I am reposting this today, because two very dear friends - fiercely loving people - took the care to point out to me some ways I've been hiding what I can bring to the world. Most of us are hiding, at least some of the time, and although there are necessary protective and restorative gifts in hiding until it is our turn, it's easy to hide when it is actually our turn to step up, to speak out, to see something or someone that nobody else is seeing, and to respond with all the humanity and care we can muster.So this is my offering to all of us who are still hiding when we shouldn't be, and my encouragement - to all of us - to do what's called for in these changing, shifting times when we need, so very much, everyone to make their gifts available.
It's easy for us to hide in plain sight.We hide in our busyness and in our distraction.We hide by saying only part of what's true, and withholding the rest.We hide by leaving parts of us out - our courage, our vulnerability, our truthfulness.We hide by throwing ourselves into our work,and thereby saving ourselves from showing up outside it.And we hide by throwing ourselves away from our work,and saving ourselves from showing up within it.We hide in our addictions, in numbing ourselves, in scrolling the facebook feed.We hide in pretending to be happy, when inside we're crying.We hide in our self-importance, and in overdoing our smallness.We hide behind rules and regulation, policy and procedure.And we hide in meetings through our silence and compliance.We hide by shutting down our hearts in the face of the suffering of others.We hide by stifling our ideas and holding back what only we can say.We hide in our pursuit of money and status.We hide ourselves in looking good and avoiding shame.And we hide by refusing to ask for help when we need it.And every moment of our hiding robs us, and the world,of wonders that only we can bring,from seeing that only we can see,and from words,perhaps the most necessary words,that only we can say.
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Because we are story-telling beings, we humans have a million ways of avoiding being present to what is right in front of us - people, projects, possibilities, suffering - and what is within us - thoughts, feelings, and the sensations and wisdom arising in our bodies.We so easily spin stories, throw ourselves into guilt and reminiscence about the past, worry about and try to anticipate the future. And while each of these have their place, they so easily distract us from what we're most directly in the midst of.Missing what and who is here robs us of the opportunity to experience life in its richness as we go.More importantly for everyone else, it denies us the opportunity to bring ourselves at our fullest. Because in our distraction, we respond not to the needs of the moment, but to the needs of our fear, or to our wish to not have to face the world as it is.Our deepest possibilities for connection and contribution are muted - whenever here is not where we are, and now is not what we're responding to.
Behind all our attempts to manipulate and control the world so it's just as we'd like it (and behind the pain, frustration, sorrow and disappointment that our inevitable failure brings), we're just trying to find a way to feel safe and to feel at home.I think we'd be better off knowing this.Then we'd set aside our mission to control what can't be controlled. And we'd work on how to feel safe and at home in the world as it is - in this ever-changing, surprising, vast and mysterious life in which we find ourselves.
If you were parachuted into your life from outside - into your life and body as it is today - you might start to see what's there through new eyes.Perhaps you'd be more immediately grateful for the people around you, for the love, support and attention they bring you that you had to do nothing to earn. And perhaps you'd see the difficulties in your life for what they are - difficulties to be worked with, rather than confirmations of your inadequacy.Enormous possibilities and freedom to act might come from inhabiting this world in which you're both supported and have problems towards which you can bring the fulness of your mind, body and heart.Being parachuted into your life might put an end to self-pity, because you'd come to see how the body you inhabit has been training, practicing all these years building skills, strength and an understanding of the life it's been living and the difficulties it's been facing. Maybe you'd see that you are precisely the one best equipped to deal with the detail and intricacy of this particular life. And perhaps you'd discover a way to look honestly at your situation and the resolve to deal with it, step by patient step.Maybe if you were parachuted into your very own life, you'd understand that everything that has happened to you - so far - is not a shameful failure but the exact preparation you need for living today, tomorrow, and for the years to come.
