I know, you’re stuck on a crowded bus, in a boring meeting, in a traffic jam, washing the dishes, doing your expenses, waiting for the cashier.I know, from here, life seems pretty boring, mundane, lifeless even. I know, it seems like what matters is happening somewhere, to other people right now.I know how often I am caught in seeing life that way.But perhaps that’s mostly because we imagine, or at least feel like, we’re going to live forever.But if you were dead, if you were no longer around, if you were offered just one minute more of life, and it had to be this moment in the queue, in the bus, in the meeting, with the dishes, would you take it?I’m sure I would.Then you might see this humdrum moment for the absolute wonder that it is – filled with enormous possibilities for curiosity, discovery, and purposeful action. Or for just looking in amazement.And if your answer was yes, is there any chance you might start seeing things this way, at least occasionally, in the life you already have?
Your glorious ordinariness
There’s a certain harshness in wanting change, transformation, improvement all the time.Does it arise from feeling ashamed at how things are? At ourselves?A response to the gnawing of the inner critic – its demand that we do better every day?Today, can you allow yourself to know your glorious ordinariness? And the wonder of a messy, incomplete, everyday life? To feel the simple weight of the dishes as you wash them? To marvel that you can breathe, move, experience? To gaze into the eyes of your glorious, ordinary loved ones?There’s much to be said for turning our attention away, some of the time, from what we imagine needs to happen and into the exquisite texture of what is here already.
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Being our home
A meditation for those days when we feel small, abandoned, or on the outside of our lives.Bless these feet that carry me by day and by night.Bless these hands that touch, sense, and bring the world towards me.Bless these lungs, transforming air into life on every breath,and bless this heart, for the continued heritage of all heartssince the first broke into the stillness.Bless this mouth, that can say what only I can say.Bless this body for love, joy, grief, rage, despair and hope.Bless this 'I' for incompleteness.Bless this mind that discerns, wonders, confusesand occasionally makes sense of the chaos.Bless the uncountable mistakes, accidents, chances and failuresthat keep life going and delivered me to this moment.I do not know, really, what is mine to do.But I do know that I am here,along with so many others.So bless the here-ness of me, and may it be my offering,My thanks, my home.
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On account of nothing we did
Ordinary life can seem so - ordinary - that it's natural to slip into taking it for granted, as if it were obvious and straightforward that we're here, and as if it will go on this way for ever.Many traditions have practices to remind us that it's anything but ordinary to be able to move, breathe, think, make breakfast, travel, work, love, argue, sleep, produce, write, speak. And that it's anything but ordinary to have a body that can do all this again and again, which can heal itself so often without us having to do anything. And that none of it lasts nearly as long as we might hope.Here's a morning blessing from Judaism, said by some as they use the bathroom for the first time in the day, that I think is particularly brilliant for its combination of straightforwardness about life and death, piercing insight, and gentle humour.
Blessed are you, Eternal One, Creator of everything, who formed human beings in wisdom, creating within us openings and vessels. It is revealed and known before you that if any one of them is opened or closed it would be impossible to remain alive and stand before You. Blessed are you, Eternal One, who heals all flesh and performs such wonders.
Finding daily practices to remind us of our bodies' unlikeliness and wonder - even in the most ordinary of circumstances - does not require religious belief of any kind of course (and in Judaism, by the way, belief is secondary to practice, the actions that shape the world of possibility and relationship again and again).All it requires is opening to life. And reminding ourselves that we are each here on account of nothing that we did.And that by one of the most unlikely miracles imaginable we each find ourselves for a brief time, embodied, in a world ready and waiting for our participation.
Too short, too precious
Life is too precious, and too important for us to believe the stories of our own unworthiness, to plead that we have a special kind of suffering unknown to anyone else, to wallow in shame at our incompleteness, our falling short, our confusion, our lostness.Yes, let's feel it all, but let's not take it to be the only truth about our situation. Because life is too short for us to wait until we feel better before we begin.Let's allow ourselves to look at life with childlike eyes that see again the wonder in things, and that live it all, fiercely and passionately. Let's learn to drop our defences, to give it all away, and use our experiences, all of our joys and all of our sorrows, as a channel for aliveness.Life is too short, too precious, and too important for us to waste our time doing anything else.
