their lighting and decor and furniture and equipment, afford us certain possibilities and deny us others. Some places bring out the possibility of being focussed and diligent, others bring out our playfulness, and in yet others we get attuned mostly to our boredom or agitation.As we move from place to place, situation to situation, we might notice the different possibilities that are brought forth. But we rarely see that the entire cultural and architectural background in which we live is shaping us all the time. The very kind of people we come to be is, in large part, being produced by the built environment in which we live. And because it's all pervasive - we're born into it and, unless we immerse ourselves first-hand and deeply in other cultures we rarely escape from it - much of its shaping effect is completely invisible to us.I have been reading Junichiro Tanizaki's book In Praise of Shadows this week, which is all about this. Tanizaki shows us how, in the west, our contemporary buildings emphasise light. We build large windows to catch the sun, and where this is impossible we add bright electric lighting - fluorescent tubes, halogens, bright white bulbs - to illuminate and to banish darkness. And while this can be beautiful, and is at the least enormously practical, there is something profound about the possibilities of deep shadow that we rarely encounter, and so barely know.On the traditional Japanese way of building a toilet, for example - so different from bright white, tile and porcelain constructions - he writes:

"There are certain prerequisites: a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and a quiet so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kantō region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones... Here, I suspect, is where haiku poets over the ages have come by a great many of their ideas."

It is shadow around which the traditional Japanese interior world is constructed, and which Tanizaki describes so beautifully in his book. His attention ranges from the design of living rooms and bathrooms - and their affect on us - to the experience of eating steaming rice in the dimness of low-eaved, paper-walled dining rooms; from the practicalities of cleaning and heating our living and working spaces to the possibility of ordinary, everyday buildings as places of spiritual repose.In Praise of Shadows is readable in one short sitting, and an exquisite way of seeing in a new way what's possible for us, and hidden from us, in the contemporary world of work and home.

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On Action

I've been slowly reading Hannah Arendt's remarkable book The Human Condition, an exploration of the possibilities of human action as relevant today as it was on publication some 50 years ago.She was born on this day in 1906.Of the many striking themes in the book (which itself is a complex, challenging and enormously thought-provoking read) is human freedom, about which I have been writing extensively here over the past 18 months.For Arendt, freedom is the quintessential mark of humanity. Despite our tendency to fall into habitual and predictable routines, to constrain ourselves in our attempts to look good or follow the crowd, what is always available to us is the possibility of novel action. We can always, she tells us, initiate some new action that has never been tried before. Of course, we cannot ever really know its consequence - the endless chain of further actions that we will begin. But it is our human responsibility to act - to not go to sleep to ourselves - and then to act again in order to deal with the consequences of our acting in the first place.And each of us brings in to the world our particular uniqueness - a way of acting that's possible simply because we are here, and because although we are like every other human being we are simultaneously unlike any human being who has lived before.Arendt's work is a vital reminder of our responsibility, always present as human beings, to take responsibility for the condition of our lives, our work, our organisations, our society.

"The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means, that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world." -- from The Human Condition

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