In the Jewish world today it is Yom Hashoah, or the day of remembering the Holocaust.Last night I joined a beautiful ceremony at the community which I call home. At one end of the room, a table filled with the shining light of tens of memorial candles. And in front of it, one by one, the testimonies of survivors and their families, woven together with prayers and with music composed by those who lived and died in the ghettoes and camps.Already in the 1930s, one of the speakers who was a child survivor of Auschwitz reminded us, the seeds of dehumanisation were being planted in public discourse, and in law, in countries across Europe. By the time the genocide and its unspeakable horrors began in earnest there had been years of acclimatisation in language, and in speech, and in shifts in public culture. The Holocaust, as Marcus Zusak reminds us in his extraordinary novel 
Fear is easy.Really easy.It spreads, like wildfire - my fear becoming your fear becoming their fear becoming my fear again.It makes us feel special - if I'm so afraid, there must be important things to do, like saving myself or saving the company or saving the country. At last, because of fear, I have a role to play.It makes things look simple - there is no choice here, no nuance, no time to talk together or think together about what's really called for, or if we're doing the right thing, or what the consequences over time might be. There is just action, this action, my action, and now.It helps us look right - how dare you suggest another way, a different way? Can't you see what's at stake here? How risky this is? How much we have to lose?It saves us from having to listen to one another - if you're not with me you're against me, and if you're against me you must be wrong, and it's because you're wrong and all of those others of you who are wrong that we're in this terrifying mess in the first place.It saves us from having to think - that there might be another way to see this, that your point of view might have merit, or integrity, or something to offer.It saves us from shame - at the ways I'm hurting you, or hurting myself, or hurting those who will come after us.It sells - the idea that I'm the best, that my way is the right way, that we're the chosen ones, that they're out to get us, that you have to work harder, that you must never stop, that our values are under threat, that we have to do this vital but terrible thing, that after all it's only business or politics or necessity.It allows us to justify - these punishing targets, our culture of hyper-activity, my monitoring of your every move, the hours I expect you to work, our obsession with measurement and deliverables, my not listening, our race to the lowest common denominator, your being available at every moment, our treating others as objects.Of course, fear works best when it doesn't display itself as fear. It's at its most potent when dressed up as civility, and best practice, and just-doing-business, and competency frameworks, and HR policy, and micro-management, and 'smart' goals, and this-is-work-not-a-playground-don't-you-know.Fear is easy, and fear is cheap, but it's dignity that sets the human spirit free to contribute, and create, and address our difficulties, and listen, and change things, and improve our situation. And dignity takes work, and courage, and honesty, and sincerity, and integrity, and wisdom and compassion and humility and love.Yes, love. Not a much-respected word in many organisations or in politics, and easily dismissed by the easy politics and business of fear. But it is indeed love that reminds us how brilliant human beings can be, how capable, how varied, how much there is to marvel at in our situation and our capacity, and how much we need all of this right now, just as we always have done.
Many of the most courageous people I know are also the most afraid.Living with such an intense inner experience of fear - and surviving it - cultivates within them extraordinary capacities to keep going, to face things as they are, to take action when it's called for, and to be present with others who are afraid.I know how much I value having such a person by my side when there's something genuinely terrifying to face. Someone who knows fear intimately. Someone who has found ways to work with it. Someone who already knows what to do.Many of the most courageous people I know hardly see themselves as courageous at all.They relate to their fear as a defect, a failing, a reason to judge themselves, as fuel for the harshest inner criticism. That they are afraid obscures the view, so that they're blinded to the gifts they bring.They do not see that the part of themselves they most wish to banish is the very source of blessings, the source of their secret superpower.So it is in the best superhero origin stories, and so it is with all of us.
Aside from our projections (the aspects of ourselves we see in others when they are actually present in ourselves) we also miss the truth about other people when we hold on too tightly to our memories of them.We so readily fill in the gaps in our experience with that we think we already know. But our stories are necessarily incomplete, and our memories are in many ways unreliable. And, added to that, people keep on changing, so that our certainty about others quickly becomes a way to have them be familiar to us rather than a way of meeting them. Often even a well-worn difficulty feels more inviting than the uncertainty and openness of not knowing.And it may even be the case that the child, the friend, or the partner you said goodbye to this morning is not the same as the person who is walking back in through the door this evening.Responding to this is not at all easy. We'd rather hang on to our stories than take the risk of being surprised, with all that could bring. It takes courage to set all that aside. But learning to see people more accurately (and with more kindness) might be our best source of hope for healing our relationships and finding the goodness in ourselves and others that we so urgently need.
Yes, there might well be a storm brewing. An economic storm. A social storm. A storm which will call on us to rethink ourselves, to undo ideas and categories we've become attached to. A storm that will at times have us be afraid. That will sometimes throw us apart from one another and at other times bring us in close.We're probably already in the storm.In one way or another we've always been in it, even when life seemed calmer, more straightforward. Even when we were turned in the other direction.It's easy to understand the upending energy of the storm as an entirely negative or malevolent force. But as Rainer Maria Rilke writes in