Renewal
On Living and Working is four years old today.When I started, on a warm April afternoon in 2013, I had no idea of the possibilities that writing here would open. I have learned much about myself, and about what I care about, by putting thoughts and questions into words, and making them available in the public domain. And I have started enriching conversations with people from many parts of the world who have contacted me in response to what I've written. It has been an enormous gift to be part of what a project like this can make possible.Today I'm particularly aware of how dependent I am on the support of other people in having all of this happen. From people close-in: my friends, family and colleagues who offer advice and feedback and sometimes have searching questions to ask about what I'm saying. From those of you read, reply, comment and share with others. From those who have taught me, and those who have written the books and blogs, articles and lectures, podcasts and films that have inspired much of what's here. From the countless others who designed, manufactured, shipped, sold, connected and maintain the technologies upon which we rely to communicate with one another so widely and effortlessly. And from all those who guided, raised, fed, clothed, paid and otherwise cared for all of these people in the ever-widening circles of support that surround us.Many of us live in a culture that pays inordinate attention to individual achievement. It can lead us into narrow kind of self-obsession that in turn becomes a sense of entitlement - a belief that the world owes us a particular kind of life, and a particular kind of recognition for our efforts, as if what we do is solely the produce of our own hands, hearts and minds. Today, on the fourth anniversary of this piece of work, it seems to me that we have it the wrong way around.I am, we all are, truly indebted to a vast network of living interactions upon which we absolutely depend. A network that holds us, nourishes us, and makes what we do possible, always - and which we did nothing to earn. In a world so obviously filled with troubles, it is nothing short of a miracle that such support unfolds around us and renews itself minute by minute with such unerring grace.
Blessings and Curses
At every moment in life, you can choose whether to be a blessing or a curse to others.How you open the door to her when she comes come, how you reach across for him when you wake, how you speak when you order your coffee, how you move through a crowded train, how you are with a crying child, how you put out the bins.How you answer the phone, how you begin a meeting with your pressured and anxious team, how you write the next email, how you announce your intentions, how you respond when you're hurt, how you listen to the request of a lost stranger.The capacity to bless will have its seeds in your capacity to bless yourself, which always means welcoming yourself and what you're experiencing rather than denying it, raging against it, or judging yourself for it.Will you turn towards that of you which loves without dismissing, or denigrating, or criticising it for its impracticality?Will you turn towards your fear and acknowledge how afraid you are with dignity, rather than pretending it isn't true?Many of the curses in the world arise from our denying our own very basic, vulnerable, mysterious, confusing humanity. Much of that comes from being afraid and pretending that we're not - a curse upon ourselves which curses others as we go. And many blessings come from the discovery that this one, brief, precious life simply won't go exactly how we want it.Of course, it's rarely as simple as just 'deciding' to bless as we go. Too much of us has been shaped by years of habit for that. But the good news is that the capacity to bless - which is given to all of us - grows with practice. And that you can start today.
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Losing it
This morning, after swimming, I overhear a conversation between two men who are sitting by the water. One has lost his sunglasses on an earlier swim and is quite distressed.'They were expensive. Armani.' he says. 'I paid a lot of money for them. And they are the third pair I've lost this summer'.He is too agitated to be present with his friend who, after some minutes of listening, says 'You seem really shaken up by this, too shaken up even to really be interested that I'm here with you. You're saying the same thing, over and over again. But,' and here he pauses, 'tell me something. Did you enjoy having them? Did they bring you pleasure? Because although you've now lost them, for a while you did have them too'.For a while, you did have them.And at that moment it occurs to me that this is true for everything, and for all of us. We wail and fret about what we lose, and rightly, because our loss is so often a source of suffering for us. But we will all lose our sunglasses, eventually, just as we will lose all our possessions, our friendships, our bodies, and everything we know.And because losing is terrible and difficult to bear, we can spend our lives fretting about what's yet to lose, and clinging madly to it, or becoming consumed with longing or remorse for what we've lost.And all the while forgetting that, for a time, we did have all of this, and missing the wonder that there is anything at all - sunglasses, friendships, work, life - worth having enough that its loss matters to us in the first place.
On Ritual
"As an archaeologist, my father always used to talk about the origins of language, of communication, being around a fire. When you think of that in relation to a theatre you realise that the audience is exactly the same scale as a sustainable human community from prehistory onwards, whether of 100 people or of 10,000. We become part of a collective imagining, we laugh at the same things, we find we are not alone. It's why religion and theatre are so closely entwined. Priests know how to put on a good show. They understand that we all need rituals, patterns."Simon McBurney, Playwright and Theatre Director
We've largely forgotten the power and importance of ritual. Perhaps because we've conflated ritual with religion, and taken religion to be superstition, something we ought to be over by now in a society founded on science and reason. Or maybe we have a hard time seeing what ritual can do in a cause-and-effect way. If we can't make a straight line from the doing of a ritual to a measurable improvement in something, we dismiss it as a distraction from the important work of getting things done.Maybe. I think these are our public stories, the stories of so many organisations and the story of so much marketing (where buying and consuming products and services becomes the new ritual to replace all others). But in our private spaces and in our quieter moments I think many of us long for the redemptive, grounding, relationship-shifting power of ritual. I agree with Simon McBurney that we need ritual to help us rediscover an orientation to life and to one another that can be more nourishing and more whole than the spun-apart, face-it-alone, get-ahead narrative that undergirds so much of our lives.Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh make the point eloquently when they describe how rituals allow us to rehearse a different relationship with life and with other people. In one example they outline the ritual qualities of hide-and-seek, which switches the usual order around, allowing the hiding adult to play at being vulnerable and small and the seeking child to rehearse being commanding, giant-sized, and powerful. Everyone knows that it is a game - games and play themselves are powerful rituals - and this is the very point. It's the 'constructed' nature of the ritual that gives it its power to upend things and give us a first-hand experience of parts of ourselves that we might not usually encounter so easily. Vulnerability in the commanding adult. Power in the vulnerable child. And a reconfigured relationship between both.I've long related to the rituals of my own Jewish tradition in this way, less as a matter of 'belief' but as practices honed and deepened over generations which, if carried out with intent, are very powerful invitations into a new standing with life. I know that when I pause with my family on a Friday night to say shabbat blessings over candle flames and sweet wine, I'm momentarily put back in contact with the part of myself that marvels at the existence of others, at the wonder of light, and at the good fortune of having food to eat and somewhere warm and dry that can shelter us. For a short while we share together in that aspect of us that can be grateful for all this, that knows that many people go short of their basic needs, that understands how small we are in a vast universe that we did not create, and that sees how little direct control we have over any of it coming our way.Of course, once the ritual is ended, we return to the messiness and complexity of our lives. We find ourselves feeling separate from one another again, perhaps a little afraid at the state of the world rather than grateful, and maybe overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily life rather than awash with wonder and awe. To expect anything different would be to misunderstand the nature of ritual. Because rituals are not talismans or magic spells, capable of changing reality in an instant, or shifting our bodies and minds in a simplistic way. When understood this way, they inevitably appear shaky and ultimately a disappointment. Rather they are practices. And if done with the right intention and sufficient attention they teach us, as we enact them repetitively over time, what it is to be in the world and be with one another in a deeper and more attuned way.Good rituals, so sorely missing in our culture, reintroduce us to that which is out of view, and that which we have left out, and in this way they can be profoundly transformative, deeply healing, and powerfully developmental.
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Opening
As Mark Nepo points out, trying to bend the world to my own shape is not only exhausting and painful, it's also ultimately self-defeating. The world is much too big, too mysterious, too deep to be shifted in this way. And it is an act of grandiosity - of trying to making myself into a god - to imagine that I can force life to be just the way I want it.But this is not a cause for despair, because there is another way to meet the world. Instead of trying to make life like me, I can work on allowing myself to be like life. This means giving up trying to have the world be an imprint of my preferences and my wishes, and instead opening myself so I can include more and more of the world within me. In this way, development happens very naturally.And the more of the world I can open to - the more people I can open to - the wider the possibility of responding to life not with frustration or resentment, but with acceptance, and grace, and wisdom and compassion. And there's more of a possibility of also doing what's really called for, rather than what would make me feel better, safer, or more self-satisfied.
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